by Paul Schrag
The remains of ancient giants in America are scarce, but evidence, both empirical and anecdotal, does exist. By reading the various newspapers and town journals of the 1800s a serious investigator will find a surprising number of stories about discoveries concerning giants. Many tales emerge from mounds that were being excavated by hordes of new frontiersmen moving west along the trail blazed by the Corps of Discovery.
Lewis and Clark’s mission was to find a sensible route to the Pacific Ocean, to categorize the plants and animals, to map the land, and to give new names to the rivers and mountains. Most of all, they came to prepare the way for the onslaught of a new civilization built on concepts of progress, change, and exploitation of resources that were utterly alien to the native people. As trusted friends and military men of experience, they were hand-picked by President Jefferson for this monumental mission. Their instructions were precise.
Their meticulous handling, documenting, and recording of data was necessary and vital to their mission. It is therefore inexplicable that the main participant of this journey would have missing dates and gaps in his journal from October 24 to November 17, 1805, and that it would be unclear on what day exactly the expedition reached the Pacific Ocean. The odd and scattered accounts during those days, and up to November 17, suggest that they may have spent some time doing something other than seeking a way to the beach.
The Hero Returns
The winter spent in Fort Clatsop was a difficult one for the Corps of Discovery. The days were dreary, cloudy, and cold, with little sunlight. The food supply was low, and the explorers had to resort to rationing as the salmon ran out and the bad weather made it impossible to conduct any successful hunting outings. The return trip home weighed heavily on the men’s hearts as they contemplated the long journey back and the possible disasters awaiting them.
With low morale attributed to starvation, the Corps of Discovery left Fort Clatsop on March 23, 1806, to face fighting the river currents and falls of the Columbia. Bruised and battered, they decided to ditch their canoes and head inland. They retrieved their horses from the Nez Percé and waited for the mountain snow to melt before riding back to the Continental Divide. Here the corps split into two teams. Lewis wanted to explore the Marias River, which he named after his beloved cousin, and took three men along on this detour. He wanted to research the northern reaches of the Marias, and although he didn’t know it at the time, Lewis and his team were wandering into sacred hunting grounds.
The decision to explore this new territory suggests that Lewis was in full military strategist mode and had become focused on achieving the primary goal of discovering a river route to the Pacific. Locating a route between the Marias and Saskatchewan Rivers would have been helpful in cutting into the pockets of Canadian fur traders. The Canadians dominated the lucrative fur trade business, and America was desperate to get a piece of the action. Lewis was looking for a breakthrough to fulfill this part of the expedition’s assignment. If he had suffered a mental breakdown at Fort Clatsop, it seems questionable that he would have been so motivated.
Unfortunately the route did not appear, and Lewis had no choice but to continue downriver, where he encountered the Blackfeet tribe. The Blackfeet, who controlled most of the north Saskatchewan River to Canada, noticed the lost white strangers. The natives were heavily armed and known for unprovoked attacks on their neighbors, the Nez Percé and Shoshone.
When the horse-riding warriors approached Lewis, he feared the worst. Outnumbered but alert, Lewis was prepared to fight to the death if the warriors made any attempt to rob him of his papers, survey instruments, or gun. The Blackfeet were shocked to see these white men trotting upon their land and were equally uneasy. The two parties awkwardly shook hands. Lewis knew he was in a vulnerable position, but when the Blackfeet invited him and his men to camp, he had little choice but to agree.
This was the first time they had encountered this tribe, and there were many things Lewis was not aware of. For example, he was unaware that the Blackfeet had been given guns by Canadian and British traders. The Blackfeet’s dominance over the Nez Percé and Shoshone depended on this advantage. Lewis made the mistake of telling the Blackfeet about their earlier dealings with the Nez Percé and Shoshone tribes and naively explained how he was arming and cooperating with the Blackfeet’s rivals, unknowingly creating a direct threat to their interests. Hoping for peace and a decent night’s rest, Lewis offered the Blackfeet some horses and tobacco.
