Part 1: The Suppressed History of America...The Olmec Riddles...Florida and the Fountain of Youth...The Mysteries of the Mississippi Mound Builders

The Suppressed History of America

The Murder of Meriwether Lewis 

and the Mysterious Discoveries of 

the Lewis and Clark Expedition

By Paul Schrag and Xaviant Haze

Foreword 

If it flies in the face of convention, suppress it. If it contradicts accepted academic dogma, reject it. If it opens minds, condemn it. If it turns history upside down, make sure it never sees the light of day. So has it been down through time. So it was in the late 1800s when Smithsonian executive John Wesley Powell and his colleagues decided that, for humanity’s good, they had best systematically destroy the vast amount of accumulated evidence proving that several Native American Indian tribes were most probably descended from ancient European visitors to the New World. Yes, in the minds of duplicitous psychopaths, destruction is always sanctified by some dubious pretext. Nevertheless, regardless of the blitzkrieg on truth, it is always a day for celebration when nefarious plots are foiled or exposed. 

Reading through the pages of this book gives me this sense of satisfaction. It also furnishes me with additional proof of the devilry of people in high places. Although I have always been aware of the extraordinary lengths to which brainwashers will go to engender the consensus trance that suits their overall agenda for world control, it is valuable to learn even more about their ruthless and unceasing campaign to mislead us. Page after page, I was left aghast. 

Particularly formidable are the revelations concerning the vaunted viii H Foreword Smithsonian Institution that was legally established in 1846. Curiously, its founder, James Smithson (1765–1829), never visited the United States. It is not even clear what motivated him to found the institution. Its facade gives an impression of nobility and academic prowess, and its cathedral-like architecture exudes an aura of established credibility. The average visitor is not inclined to guess that the carefully arranged displays and tour-guide rhetoric are contrivances that ultimately give them a false impression of America’s past. No, they walk away feeling intrigued, informed, and certain. Little do they suspect that they’ve been royally deceived. 

Since its advent, the Smithsonian Institution and its eleven satellite museums have been visited by millions of people from all over the world. It is, according to its own PR spin, dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” That’s nice. But is it true? 

Well, no! Unfortunately, as this book reveals, it is not true. Too bad the Smithsonian’s founders and board of regents decided to obliterate the evidence that contradicted consensual notions about America’s ancient history. Reading of their Machiavellian intrigue compels us to ask, yet again, what our world would be without such egregious censorship. Where would we be if humanity had open access to the information that has been sequestered and hidden away from sight? We can only guess. 

These are a few of the questions that have perpetually arisen in my mind as, through the years, I delved into relatively unexplored areas of history. Personally, I have long been interested in ancient origins. My father enjoyed taking my brother and me to many megalithic sites in Northern Ireland. He did not have the same interest in them as I later developed, but in his own casual way he marveled at the stone circles and passage graves and made us aware of their mysterious history. That might have been the beginning for me. I don’t know. 

Later, in the mid-1980s, I decided to revisit many sites to take measurements and photographs. I wanted to make a more precise study of Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, Tara, Navan, Cong, Grianan de Aileach, Foreword H ix Dun Aonghasa, and other extraordinary places. Of course, it wasn’t long before I realized that what Irish people generally knew about their ancient forebears was largely nonsense. 

There was much more to what I was seeing, and I was determined to find out why these places existed, why they turned out to be aligned to the constellations, and why they had been designed so that one site in a field geomantically aligned with every other similar site in the country. I soon discovered that I was not getting my answers from the many contemptuous and myopic tour guides I encountered. It troubled me to think that the situation was probably not very different in other countries of the world. If what I suspected was true, something had to be done. Well, little did I know it at the time, but my real education had begun. 

Fortunately I was never inclined to accept the implausible and often blatantly contrived jive I was taught in school and that I read in most mainstream or officially vetted history books. Whatever I found intriguing about the history of my own land, and other places, was frequently labeled and dismissed as “mythological.” It took time for me to realize that this is one of the most misapplied terms in the English language. In my opinion, it is one of many talismanic words used to entrain minds. It induces us to partition reality into hemispheres that are then deliberately dislocated, and rarely if ever reunited. I know for a fact that this is what passes for education and intelligence in today’s world. One is considered educated as long as one does not question the flagrant trickery and deemed intelligent as long as one continues to practice the same travesty during one’s own academic career and intellectual feats. 

Yes, declare something a “myth” or “legend,” and you can be sure that most people will regard it dismissively. A fact or event so labeled does not have the same impact or significance as that which an average person blithely takes for “reality.” Cross that line, break that trance to begin asking troublesome questions, and you risk a lot. Like Meriwether Lewis, the truth seeker might find the journey into the unknown to be a perilous one. 

To change your settings and walk the alternative road takes work and time. To think critically and doubt what you are supposed to believe takes guts. To read between the lines and fill in the blanks takes audacity and imagination. And to negotiate the labyrinth of age-old deception takes determination, self-assuredness, and passion. Moreover, the reward sought by a legitimate truth-seeker is not that of public adulation but the breaking of a trance, the overcoming of formidable obstacles, the discernment of a subtle but perfidious lie-machinery, the exposure of truth, and the attainment of clear understanding. Once that great gift is won, it is an additional boon to be able to communicate and share one’s interests and discoveries with the world at large. This is because there is no end to the chain of revelation. There will never be an end to the journey of discovery and awakening. One find leads to a second; one “Eureka” moment paves the way to another; one person’s life struggle gives purpose to another’s adventure. What truly bonds one human being to another is not blood but ideas. 

We may traverse valleys, mountain ranges, and oceans, as did Meriwether Lewis, or we may negotiate more abstract landscapes—those of heart, mind, and soul. If we study nature we end up finding out more about ourselves. If we study other people—other nations, races, and tribes—we end up knowing a great deal more about our own existence. We also find out how many obstacles stand in the way of our goal. We become familiar with the stench of deception, the shades of falsehood, the hideous complexion of lies. We perfect our ability to discern truth because we grow so familiar with its opposite. We come upon the truth because we have become immune to everything that stands in contradistinction to it. Our minds receive the gift of truth once we reject everything that takes its place or attempts to stand in its stead. Genius and enlightenment rise from no other foundation and take seed in no other “soil” than the mind with zero tolerance for the false and contrived. 

