by Paul Schrag
“Holmberg was a careful and compassionate researcher whose detailed observations of Siriono life remain valuable today,” writes Mann. “. . . Nonetheless, he was wrong about the Siriono. And he was wrong about the Beni, the place they inhabited—wrong in a way that is instructive, even exemplary.”11
Like Powell and other misguided founders of modern archaeology and anthropology, Holmberg neglected to consider more recent influences on the character and state of native culture. The Siriono, it was later surmised, were not a dead culture left over from antiquity but the remnants of an amazingly sophisticated culture that had been wiped out by smallpox and influenza in the 1920s. Some 95 percent of the Siriono, he neglected to consider, had been killed by disease or thrown into prison camps by the Bolivian government at the behest of white cattle ranchers who were taking over the Beni.
The Beni was no anomaly. For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s take—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school text books, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as Noble Savage.12
It is here—in the myth of the Noble Savage—that we encounter the dark side of cultural diffusionism. It is important to note that while new evidence pointing to pre-Columbian contact in the Americas is fascinating, much of the discussion of pre-Columbian contact with various Anglo-Saxon, African, and Asian peoples has been used to denigrate natives as well.
Some scholars contend, for example, that modern diffusionist researchers have simply circled back around to an old view—that native people weren’t able to develop their own, advanced technologies and systems and that discoveries of advanced civilization on the American continent must have emerged thanks to contact with more advanced outsiders at some point in antiquity. Like early American settlers, many diffusionist theorists have trouble accepting the notion that native peoples were able to create their own advanced infrastructure, technology, sciences, and systems. In the case of the diffusionist viewpoint, natives were simply innocent and pure, living in an idyllic, though mildly contemptible, peace with nature. Any advancement, technological or otherwise, must have been borrowed or stolen from more advanced, seafaring cultures such as the Phoenicians or the Welsh.
“Positive or negative,” writes Mann, “in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.”13
John Wesley Powell, it seems, fell victim to both perspectives during his career. Like Holmberg, long before he was a political powerhouse and champion of justifying America’s genocidal westward expansion, Powell was a well-intentioned researcher and a friend of the native people. It was in this role that Powell, paradoxically enough, shunted exploration of the Mississippi Mounds into the narrow confines of independent inventionist theory, the antithesis of the diffusionist view.
Once appointed to lead the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BEA) in 1879, Powell began building his academic empire. Three years after his appointment as leader of the bureau, Powell hired Cyrus Thomas to carry out fieldwork and explorations of the Mississippi Mounds as head of the BEA’s Eastern Mounds Division. Thomas, a minister and entomologist, was said to have believed that an ancient race was involved in building the mounds. But Powell, who had once explored the mounds, believed strongly that close ancestors of the region’s native tribes had built them.
Powell may have initially been motivated by his sympathies for natives and railed against notions that an ancient race of Anglo-Saxon origin or some other nonnative race had built the mounds. Early settlers in the region had surmised that an ancient, “superior” race had built the mounds, presumably driven by the notion that so-called savage native tribes couldn’t possibly have created the amazing structures, or the artifacts they found in them. This superior race was alternatively believed to be of Egyptian, Norwegian, Saxon, Indian, Greek, Israeli, Belgian, African, and Welsh origin, depending on who was asked. Many scholars and early settlers characterized Native Americans as late arrivals who had savagely wiped out the complex, ancient civilizations that had built the mounds. From this, early settlers decided they were justified in desecrating the mounds and building farms and homesteads on mound sites. They were, it was reasoned, simply taking back the land on behalf of more civilized nations that had once been wiped out by ancestors of the native tribes.
Like Jefferson, Lewis, and others, settlers in the region had used selective interpretation of scientific data to justify their political exploits. And like the amazing waterways overlooked by Holmberg, the Cahokia mounds were fascinating, but not fascinating enough to warrant reconsidering whether to exploit the land and people that created them.
The mounds generated so much public interest that the Bureau of American Ethnology dedicated a quarter of its budget to their exploration. That work, overseen by Thomas, spanned twelve years and produced massive amounts of data from work at more than two thousand sites. In 1894 Thomas produced a 700-page “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology” as part of the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. It began with the question on many people’s minds: “Were the mounds built by the Indians?” Thomas concluded, in keeping with his superiors’ wishes, that natives had indeed built the mounds.
We may never know the true answer to the question, thanks to Powell’s seemingly benevolent, and later ironic, decision to reject all evidence that might contradict his assertion that early America had not been visited by any European, African, Middle Eastern, or any other non-Asiatic, nonnative peoples. Voluminous amounts of irreplaceable historical data were lost, destroyed, or misplaced as a result of this decision.