He assigned one man to lookout duty, and Lewis and the others were able to fall asleep. Exhausted, the man on duty also fell asleep. Taking advantage of the situation, a Blackfeet warrior slyly pilfered some of their guns and was making his escape when one of Lewis’s men woke in time to see him running. The commotion that ensued ended the fretful rest, and Lewis awoke from a “profound” sleep to a chaotic nightmare. After a chase the young Blackfeet thief was caught by one of Lewis’s men. Instead of returning the weapons, the young warrior decided to make a fight out of it. As they wrestled Lewis’s man pulled out his knife and plunged it deep into the Blackfeet’s chest and killed him.
Moments later the other Blackfeet thieves were rounded up and the guns retrieved. But this was just another distraction as Lewis saw that other Blackfeet were now attempting to steal their horses. Losing their horses would have been an irreparable disaster as this would have left the small band of men alone with no means of escape. Giving his men instruction to shoot if the renegades got brave, Lewis went after the Blackfeet who had taken his horse. Lewis gave chase until he ran out of breath. What followed was the most frightening encounter of his journey. He writes in his journal:
at the distance of three hundred paces they entered one of those steep nitches in the bluff with the horses before them being nearly out of breath. I could pursue no further, I called to them as I had done several times before that I would shoot them if they did not give me my horse and raised my gun. One of them jumped behind a rock and spoke to the other who turned around and stopped at the distance of 30 steps from me and I shot him through the belly. He fell to his knees and on his right elbow from which position he partly raised himself up and fired at me. And turning himself about crawled in behind a rock, which was a few feet from him. He overshot me. Being bareheaded I felt the wind of his bullet very distinctly.1
After the shooting, the rest of the Indians fled. Lewis knew he and his men were now in a world of trouble. An ill-fated diplomatic excursion had ended in death for two Blackfeet and near-disaster for him and his men. The echo of the nearly fatal whizzing bullet left him shaken. He rounded up the men and available horses, and fearful of a revenge party, they rode fast and hard out of there. Lewis left behind a reminder of his presence by placing the Jefferson peace medal around the neck of the dead warrior. He and his men rode frantically back to the Missouri, hoping for a reunion with the rest of the Corps of Discovery.
Meanwhile Clark and his group had entered Crow territory along the Yellowstone River in present-day northern Wyoming. By then it was summer, and the refreshing breeze must have been a welcome change from the chilling Oregon winter, and a sign they were closer to the culmination of the journey.
While Clark and his men were setting up camp on the riverbanks, the Crow amicably approached them. However, their friendliness was a facade. The Crow natives were the most notorious horse thieves of the plains. By morning half of Clark’s horses were gone, and not a single Crow could be found. The loss of horses made the journey difficult, because the group had to walk long stretches in the heat until new horses were located.
In contrast to Lewis’s troubled exploration of the Missouri and Marias, Clark’s trip along the Yellowstone held pleasant surprises and visual wonders. Though he missed discovering Yellowstone Park by about forty miles, Clark did discover monuments recognized by other ancient travelers.
The most memorable one is a giant sandstone pillar containing ancient petroglyphs, which Clark named “Pompy’s Tower” after Sacagawea’s infant s
on, whom he had nicknamed “Pompy,” which means “little chief.” Captain Clark carved the date and his name on the rock, and he detailed in his journal the various images he tried to make out of the petroglyphs. Many of the oldest glyphs have eroded with time, but Clark’s signature has been framed and protected by a thin screen. These weren’t the only petroglyphs Clark encountered on the return journey. In Kansas, a short distance from the mouth of the Nemaha River, he examined petroglyphs that resembled stars in the night sky.
After camping near the pillar, Clark and his team continued their journey. Surrounded by bison, they had no shortage of food or panoramic views. The ever-stretching skies blanketed them as they rode their bullboats down the Yellowstone River. They stopped periodically so a few of Clark’s men could venture into the wilderness to hunt for food. Clark’s men weren’t the only ones seeking nourishment in the area. Meriwether Lewis and his men had escaped a sure death from the Blackfeet as they hurried down the Missouri. Eager to be reunited with the expedition at the convergence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, Lewis rode at a blistering pace.