Sadly, most people don’t lose much sleep over the existence of obscene people or institutes hell-bent on keeping secret the facts about our world. Even when most people are told that crimes—such as those Foreword H xi revealed in these pages—have occurred, they don’t let it get under their skin. They are more likely to retort, So what? What can I do about it? A few old relics went missing. The last surviving member of an ancient and mysterious race finally passed away, taking his knowledge with him. Okay, that’s tough. History books give us a deliberately skewed view of the past. A high-placed official’s ego got out of control, and he took liberties with valuable data. It happens! He’s long dead, so nothing can be done. All too often this is what we get. All too often there is no public uprising, outcry, or demand for restitution. 

Having said that, one positive outcome is possible. Regardless of how much time has elapsed, we can at least learn who was who, and who did what. We can learn about past underhanded machinations so that we are less likely to fall for similar antics in our own age. Additionally, the names of great men and women, who in their own time defended the truth and had the good of humanity at heart, can be remembered and honored. In my mind, this is what particularly distinguishes this book. 

Of additional interest to me are the author’s questions about the origin of various important Native American tribes, such as the deeply spiritual Missouri Mandans (first encountered in 1797), and the even more ancient and mysterious Mound Builders of Ohio. His work makes the reader acutely aware of important problems concerning ancient American history. How did the earliest humans get to the continent of America? Where did they come from? What compelled them to vacate their original habitats? What did the ancients say about their origins? What are the most important differences between the many Native American tribes? 

Why do so many tribes (of both the Southern and the Northern Hemispheres) speak of extraterrestrial visitation, giants, and evil angels whose diabolical behavior compelled the gods to send a cataclysm to wreck the world? Why did certain tribes (Kogi, Iroquois, Cherokee, Hopi, Pueblo, Seneca, Apache, and others) prophesy a coming age of severe moral and spiritual decline? Why did Maya and Cherokee astrologer-priests prophesy the world’s end in the year 2012? 

Why were ancient Chinese coins found in the state of Washington? Did the Ainu people (the prehistoric inhabitants of China) once frequent the northwestern United States? Why is the language of the Mandan people so similar to Gaelic? Why were the garments of Mandan women found to be similar to those of Nordic women? Who built the ziggurats, temples, and precisely positioned sacerdotal cities of Mexico? Who were the Olmecs? Who was the so-called Feathered Serpent, and why was he described as being of pale complexion? On and on go the questions. 

Naturally no single book or encyclopedia can ever hope to provide us with complete answers to these kinds of questions. Having said that, I must say that the authors of this book have done justice to most of them, warranting my acknowledgment for even asking questions of this kind and for bravely considering controversial theories in response. This work certainly shows us that currently we do not have all the answers to the many mysteries raised, at least not from official sources. More crucially, in all likelihood, we will never get them as long as the present academic status quo remains intact and unchallenged. The findings herein stress that even when solutions are proffered by open-minded and intelligent people, they are all too often shot down in flames. It is quite a challenge to come upon a truth after decades of searching and labor. It is also a challenge to transmit that truth to humanity. The latter struggle often proves more laborious than the former. 

I have personally found this to be the case. I too have dealt with similar mysteries and conundrums about America’s past in my own book titled The Irish Origins of Civilization. In volume one, in the chapter “American Arya,” I briefly cover some of the sensational discoveries of Augustus Le Plongeon and Barry Fell. The earthshaking finds of these men clearly show us that ancient Europeans had indeed visited and perhaps even settled in the Americas. Furthermore, in my “Irish Origins” and “Atlantis” volumes I referred to a book titled Fair Gods and Stone Faces by Constance Irwin that I have kept in my possession since the 1980s. The author of this hard-to-find masterpiece provides  ample evidence of the presence of white people in South America, people regarded by Toltec, Maya, and Inca sages as the bringers of civilization. And like those southern tribes, the Mandans, Zuni, Hopi, and other pre-Columbian tribes of North America also spoke of a worldwide cataclysm that drove their terrified ancestors underground. 

Before that time, before the antediluvian world was destroyed, the nations and races were constellated. They lived together, without division, on a great continent in the Atlantic region. It was from this ancient land, say the legends, that the godlike people came, the land of Pahána—or “lost white brother.” Are we to disregard these accounts as yet more “myths”? Are we to pretend that the Olmec stone heads and vast megalithic ruins of Easter Island, Chaco Canyon, Palenque, Cuzco, and the Bolivian Andes are merely figments of our imagination? 

As to this book’s main theme, we can be fairly certain that Meriwether Lewis was murdered. Personally, I suspect Thomas Jefferson and his crew, but if Aaron Burr and his gang turn out to be the culprits it won’t surprise me in the least. Each reader must come to his or her own conclusions on the controversy. In any case, I can assure the reader that the names “Lewis and Clark” elicited no glazed expressions when I was in school. In my day, every school kid in England and Ireland knew their names. The eyes of most boys and girls lit up once they were mentioned, and we listened with fascination when our history or geography teachers recounted the story of their harrowing adventures and exploits. Their grueling traversals and terrifying encounters thrilled us long before the advent of Hollywood’s make-believe Indiana Jones, that’s for sure. Therefore, it is with pride that I write this foreword for this fine book. Not only was I eager to read his work and discover the truth about Meriwether Lewis’s life and death, but I also consider it a duty to assist in the restoration of the governor’s name and reputation. It is a noble thing to honor great men and women of the past, particularly those whose contributions have either been forgotten or deliberately downplayed by humanity’s scurrilous misleaders. 

Governor Lewis apparently suffered the same fate as many other ardent souls who labored to discover the truth about humankind’s origins. He went the way of Wilhelm Reich, who discovered the secrets of the spirit-body connection; and of Raymond Royal Rife, who discovered how to obliterate cancerous disease. 

Meriwether Lewis’s discoveries suffered the same fate as those of Augustus Le Plongeon, Gerald Massey, Reverend Robert Taylor, E. A. Wallis Budge, Immanuel Velikovsky, L. A. Waddell, Comyns Beaumont, Barry Fell, Professor Thomas L. Thompson, and so many other geniuses and pioneers I could mention. The tribulations of these men must be reviewed. Injustices against their names and reputations must be set aright. It is a lofty undertaking that must be made with courage and indefatigable passion. The great work of exploration and restoration continues. Truth Against the World! 

Michael Tsarion

Introduction 

Some of the most crucial tales of American history are contained in the journals of Meriwether Lewis, explorer, historian, scientist, and soldier. But behind the tales of frontier bluster and adventure are stories that are far more fascinating. These tales have haunted academics and historians for decades—stories of lost cultures, strange monoliths, anachronistic artifacts, and enigmatic races found in the shadows and cracks between America’s official versions of history. The death of Meriwether Lewis, his exploration of the American wilderness, and many of the discoveries that lie along his path are steeped in mystery. 