As author Ross Hamilton explains:
Armed with a self-created doctrine powered by ample funding, and with a little help later from the one-way door to the Smithsonian’s inaccessible catacombs, the years that followed saw Powell and his underlings nearly succeed in the obliteration of the last notions of the legendary, mysterious, and antique class of mound building people, and for that matter, any people that didn’t fit into the mold of his theory. This decision led to a wholesale plunder of mounds and caves. In the process, anything that fit into Powell’s narrow paradigm of American history was kept, while everything that did not, met an inglorious end. Ancient civilizations built mounds from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains, but the greatest concentrations of mounds are found in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys.14
Long before Powell arrived, the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1803–04 at a camp near the Cahokia Mounds, and both Lewis and Clark spent time exploring several of the more than 200 mounds that existed near their camp.
On September 10, 1803, Lewis visited the massive Grave Creek Mound, which is the largest mound of its kind, built from more than 60,000 tons of dirt. Construction of the mound took nearly a century, and resulted in a massive structure measuring 62 feet high and 240 feet in diameter.
The rain ceased about day, the clouds had not dispersed, and looked very much like giving us a repetition of the last evening’s frollic, there was but little fogg and I should have been able to have set out at sunrise, but the Corporal had not yet returned with the bread—I began to fear that he was piqued with the sharp reprimand I gave him the evening before for his negligence and inattention with respect to the bread and had deserted; in this however I was agreably disappointed, about 8 in the morning he came up bring[ing] with him the two men and the bread, they instantly embarked and we set out we passe
d several very bad riffles this morning and at 11 Oclock six miles below our encampment of last evening I landed on the east side of the [river] and went on shore to view a remarkable artificial mound of earth called by the people in the neighbourhood the Indian grave. This remarkable artificial mound of earth stands on the east bank of the Ohio 12 Miles below Wheeling and about 700 paces from the river, as the land is not cleard the mound is not visible from the river—this mound gives name to two small creek called little and big grave creek which passing about a half a mile on each side of it and fall into ohio about a mile distant from each other the small creek is above, the mound stands on the most elivated ground of a large bottom containing about 4000 acres of land the bottom is bounded from N. E. to S. W. by a high range of hills which seem to discribe a simecircle around it of which the river is the dimater, the hills being more distant from the mound than the river, near the mound to the N. stands a small town lately laid out called Elizabethtown there are but six or seven dwelling houses in it as yet, in this town there are several mounds of the same kind of the large one but not near as large, in various parts of this bottom the traces of old intrenchments are to seen tho’ they are so imperfect that they cannot be traced in such manner as to make any complete figure; for this enquire I had not leasure I shall therefore content myself by giving a discription of the large mound and offering some conjectures with regard to the probable purposes for which they were intended by their founders; who ever they may have been. the mound is nearly a regular cone 310 yards in circumpherence at its base and 65 feet high terminating in a blont point whose diameter is 30 feet, this point is concave being depresed about five feet in the center, arround the base runs a ditch 60 feet in width which is broken or inte[r]sected by a ledge of earth raised as high as the outer bank of the ditch on the N. W. side, this bank is about 30 feet wide and appers to have formed the enterence to fortifyed mound—near the summet of this mound grows a white oak tree whose girth is 13½ feet, from the aged appeance of this tree I think it’s age might resonably [be] calculated at 300 years, the whole mound is covered with large timber, sugar tree, hickery, poplar, red and white oak and c—I was informed that in removing the earth of a part of one of these lesser mounds that stands in the town the skeletons of two men were found and some brass beads were found among the earth near these bones, my informant told me the beads were sent to Mr Peals museum in Philadelphia where he believed they now were. . . .15
Strangely, the remaining half page and five following pages of Lewis’s description of the mound were left blank for reasons that remain unexplained.
Spirit Mound inspired Lewis and Clark to take an eleven-man team to explore the solitary, strange-looking hill that was said at the time to be inhabited by armed, strange, eighteen-inch-tall “little devils” with large heads. The hill, dubbed Paha Wakan by the Sioux, was a source of awe to the Omaha, Sioux, and Otoes tribes, which believed that the mound was occupied by spirits that would kill any human that approached it. The Journals of Lewis and Clark contain the first written records of Spirit Mound, which the Corps of Discovery explored on August 24, 1804. Clark writes,
Capt Lewis and my Self Concluded to visit a High Hill Situated in an emence Plain three Leagues N. 20º W. from the mouth of White Stone river, this hill appear to be of a Conic form and by all the different Nations in this quater is Supposed to be a place of Deavels or that they are in human form with remarkable large heads and about 18 inches high; that they are very watchfull and ar armed with Sharp arrows with which they can kill at a great distance; they are said to kill all persons who are so hardy as to attemp to approach the hill; they state that tradition informs them than many indians have suffered by these little people and among others that three Maha men fell a sacrefice to their murcyless fury not meany years since so much do the Mahas Souix Ottoes and other neibhbouring nations believe this fable that no consideration is sufficient to induce them to approach this hill.16
Many scholars dismiss Clark’s stories of these “little demons” as tales of a failed attempt to prove a primitive legend. But some, such as Dr. Robert Saindon, suggest that Lewis and Clark may have ventured into a realm that was once inhabited by honest-to-god mystical dwarves. As late as 1977 newspaper articles in the Billings Gazette mention discoveries of curious, diminutive, mummified remains discovered by locals. One mummy, discovered by gold prospectors in the Pedro Mountains, displayed bronze skin, a low forehead, a flat nose, a full set of teeth, and eerie eyes. X-rays of the tiny mummy revealed human vertebrae and a typical, though smaller, adult human skeletal structure.