Exhausted and hungry after a long stretch, Lewis took a break from riding and ventured into the woods to hunt. Spotting some elk, Lewis began to aim his rifle when he was shot in the hip by a bullet. He clutched his hip and screamed out in pain. Lewis immediately assumed one of his own men had shot him, but when he didn’t hear a response, he feared it might have been hostile natives. Rushing back to the river, he organized the men and moved on. There were no native tribes to be seen in the vicinity, and none of the men ever admitted to shooting him. For Lewis it was just another bad omen, a stack of which seemed to be growing since he had left the Pacific coast. Various theories emerged to explain the shooting. A volume of published speculation suggests that Lewis was mistaken for an elk by a poor-sighted riverman and translator Pierre Cruzatte and shot by mistake.
On August 12, 1806, Lewis reunited with Clark and the rest of the expedition. Relieved and spent, Lewis showed Clark his injury. Fortunately the wound wasn’t life threatening. But the bullet had gone straight through, and the mangled flesh had become infected. With the help of natural medicine and rest, Lewis recovered but was in no mood for writing. His frustration is evident as he makes his last journal entry complaining about the pain he suffered from the gunshot wound. Knowing that the distance home was now shorter, he was eager to get into the canoes and sail with the currents back to St. Louis. It is at this point that Lewis assigns all future writing to Clark, and with obvious relief he gives up his role as captain of the expedition. He abandons his sworn duties without much concern and settles back as a spectator.
As Lewis and Clark made their way home during late September the expedition made more important zoological and botanical discoveries. In all, they discovered more than 179 new species of plants and trees and 122 species of animals, birds, and fish.
As the Corps of Discovery glided down the Missouri, the stress from the journey gradually lifted. The explorers had participated in one of the most adventurous and amazing camping trips of all time and had lived to tell the world about it.
It must be restated here that Lewis and Clark were only rediscovering the ancient lands of America. Dr. Barry Fell was one of the figures who championed this notion, and another who paid a price for it.
A Harvard-educated professor, Dr. Fell wrote groundbreaking works on New World epigraphy. This linguistic study consumed Fell as he researched and covered grounds his peers would not. Not surprisingly, the academic establishment ignored his revelations, trying their best to erase him from history with silence or critique.
But when looking into Fell’s work it becomes clear he possessed an encyclopedic amount of knowledge, especially on the topics of ancient languages. Fell was far ahead of self-proclaimed experts who restrict their work to a single script or language. Fell studied all languages, and he wrote his first study on the ancient petroglyphs of Polynesia in 1940. His life’s work culminated in the publication of a trilogy of controversial books in the 1970s. The most famous of these three books was America BC.
In it, based on his studies of ancient rock art, he proposed that Celts, Arabs, Phoenicians, and others had visited and traded with Native Americans long before Columbus. This simple truth was bashed by the academic world, and the facts were kept from the general public. The academics even brought out the big guns from the Smithsonian’s anthropology department to write the accepted scholarly rebuttal to Fell’s work. Letting the Smithsonian investigate theories of pre-Columbian visitors to America’s shores is like letting Charlie Manson investigate the Sharon Tate murders.
It is important to bear in mind that the majority of the early European colonists were uneducated in cultural anthropology, and when they looked at any rock art, they had no idea as to the art’s antiquity, its significance, or about the people who had created it. The colonists could barely communicate with the Native Americans about simple survival. This lack of communication resulted in hundreds of years of knowledge waiting undiscovered or unexplored. Fell’s work changed all this, or was at least supposed to, before he was condemned.
Some of Fell’s work addressed the megalithic stone oddities found throughout the New England states. Known as America’s Stonehenge, the ruins found at Mystery Hill, New Hampshire, bear a striking resemblance to those found in England. Some of these stones contained inscriptions that Fell determined to be in the style of ancient Celtic ogham writing. When the inscriptions were translated, Fell discovered they were dedicated to the Celtic sun god, Bel. Bel was also known as Baal and was worshipped by the Phoenicians who came from ancient Palestine. These “eye of Bel” types of engravings have been found inside solar chambers all across New England.