The contention that Lewis was murdered is not a new one. Rumors about murder began circulating as soon as news of his death emerged. Historical accounts, letters, and newspaper reports compiled by biographers such as Stephen Ambrose and Richard Dillon suggest that the people who knew Lewis were initially shocked, saddened, and confused about the circumstances surrounding his death. 

Lewis was respected by all who knew him as a fearless, quick witted adventurer of powerful constitution and indefatigable will. When asked why he chose Lewis over a scientist or researcher to catalog the adventure west, then president Thomas Jefferson said, “It was impossible to find a character who to complete science in botany, natural history, mineralogy & astronomy, joined the firmness and constitution character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods & familiarity with the Indian manners & character requisite for this undertaking. All the latter qualifications Capt. Lewis has.”1 

The same qualities that made Lewis the president’s first choice to lead the expedition west—strength, savvy, fearlessness, strength of character, education, and military wit—are the same qualities that cast doubt on reports of his deterioration and suicide. They’re also the same qualities that likely got him killed. In chapter 10 we explore the politics of Lewis’s day and why certain factions may have wanted him out of the way. 

With regard to Lewis’s actual death, there were no eyewitnesses, and there is a list of strange circumstances that remain unaddressed and unanswered by official accounts of his alleged suicide. How did an expert marksman manage to shoot himself so ineffectively, languishing for hours, then finally manage to cut himself with razors from head to toe to finish the job? The answer, it seems, should be simple. The once great wilderness explorer turned political powerhouse was murdered. 

But history is never that simple, and the truth of history is notoriously difficult to pin down. Many historians, who have become lost in a sort of wilderness of their own, still believe in history as written and feel content to piece it together from the writings and research of other academics. They offer dry, lifeless regurgitations—fallow truths uttered from deep-red high-backed leather chairs, resting by a fire in New England. They are content with history as long as it is deemed academically sound and safe. 

This book is not a safe journey. This is an invitation to return to the wilderness, where history is pieced together from bits of exploration, strange and wonderful experience, passion, and poetry. The place where these topics coalesce—pre-Columbian America and the exploration of Lewis and Clark—has been danced around for years. Much of the story has simply been brushed aside as mere speculation or fictitious legend. 

Despite persistent criticism and opposition from official circles, a different picture of early America has begun to emerge. It is one that requires a different approach to the way we catalog history . . . 

One 

The Olmec Riddles 

The murder of Meriwether Lewis marked the inception of an academic war over how to define the America that existed before the Spanish conquistadores, French explorers, and British adventurers arrived in the so-called New World. This intellectual battle has been waged for centuries now by two factions of scholars—the diffusionists and the independent inventionists. 

To this day the diffusionists are spoken of with derision in mainstream academic circles, as they dig into the past with the same courage that characterized Lewis and his journey west. Like Lewis, these rogue scholars continue to unearth evidence that America was visited long before Columbus by explorers crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Moreover, these scholars continue to unearth evidence of rich, vibrant, highly evolved cultures that existed in ancient America. This growing volume of archaeological evidence stands in clear contradiction to many key assumptions held by America’s founders and their scholarly counterparts, the so-called independent inventionists.

The inventionist perspective remains the standard among archaeologists and suggests that natives of the American continent are descended from Ice Age relatives who crossed the Bering Strait and developed in complete isolation—until, that is, they were “discovered” by Spanish, French, and British explorers during the late fifteenth century. In the early days of America it was the federal government and its proponents who were most interested in characterizing the continent as an untrammeled paradise populated by savages. 

This set of assumptions gave early explorers and exploiters of the American continent the justification they needed to co-opt and pillage its resources, wage war on its native people, and occupy its lands with impunity. It was the perspective that America’s government officials held as they tamed America’s terrain and battled its people for control of the vast stores of resources that would fuel the creation of their New World. It also became the perspective that was later adopted by the Smithsonian Institution, which, more than any other organization, has defined our understanding of America’s origins. Since its inception in the 1800s, the Smithsonian joined the powers in Washington in vigorously promoting the idea that America was an untouched landscape before Europeans arrived to “claim” it. Simply put, the Smithsonian’s initial administrators followed the direction already chosen by America’s early leaders, supported by their own inherited cultural and scholarly myopia. 

Paradoxically enough, however, it was an agent of the Smithsonian Institution, Matthew Sterling, who championed one of the first contentious examples of cultural diffusionism when he began investigations into the mysterious Olmecs and the origins of Mayan culture in what are now the southern reaches of Mexico.

The Olmecs are considered by some historians to be the mother culture to the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca tribes. A pre-Columbian people, they inhabited the lowlands of south-central Mexico, in a region now occupied by the states of Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmec were prominent from 1200 BCE to about 400 BCE, according to various accounts. They were the first Mesoamerican civilization and planted seeds of other civilizations throughout the region. The Olmecs are credited with being the first Mesoamerican culture to practice ritual blood sacrifice and play the Mesoamerican ballgame—practices that became the hallmarks of several subsequent tribes and civilizations. 

From the steamy jungles of Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast to the modern countries of Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, the Olmecs built large settlements, established trade routes, and developed religious iconography and rituals. 

The rise of the Olmec civilization was driven largely by the region’s ecology, which included well-watered alluvial soil and a network of rivers that provided the Olmecs with a useful transportation system. The region where Olmec culture took root is similar to other cultural spawning grounds such as the Nile, Indus, and Yellow River Valleys. This rich environment fostered a dense population and the rise of an elite culture that exploited the region’s stores of obsidian and jade, for example, to create works of art that have defined the Olmec culture. Exploration of this culture was sparked by artifacts circulating through the pre-Columbian art market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this day, Olmec artwork is considered among ancient America’s most marvelous achievements. 

Archaeologists consider San Lorenzo the earliest of the major Olmec ceremonial centers. Located in the open country around the Rio Chiquito in southern Veracruz, it rested on a massive, sculpted salt plateau, with a series of manmade ravines constructed on three of its four sides. This structure represents the earliest ball court in Mesoamerica, complete with a system of carved stone drains. 

Richard Diehl, professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama, has conducted archaeological investigations all over Mexico and authored the essential guide on the Olmecs. Diehl echoes Ann Cyphers, an Olmec scholar at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, when he explains, “San Lorenzo shows clear evidence of class structure,” and “there were probably a number of different populations, forming groups that rose and fell over time and shifted alliances. I don’t think there was any political integration.”1 

And while Diehl offers admiration for their drains and class structure, he makes very little mention of the Olmecs’ dramatic end, which has been explained away by theories of an internal uprising, ecological disaster, or hostile invasion. When San Lorenzo was discovered, almost all its large sculptures were defaced, buried, or destroyed. Like Meriwether Lewis, the Olmec people met a mysterious end that has yet to be satisfactorily explained. 