One article cited by Saindon suggests that native legends of the little people indicate the mummified remains may have been nearly 10,000 years old and that similar skeletons and mummies have been found as far north as Yellowstone and in caves near the Colorado border.17
Also steeped in mystery and legend, Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound is by far the largest and most interesting serpentine effigy mound in the world. Ohio archaeologist Dr. William F. Romain, who studied the mound for decades, writes:
The Serpent Mound acropolis is located in a 7–8 mile wide peninsula of unglaciated Lexington Plain, also known as Ohio Bluegrass, that intrudes between unglaciated Appalachian plateau on the east, and glaciated Till Plain on the west. In layman’s terms, Serpent Mound was strategically placed to command a view of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the east, and the open, fertile plains in the west. The Serpent Mound acropolis also sits in a narrow region of Mixed Mesophytic forest, bordered by Oak, Sugar Maple and Beech forests. Mixed Mesophytic forests are a remnant of the type of forest that once covered North America in ancient times. They are made up of a wide variety of trees and plant life including primarily Sugar Maple, Buckeye, Basswood and Red Oak, as well as Big-Leaf Magnolia, American Beech, and Euonymus. The soil is rich and undisturbed, not too dry and not too moist, and tends to be more acidic. This type of forest is fast disappearing, now remaining only in the eastern United States and in eastern and central China.
The Serpent Mound also lies near the intersection of several fault lines, and in an area of unusual magnetic activity, combined with an area of unusually intense gravity anomalies. In all the areas where the mounds are located are a collection of natural and artificial lakes. On the shores of these lakes the natives built vast cities. The cities were circular in shape and surrounded by walls. Behind the walls, inhabitants carved out large canals to enable the waters of the lake or river to enter.18
These canals provided them with an inexhaustible supply of fresh water and made it possible for them to maintain a year-round supply of live fish. The canals also provided transportation.
With amazing skill, the engineers developed an internal system of navigation, linking the lakes and rivers with the various metropolitan centers of the region. It also was via these interconnecting waterways that the cities received needed produce. The Mississippi River served as the principal transportation artery. Many archaeologists and investigators agree that the artificial rivers in the southern part of the United States are a gift handed down by the pre-Columbian ancestors of the region.
Old public county documents of the diaries and letters of early settlers mention the unearthing of giant bones in land being developed.
Today we may not know who the Mound Builders were, but the answer may have been known two hundred years ago. As previously described, as time went on, stories like these were actively suppressed by ruling factions of the government who were interested in presenting a different view of the history of America. What would Meriwether Lewis’s ongoing role in all of this be?
Lewis and Clark and the Journey West
Thomas Jefferson was known to have in his own personal library the most accurate and complete collection of books and maps cataloging the West. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a skilled cartographer and surveyor. In Virginia surveyors enjoyed prominent status and had plenty of opportunity to become landowners as well. Anyone who wanted to obtain title to an
area of land had to deal with a surveyor. In many cases, a surveyor’s knowledge of the land would garner him employment representing large land companies. Surveyors were also among the best-educated Virginians, and it was not unusual for them to acquire large estates from the opportunities afforded by their profession.
Before 1755 the lands west along the Allegheny Mountains had not been settled. Land ownership in Virginia was necessary for the settlement of the area and for the growing prosperity of the colonial planter. The colonies were thriving, and the assurance of westward expansion depended largely on the incentive of land ownership. The expansion west was not just expected. It was being carefully laid out.
People settling in what was known then as the Northern Neck were required to obtain a survey warrant from the Northern Neck Proprietary Office for a set amount of acreage in a specific location.
The survey warrant, issued directly from the office to the county surveyor, instructed the surveyor to make a “just and true” survey of the land, officially determining and limiting its boundaries.
In 1749 Peter Jefferson founded the Loyal Land Company of Virginia along with another fellow Virginian and close neighbor, Thomas Meriwether, Lewis’s grandfather. The Loyal Land Company was formed to petition for grants of land west of the Allegheny Mountains. In addition to Peter Jefferson and Thomas Meriwether, the Loyal Land Company included other members and families of high influence, magnates, and large landowners.