When European-Americans crossed the Appalachian Mountains at the end of the eighteenth century, they encountered huge, man-made earthen mounds of conical, geometrical, and animal shapes. They asked the local Native Americans who built them, and according to legend were told the Native Americans did not know. Failing to see a direct connection with current Natives, the European-Americans began to attribute them to lost races from Europe, to the Middle East, to India. Leading citizens, including New York Governor DeWitt Clinton and President William Henry Harrison, proposed their own theories of the mounds. They were an important topic of debate on the Chautauqua circuit. The most enduring of these mound myths was developed by a young treasure hunter from western New York named Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church.
Author Jason Colavito traces the development of the mound myths to a combination of misinformation and racism. They became a rationale for the decimation and removal of the tribes in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys—clearly the ancient mound builders were not related to contemporary Natives, thus invalidating the latter’s claim to the land. He also sees the mound- builder debate as a precursor to modern stories of ancient astronauts and other nonsensical mysteries that assault reason nightly on cable TV. It’s an interesting story that Colavito demonstrates has been with us since the founding of our republic.