Some of the carved works at San Lorenzo include the legendary massive Olmec head sculptures, which weigh as many as forty tons and stand nearly three meters high. These massive heads have vexed archaeologists since their discovery, showing characteristics that have led many to assert that they are African in origin or were created by people of African descent. 

First discovered by plantation workers, the colossal sculptures were reported in the 1869 Bulletin of the Mexican Geographical and Statistical Society as “a magnificent sculpture that most amazingly represents an Ethiopian.” The report included a drawing clearly outlining the stone heads’ African features. What appears to be a bit of honest investigative reporting was too controversial to be taken seriously at the time, and the idea of Africans residing in Mexico was quickly and largely forgotten. 

Decades later Smithsonian curator Matthew Sterling, fascinated by dusty tomes pulled from the basements of the museum, began a personal exploration into the history of the Olmecs. At the time, Sterling’s findings were considered blasphemous by an academic community dedicated to the study of Mayan culture. Until Sterling’s investigations in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Mayan culture was considered the seed of all culture in Mesoamerica. Work by archaeologists such as Phillip Drucker and Robert Hetzer, who used modern methods such as carbon dating to determine the age of Olmec artifacts, later vindicated Sterling and his views. Though not widely acknowledged, Sterling’s discoveries, publications, and perseverance in defending them would undermine a position long held by his own organization, the Smithsonian Institution. Kathy O’Halleran, author of Indigenous People’s History, says: 

The outcome of the Olmec-Maya controversy is noted in the intellectual community as a shining example of the need for open minds. Above all, it shows how major new archaeological discoveries can be made even in the mid-twentieth century and how the intellectual perseverance of a minority viewpoint in the archaeological community can lead to eventual acceptance—even after initial rejection.2 

After years of research, in 1938 Sterling traveled to the southwestern Mexican lowland, armed with well-prepared journals and funds from the National Geographic Society. His goal was simple: uncover the seeming mystery of a discarded ancient people. 

Sterling’s first stop was Tres Zapotes, an ancient Olmec city on the western edge of the Los Tuxtlas Mountains. Tres Zapotes is best known for its impressive garden of carved steles, altars, and colossal stone heads, all of which were discovered at least a hundred miles away from the nearest source of the stone from which they were carved. 

Among the monuments at Tres Zapotes was Stele C, a freestanding stone monument carved from basalt. The stele is engraved with an indecipherable script, which surrounds a jaguar sitting on a throne. On the opposite side of the stele is the second-oldest Mesoamerican long-count calendar date ever to have been unearthed. The calendar is a nonrepeating vigesimal (based on factors of twenty) numeral system; it was apparently used by several Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Mayans. 

Sterling also discovered an imposing fourteen-foot-high stele with carvings that showed an encounter between two tall men, both dressed in elaborate robes and wearing elegant shoes with turned-up toes. Erosion or deliberate mutilation had defaced one of the figures. The other was intact. It so obviously depicted a Caucasian male with a high bridged nose and a long, flowing beard that the bemused archaeologists christened it “Uncle Sam.” These monuments, whether they resembled bearded Caucasians or African kings, have amazed and bewildered experts and the layperson for generations. 

Author Graham Hancock, an acclaimed alternative historian intrigued by the anomalies associated with the Olmecs, traveled to the ruins at La Venta, a civic and ceremonial center and home to one of the oldest pyramids in Mesoamerica. Hancock, dumbfounded at the immense complexity of the structures, writes: 

In the centre of the park, like some magic talisman, stood an enormous grey boulder, almost ten feet tall, carved in the shape of a helmeted African head. Here, then, was the first mystery of the Olmecs, a monumental piece of sculpture, more than 2000 years old. It was unmistakably the head of an African man wearing a close-fitting helmet with long chinstraps. Plugs pierced the lobes of the ears, and the entire face was concentrated above thick, down-curving lips. It would be impossible for a sculptor to invent all the different combined characteristics of an authentic racial type. The portrayal of an authentic combination of racial characteristics therefore implied strongly a human model had been used. I walked around the great head a couple of times. It was 22 feet in circumference, weighed 19.8 tons, stood almost 8 feet high, had been carved out of solid basalt, and displayed clearly an authentic combination of racial characteristics. My own view is that the Olmec heads present us with physiologically accurate images of real individuals. Charismatic and powerful African men whose presence in Central America 3000 years ago has not yet been explained by scholars.3 

Hancock personally studied the same stele that Sterling had sixty years earlier. Two things seemed very clear to him: 

The encounter scene it portrayed must, for some reason, have been of immense importance to the Olmecs, hence the grandeur of the stele itself, and the construction of the remarkable stockade of columns built to contain it. And, as was the case with the African heads, it was obvious that the face of the bearded Caucasian man could only have been sculpted from a human model. One was carved in low relief on a heavy and roughly circular slab of stone about three feet in diameter. Dressed in what looked like tight-fitting leggings, his features were those of an Anglo-Saxon. He had a full pointed beard and wore a curious floppy cap on his head. Around his slim waist was tied a flamboyant sash.4  

These Caucasian figures carved in the stones were uncovered from exactly the same strata as the huge Olmec heads. The La Venta figures and their attire resembled reliefs in Abydos, Egypt, that depict the Battle of Kadesh. Hittite charioteers shown in the reliefs all have long, elaborate robes and shoes with turned-up toes. 

Hancock suggests, “It is by no means impossible that these great works preserve the images of peoples from a vanished civilization which embraced several ethnic groups. Strangely, despite the best efforts of archaeologists, not a single, solitary sign of anything that could be described as the ‘developmental phase’ of Olmec society has been unearthed anywhere in Mexico. These amazing artists appeared to have come from nowhere.”5 

Evidence suggests that rather than developing slowly, the Olmec civilization emerged all at once and fully formed. The transition period from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it baffles modern anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. Technical skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight and with no apparent antecedents whatsoever. 

A vivid picture of the end of the Olmec civilization is found in the ancient city of Monte Alban. The city stands on a vast, artificially flattened hilltop overlooking Oaxaca and consists of a huge rectangular area enclosed by groups of pyramids and other buildings that are laid out in precise geometrical relationships to one another. 

Hancock visited this site and recorded his discoveries. 