Fell made another bizarre discovery several miles off the coast of Maine, finding a stone inscribed in what he determined to be Goidelic Celtic writing. After deciphering it Fell determined that the tablet spoke of ships sailing from Phoenicia. This provided evidence of what many now assume to be true—that the Phoenicians and Celts were brave seafaring warriors who touched the lands of America before Columbus.
Fell provided another example of intercultural trade in ancient America when he studied a three-hundred-pound chunk of pink granite first discovered in Bourne, Massachusetts, around 1860. Fell was able to identify the letters inscribed on the stone as a variation of the Punic and Iberian alphabets found in ancient Spain. He translated the writing as recording the annexation of modern-day Massachusetts by Hanno the navigator, a commander of Carthage. The Carthaginians were the natural successors to the Phoenicians and continued the tradition of maritime dominance. Hanno was a real historical figure who explored and colonized along the African coast around 500 BCE. He founded several cities and set up trading posts. The Greeks had been referring to his heroic voyages since the tenth century CE. According to the Greeks, Hanno was said to have circumnavigated the Atlantic.
After a lengthy examination of the ruins inhabiting the remote areas of Vermont, Fell was convinced of the importance of his discoveries, writing, “Within ten days we were finding dozens of Ogam inscriptions on another more remote site in central Vermont. It became clear that ancient Celts had built these stone chambers as religious shrines, and the Carthaginian mariners were visitors who were permitted to worship at them and make dedications in their own language to their own gods.”2
Perhaps Fell’s most important contribution to pre-Columbian contact in America was his decipherment of the Davenport Stele. Found in 1874 in a burial mound in Iowa, this stele has been called the Rosetta Stone of the West. Inscribed on this stele were three different types of writing that Fell was able to read. They included Egyptian hieroglyphics, Iberian Punic, and Libyan script. Fell estimated the age of the stele to be ninth century BCE. Another curious stele thought to be of the same age was discovered around 1888 on Long Island, New York, and contains more Egyptian and Libyan script.
This bilingual inscribed tablet referred to an expedition sent from
Egypt. Fell suggested that early visitors from Egypt might have traded with the Algonquin Indians and perhaps taught them how to use Egyptian hieroglyphic signs in writing. Fell analyzed the inscriptions and began to compare them with writings of the Algonquin/Micmac Indians of Maine. Using an Indian-language dictionary prepared by a missionary around 1690, Fell noted the clear similarities between the written script of the Algonquin/Micmac Indians and that of ancient Egypt. He concluded that the Micmac language was actually a derivative of ancient Egyptian.
This discovery from a professor at Harvard University should have shaken scholars. Instead the findings have been neglected and assigned to shelves of museums and libraries or buried in basement archives. There have been other Egyptian artifacts discovered in America that shared the same fate. A particularly interesting one is a 9-inch-high Egyptian soapstone statue found in an ancient burial mound in Libertyville, Illinois. Information about this important discovery is only to be found in an obscure Ancient American magazine article from 1999. The well-crafted object clearly portrays an Egyptian man holding a shepherd’s crook and a flail, both of which are recognizable icons of ancient Egypt.
In 1952 several coins bearing ancient Hebrew iconography were found in Kentucky. Dr. Ralph Marcus of the University of Chicago identified the iconography on the coins as being related to the revolt of the Jews against Rome in 132–135 CE.
In Tennessee several artifacts have turned up bearing Hebrew script, the most important being the Bat Creek Stone, professionally excavated by the Smithsonian mound survey project in Tennessee in 1889. The Bat Creek Stone was unearthed from an undisturbed burial mound by Cyrus Thomas, who initially declared that the curious inscriptions didn’t resemble the Cherokee alphabet at all. The stone measures just five inches long and is inscribed with eight Paleo-Hebrew characters dating from about the first or second century CE. Roman coins dating from this period have also been discovered along the Ohio River in Kentucky. However, since the discoverer of these coins in 2009 was a humble fisherman, his claims were denied despite no official study to prove otherwise.