I made my way first to the extreme south-west corner of the Monte Alban site. There, stacked loosely against the side of a low pyramid, were the objects I had come all this way to see: several dozen engraved Stele depicting Africans and Caucasians . . . equal in life . . . equal in death. At Monte Alban, however, there seemed to be carved in stone a record of the downfall of these masterful men. It did not look as if this could have been the work of the same people who made the  La Venta sculptures. The standard of craftsmanship was far too low for that. Whoever they were, these artists had attempted to portray the same subjects I had seen at La Venta. There the sculptures had reflected strength, power and vitality. Here, at Monte Alban, the remarkable strangers were corpses. All were naked, most were castrated, and some were curled up in fetal positions as though to avoid showers of blows, others lay sprawled.6 

At an annual conference of the Institute for the Study of American Cultures, Mike Xu, a professor of modern languages and literature at Texas Christian University, suggests the possibility of direct Chinese influence on the Olmec: 

Carved stone blades found in Guatemala, dating from approximately 1100 B.C., are distinctly Chinese in pattern, and share uncanny resemblances to glyphs from the Shang Dynasty. The problem is not whether Asians reached Mesoamerica before Columbus. The problem is when did they arrive, and what did they do here? Any proposal that smacks of diffusionism in today’s academic climate is immediately dismissed as irresponsible at best, malevolent at worst. Here are all these American scholars, speaking European languages, and they dare to say no, there was never any diffusion; and yes, all Western Hemisphere cultures are indigenous! 7 

In his most recent work, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization, Richard Diehl wrote more than 200 pages but spent only a brief part of the discussion on the subject of diffusionism. 

The origins of Olmec culture have intrigued scholars and lay people alike since Tres Zapotes Colossal Head I, a gigantic stone human head with African features, discovered in Veracruz 140 years ago. Since that time, Olmec culture and art have been attributed to seafaring Africans, Egyptians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Atlanteans, Japanese, Chinese, and other ancient wanderers. As often happens, the truth is infinitely more logical, if less romantic: the Olmecs were Native Americans who created a unique culture in southeastern Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. 

Archaeologists now trace Olmec origins back to pre-Olmec cultures in the region and there is no credible evidence for major intrusions from the outside. Furthermore, not a single bona fide artifact of old world origin has ever appeared in an Olmec archaeological site, or for that matter anywhere else in Mesoamerica.8 

With this entry, Diehl swiftly dismisses all theories and evidence of transoceanic contact. It is important to note how difficult it is to determine what a bona fide old-world artifact would be, since old-world and new-world articles are often indistinguishable. Also, Diehl offers no further information on the cultures from which the Olmecs are presumably derived. For the Olmecs to actually be Africans—not just look like them— they would almost certainly have come to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec via ship. But such voyages are dismissed immediately by most scholars, and the Olmecs have simply been characterized as local boys. 

While excavating in the Mexican state of Veracruz in 2006, archaeologist Maria del Carmen Rodriguez discovered a stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing previously unknown to scholars. The slab was covered in carved symbols that appeared to be those of a complex writing system, of which she writes: 

Finding a heretofore unknown writing system is rare. One of the last major ones to come to light, scholars say, was the Indus Valley script, recognized from excavations in 1924. Now, scholars are tantalized by a message in stone in a script unlike any other and a text they cannot read. They are excited by the prospect of finding more of this writing, and eventually deciphering it, to crack open a window on one of the most enigmatic ancient civilizations. The inscription on the Mexican stone, with 28 distinct signs, some of which are  repeated, for a total of 62, has been tentatively dated from at least 900 B.C., possibly earlier. That is 400 or more years before writing was known to have existed in Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico through much of Central America, and by extension, anywhere in the hemisphere. Previously, no script had been associated unambiguously with the Olmec culture, which flourished along the Gulf of Mexico in Veracruz and Tabasco well before the Zapotec and Maya people rose to prominence elsewhere in the region. Until now, the Olmec were known mainly for the colossal stone heads they sculptured and displayed at monumental buildings in their ruling cities.9 

Several paired sequences of signs have prompted speculation that the text may contain couplets of poetry. 

Experts who have examined the symbols on the stone slab said they would need many more examples before they could hope to decipher and read what is written. It appeared, they said, that the symbols in the inscription were unrelated to later Mesoamerican scripts, suggesting that this Olmec writing might have been practiced for only a few generations and may never have spread to surrounding cultures. 

Beyond advanced linguistic and literary systems, the Olmecs also seemed to have possessed advanced knowledge of mathematics and navigation. Astronaut Gordon Cooper became interested in the Olmecs during his final years with NASA. During a treasure-hunting expedition in Mexico, he encountered Olmec ruins, which led to a startling discovery. 

One day, accompanied by a National Geographic photographer, we landed in a small plane on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Local residents pointed out to us pyramid-shaped mounds, where we found ruins, artifacts and bones. On the examinations back in Texas, the artifacts were determined to be 5,000 years old. When we learned of the age of the artifacts we realized that what we’d found had nothing to do with seventeenth-century Spain. . . . I contacted the Mexican government and was put in touch with the head of the national archaeology department, Pablo Bush Romero.10 

Together with Mexican archaeologists, the two returned to the site. After some excavating, Cooper writes, 

The age of the ruins was confirmed: 3000 B.C. Compared with other advanced civilizations, relatively little was known about the Olmec. Engineers, farmers, artisans, and traders, the Olmecs had a remarkable civilization. But it is still not known where they originated. . . . Among the findings that intrigued me most were celestial navigation symbols and formulas that, when translated, turned out to be mathematical formulas used to this day for navigation, and accurate drawings of constellations, some of which would not be officially “discovered” until the age of modern telescopes. Why have celestial navigation signs if they weren’t navigating celestially?

And he asks: “If someone had helped the Olmecs with this knowledge, from whom did they get it?”11 

The enigmas left behind by the Olmecs are staggering. In stark contrast to nearly every assumption held about pre-Columbian cultures, much evidence suggests that people from distant civilizations arrived on the continents “discovered” by explorers such as Lewis centuries before. 

Can a similar influence be found in North America? And if so, did it still exist during the journey made by Lewis and Clark?

Two 

Florida and the Fountain of Youth 

Meriwether Lewis wasn’t the first intrepid adventurer to suffer a dark fate while discovering secrets on the American continent. In 1508, sixteen years after Columbus’s first voyage, Juan Ponce de Leon discovered gold on the island of Puerto Rico. Within a short span of time, the people of the island paradise were extinct. Many died in battle defending their homeland. Others succumbed to diseases incurred during their enslavement by foreign invaders who came to exploit rich stores of gold ore and other precious resources. Like Lewis, his discoveries made Ponce de Leon an instant celebrity and one of the richest men in the New World. 

Boasting a slightly less glorious early career than Lewis, de Leon had begun his naval career as a pirate for hire, attacking ships belonging to the Moors. This experience earned him a chance to undertake a journey to the Americas at the same time that Christopher Columbus was making his second trip to the Americas, to the West Indies, as part of a costly excursion financed by the king and queen of Spain. De Leon sailed from the port of Cadiz and arrived on a Caribbean island dubbed Hispaniola, composing the island that is now host to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, to begin his own series of explorations. 

Like Lewis, de Leon was a fearless adventurer who reveled in the chance to serve his superiors by exploring the American continent in search of riches. His arrival at Hispaniola marks the explorer’s first connection with the region alleged to host the fountain of youth. Was it here that de Leon first heard of the fabled well? Or had he already been exposed to this legend during his days of looting Moorish ships? 

Today, preserved in Aljamiado, is the oldest known story that mentions the mythical fountain. It is a poem written by the Muslims in an encoded language. The poem is called “Al-Iskandur Dhug al Quarnain” and means “Alexander the Two Horned” in Arabic. It tells the story of Alexander the Great going to the land of darkness to find a fountain of youth. It is possible, and some have speculated, that de Leon was aware of these tales via his exploration of Moorish and Muslim customs. The fountain was also mentioned as part of the “Apocryphal Letter of Prester John” that appeared in 1165 in Europe. Three hundred years later, in a world unlike anything they could have imagined, the Spanish explorers may have been enticed by similar legends told by island natives. The exuberance enjoyed after the discovery of new lands could have easily encouraged de Leon to believe that if anyone could find this legendary fountain, he could. 

After drifting past the Bahamas and the Florida Keys, de Leon made landfall on the North American mainland, which he mistook initially for an island. Thinking he was still in the Caribbean, de Leon dropped anchor and went ashore somewhere north of what would become the city of St. Augustine. 

In 1514 de Leon returned to Spain to report his findings. The fountain of youth was somewhere in those lush isles, he asserted, and the king and queen were convinced that de Leon could find it. On his next excursion de Leon sailed with two hundred men and enough supplies to establish a colony. He landed on the west coast of Florida near what would become Charlotte Harbor and was attacked by Calusa natives. A poisonous arrow wounded de Leon, and most of the Spanish soldiers and colonists were killed. Like Lewis, de Leon’s appetite for adventure and exploration led to his untimely death. The few survivors of the skirmish at Charlotte Harbor retreated to Cuba, where de Leon died from his wounds a month later. 

Coincidentally, in his initial discovery and in his last battle, de Leon had crept within a short distance of lush areas of deep freshwater sources in Florida; one is near the city of St. Augustine and another in Zephyrhills. The site of his last battle with the natives was a short distance away from the Warm Mineral Springs of North Port, Florida. These massive springs run two thousand feet deep. 

Despite the gruesome scuffle and the death of de Leon, the search for the fountain continued. The Spanish conqueror and explorer Pánfilo de Nárvaez (1478–1528) attempted an expedition from Cuba but was caught in a hurricane. The fleet of ships was destroyed, and the survivors washed ashore near modern-day Tampa Bay. Only a man by the name of Cabeza de Vaca and thirty companions survived. Their intention was to reach a Spanish settlement in Mexico and regroup there, but after a battle with hostile natives they rafted their way into southwestern Texas. Traveling west along the Colorado River, de Vaca and the survivors of the ill-fated expedition became the first Europeans to see a bison, or American buffalo. De Vaca returned to Spain nine years later and published his story. It was the bestseller of its time. 

In it there are references to encounters with giants, which coincidentally was a recurring theme in Native American folklore. De Vaca’s astounding tales mention an encounter during a raid. 

When we attempted to cross the large lake, we came under heavy attack from many giant Indians concealed behind trees. Some of our men were wounded in this conflict for which the good armor they wore did not avail. The Indians we had so far seen are all archers. They go naked, are large of body, and appear at a distance like giants. They are of admirable proportions, very spare and of great activity and strength. The bows they use are as thick as the arm, of eleven or twelve palms in length, which they discharge at two hundred paces with so great precision that they miss nothing.1 

In 1539 Hernando De Soto sailed nine ships into Tampa Bay. As they ventured inland, they encountered the friendly Timucuans. It was customary for the explorers to ensure their safety by holding captive the tribal chiefs. This was done diplomatically, as an invitation. After some reluctance the chiefs agreed to become De Soto’s “guests.” 

When the natives realized becoming guests meant being turned in to slaves, the local tribes, led by Chief Copafi of the Apalachee, sparked an uprising. After weeks of warfare the chief was finally captured in a battle near what would become Tallahassee. He was described as a man of monstrous proportions. 

Some of these legends of giants and the search for the fountain of youth are being cast in new light thanks to the work of researcher Duane K. McCullough. McCullough has found different rock islands within Key Largo that contain springs that are unique in composition, thanks to exposure to abundant amounts of nutritious sea salts. These concentrations are attributed to tidal pressure and seasonal freshwater flushing from the Everglades, collecting and mixing within the aquatic pathways that run through cracks in the coral bedrock of the upper Florida Keys. McCullough’s research suggests that these rare sea salts contained traces of gold, which is generally greatly diluted in seawater. 

Because gold could have been concentrated as a salt by the evaporation of seawater in nearby Florida Bay, and further collected as a heavy metal at the bottom of other basinlike lagoons, it could have been mixed into the local springwaters of the area. This discovery, together with a new understanding of the health benefits of dietary gold salts and how they can improve cell memory, sheds new light on the old legend of waters that impart immortality. 

Nutritious salts are common in almost all briny lagoons in the Caribbean. Sulfur, when bonded to a metallic element, creates salts such as calcium sulfate, sodium sulfate, and potassium sulfate, which are essential tissue salts found in any healthy body. Science has discovered that tissue salts and several other important salt compounds are useful in maintaining proper health. If they are not supplied as part of our daily diet, the process of aging accelerates. 

These elements do not oxidize at all, and when concentrated by the unique evaporation and flushing process of Florida Bay, they create a golden elixir that can neutralize the aging process if assimilated properly. Research by McCullough and others has helped revive a new interest in the fountain of youth. Some historians speculate that early Spanish explorers may have been close to discovering these wondrous waters, missing them in some instances only by miles. 

American magician David Copperfield claimed he had discovered a true fountain of youth amid a cluster of four small islands in the Exuma chain of the Bahamas. He purchased these islands for $50 million in 2006. 

“I’ve discovered a true phenomenon,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “You can take dead leaves, they come in contact with the water, and become full of life again. Bugs or insects that are near death come in contact with the water, they’ll fly away. It’s an amazing thing, very, very exciting.”2 Copperfield, who is now fifty-two, says that he hired scientists to conduct an examination of the mystical water, but no further information has been offered. 

Property developer Michael Baumann purchased an apartment complex in downtown Miami for $8.5 million in 1998. He planned to build a luxury condominium in its place. After tearing down the older apartments on the property, he was obliged to commission a routine archaeological survey of the site. Bob Carr of the Miami-Dade Historic Preservation Division was called in to conduct the excavation. They discovered holes that had been cut into the limestone bedrock. 

Surveyor Ted Riggs, upon examining the layout of these holes, theorized they were part of a circle thirty-eight feet in diameter. Excavation of the path he laid out revealed that there were indeed twenty-four holes forming a perfect circle in the limestone. Examination of earth removed from the site led to the discovery of an array of artifacts, ranging from shell tools and stone ax heads to human teeth and charcoal from fires. The Miami Circle represents the only evidence of a prehistoric permanent structure cut into the bedrock of the United States. 

Signs of an ancient civilization in the Americas predating Columbus’s era and the native tribes are abundant, even if they are catalogued incorrectly or ignored. Ponce de Leon, Cabeza de Vaca, and Hernando De Soto, whether looking for the fountain of youth or mapping the state of Florida believing it to be an island, opened the door to further exploration. That exploration unearthed the remains of a city and an earthwork complex dubbed Big Mound, which is situated between the Florida Everglades and the Pitney Flatwoods.

Three 

The Mysteries of the Mississippi Mound Builders 

Hernando De Soto’s encounters with giants continued as he pushed further inland in 1539. Traveling with more than six hundred men and two hundred horses, he trekked through North Florida, the southern swamps of Georgia, and the landlocked crossroads of western Alabama. Rodrigo Ranjel, De Soto’s private secretary, wrote a diary detailing the expedition. The new lands they explored were ruled by the Native American chief Tuscaloosa. 

“De Soto and fifteen soldiers entered the village, and as they rode in, they saw Tuscaloosa stationed on a high place, seated on a mat. Around him stood one hundred of his noblemen, all dressed in richly colored sleeveless cloaks and graceful feathers,” writes Ranjel of his encounter with the magnificent tribal leader. “Tuscaloosa appeared to be about forty years old. He appeared to be a giant, or rather was one, and his limbs and face were in proportion to the height of his body. He was handsome, but wore a look of ferocity and grandeur of spirit. He was the tallest and most handsomely shaped Indian that they saw during all their travels.” 

The diary, first published in 1547, gives a concise account of failed peaceful negotiations and subsequent mayhem. 

“As the cavaliers and officers of the camp who preceded De Soto rode forward and arranged themselves in his presence, Tuscaloosa took not the slightest notice of them. He made no move to rise even when De Soto approached.” Ranjel tells us that Tuscaloosa was seated on top of a mound at one end of the square, like that of a king. “After a few days of talking and watching colorful war dances, Tuscaloosa joined De Soto on their quest towards Mobile. While on the trail two soldiers turned up missing. When De Soto questioned Tuscaloosa about their whereabouts, he replied that they were not the white men’s keepers.”1 

Ranjel then describes the Spaniards’ approach toward Mobile. The scouts rode out to De Soto and warned that many Native Americans had gathered for rebellion. De Soto, brave and defiant, approached the town and its high walls. A welcoming committee of painted warriors, clad in robes of skins and headpieces with vibrantly colored feathers, came out to greet them. A group of young Native American maidens followed, dancing and singing to music played on crude instruments. 

De Soto entered the town with his most trusted soldiers, Tuscaloosa, and the chief ’s entourage. The Spaniards stood in a piazza, surrounded by a stream of foreign colors and fluttering sounds. From here De Soto saw some eighty houses within the village. Several of them were described as large enough to hold at least one thousand people. Unknown to De Soto, more than two thousand Native American warriors stood in concealment behind the walls. After some of the chiefs from the town joined him, Tuscaloosa withdrew into the village, warning De Soto with a severe look to leave at once. 

Under a hail of arrows, De Soto and most of his men retreated from the village. After regrouping and devising their strategy, the Spaniards gained entry to the village, set fire to the buildings, and massacred the city’s inhabitants. 

Despite the death and devastation, Tuscaloosa escaped. Riding deep into unknown lands, De Soto and his men marched to capture him. The giant chief disappeared, and the pursuing Spaniards found only abandoned cities with massive mounds. These staggering mounds remain standing throughout the South, especially in the Mississippi Valley.  

Professor Robert Silverberg, who has written extensively about Native American history, says: 

The Mississippi mound builders seemed to already have been declining when the Spaniards came around. The Native Americans of the Southeast slid into a less ambitious way of life. Huge mounds were no longer built, around the old mounds the familiar festivals and rituals continued, but hollowly, until their meaning was forgotten and the villagers no longer knew that it was their own great-great-grandfathers who had built the mounds. All of the Native Americans of the Temple Mound regions had only faint and foggy notions of their own history.2 

Silverberg suggested that the mounds stretched so far back into antiquity that they were not built by Native Americans. 

From Oklahoma to northern Georgia, explorations of these mounds have unearthed a variety of items, ranging from simple shells, ceramics, and pipestones to extravagant ceremonial copper axes. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of mounds were built in the Mississippi Delta. Radiocarbon dating has shown that the decline in the Mound Builders population began more than a century before Europeans arrived in the region. The decline and desertion of these people is still a mystery. 

During the time of the conquistadors, there was only one group of southeastern Native Americans who appeared to be able to trace their heritage back far enough to include the Mound Builders. These people were the Natchez, who, along with the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, were the primary travelers of the natural trail—which they shared with migrating bison, deer, and other animals—that later became the route that Lewis and Clark made famous. Their empire stretched from the delta to the swamps of Louisiana. It’s a stretch of land that Meriwether Lewis would become all too familiar with. We know from the writings of French Jesuit Pierre Charlevoix that the Natchez rebelled unsuccessfully against the French in 1729. 

The few survivors became scattered among other southeastern tribes and were looked upon as wise and gifted with mystic power. As did the ancient sages of the other tribes, the Natchez had legendary tales of invaders from a region on the other side of the world. The Natchez described the mounds as the work of earlier people. 

As the early exploration of America continued, there seemed to emerge mounting evidence of a civilization in the Americas that preceded the natives encountered by early explorers. The explanation for oddities such as a race of giants would require a reversal of a long established intellectual and religious dogma. It seemed less of a task to continue to accept the belief that the Native Americans discovered by Christopher Columbus were the original mound builders. In 1881 the Smithsonian began to actively promote this idea, which today has found its way into the federal government’s Department of Education as part of the elementary school curriculum. As a result the Smithsonian has been charged with effectively withholding information that supports the theoretical framework known as cultural diffusionism, which, as we have seen in chapter 1, is the simple and logical belief that throughout history people interacted via worldwide travels and trade. 

While the Smithsonian may have spent the better part of a century manipulating research and selectively sequestering native artifacts to support the theory that the Mississippi Mound Builders were an otherwise unremarkable tribe, growing evidence points to the contrary. 

During the 1800s the contents of many mounds were revealed to include the remains of huge men with estimated heights of seven or eight feet, buried in full copper armor with swords and axes. As settlers moved west, they came across and reported countless mounds. At the time it was not unusual to find stories or articles in local newspapers about discoveries of the remains of perfectly proportioned giants. As land was cleared for settlement and agriculture, some suggested that these mounds and their amazing contents were the products of ancient cultures that predated known native tribes. Tribes that greeted early pioneers told of a long-extinct race of giants. 

Ohio historian Ross Hamilton explains: 

The first hint we had about the possible existence of an actual race of tall, strong, and intellectually sophisticated people, was in researching Old Township and county records. Many of these were quoting from old diaries and letters that were combined, for posterity, in the 1800s from diaries going back to the 1700s. Some of these old county and regional history books contain real gems, because the people were not subjected to a rigid indoctrination about evolution and were astonished about what they found and honestly reported it.3 

How did these bits of knowledge alluding to the existence of prehistoric races in the Americas get excluded from public education? Consider that prior to the establishment of the federal Department of Education, the Smithsonian Institution was looked upon as the guardian of the physical facts that have shaped our culture—the culture of a New World. At the time, the Smithsonian and its political and scientific endeavors were an outgrowth of the federal politics of the early 1800s, most notably struggles to deal with the so-called Indian problem, and struggles to justify the social costs of westward expansion. (The politics of the early 1800s, and the deadly consequences for Meriwether Lewis, are explained more fully in chapters 9 and 10.) 

Government officials at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804 considered the native occupation of the American continent to be the chief impediment to the creation of the New World. And while Thomas Jefferson is well known for being fascinated by and supportive of the so-called Indians, he also recognized that they represented a threat to westward expansion. 

While Lewis and Clark were gathering information about native peoples and exploring potential trade routes west, Jefferson was developing a plan to get the natives out of the way—in what would later become a government policy known as Indian Removal.  

The first component of his plan involved encouraging natives to adopt agricultural practices, which would reduce their territorial hunting areas. He hoped then that government agents would be able to convince natives to sell their surplus land.

The second component was an amplification of the first and involved encouraging natives to adopt a European-style agricultural economy in hopes that they would become dependent on trade with European settlers. That dependence, in turn, could be used as leverage against natives who resisted selling their land. 

The third component of his plan involved establishing government trading posts near native settlements. His hope, in this case, was that natives could be fooled into spending themselves into debt. That debt, in turn, would be forgiven in exchange for tribal lands, which would be appropriated by the federal government. 

Many tribes, including members of the Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee tribes, willfully adopted European culture. They assimilated thoroughly, building schools and churches and creating government structures that resembled those of the United States of America. But Jefferson and agents of the American government met with increasing resistance from other tribes. 

In 1803—the same year that the Louisiana Purchase was announced, and the same year that Lewis was chosen as the leader of the westward expedition—Jefferson sent a letter to the then governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, outlining his plan for removing the remaining resistant natives. 

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.4 

This letter outlines that last part of Jefferson’s grand design, which included a notion that would become known as land exchange; this involved trading tribal land in the eastern portion of the continent for land west of the Mississippi—what was then known as the Louisiana Territory (soon to become the Louisiana Purchase). Later, this practice would become the conceptual foundation for the Indian Removal Act of 1830. 

Jefferson declared his intentions to use the Louisiana Territory as a dumping ground for displaced natives clearly in a letter to John C. Breckinridge during the summer of 1803. 

The best use we can make of the country for some time, will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the Mississippi, in exchange for their present country, and open land offices in the last, & thus make this acquisition the means of filling up the Eastern side, instead of drawing off its population.5 

Although Jefferson also had been a vocal proponent of natives’ nobility, intelligence, and equality for decades, his philosophical perspectives were seemingly trumped by his political ambitions and pervasive  Eurocentric myopia. It was those same political ambitions that encouraged Jefferson to send Lewis west, both as an emissary and as a scout. It also follows that Lewis’s appointment as governor of the Louisiana Territory was, at least in part, granted because Lewis had spent years studying and negotiating with native tribes. He was well suited for overseeing the task of relocating tribes to their new “homes” in Louisiana. As a seasoned naturalist, he also was well suited for overseeing the various tribes’ training in European-style agricultural practices. 

Jefferson’s move to “civilize” the natives out of their land, and some of the scientific theories that he ascribed to, would later evolve into a doctrine known as Progressive Social Evolutionary Theory, taken up by one John Wesley Powell, who would come to exert great influence over United States public policy as head of several government agencies. 

Powell began to exert real influence beginning in 1879, when he was named director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, which he helped create. 

Like Jefferson and other “enlightened” predecessors, Powell held seemingly contradictory beliefs about the native peoples of America. Powell had been an ardent defender of native peoples, lived and worked among them, and worked tirelessly to preserve their culture and lands. It was this pursuit that led Powell to lobby Congress to change the way federal agencies dealt with land acquisition. In the process, he laid the groundwork for the creation of the United States Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. This monumental task consolidated a number of government agencies that were previously under control of the United States Department of the Interior. It also created a phenomenal political power base for Powell and his associates in the scientific community. 

By 1879 work begun by Jefferson and Lewis, including the study of native cultures and efforts to assimilate seemingly beloved natives into Euro-American culture, had become an official government mandate. Powell was now at the helm of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and also strongly  allied with the National Academy of Sciences. He had grown from being a man in the field to being a member of the establishment, and given his new status, he went along with the mandate. 

Like Jefferson, Powell made countless moral concessions in order to be able to continue his work. Those concessions included modifying, or perhaps ultimately coming clean about, his philosophical and scientific prejudices. Put simply, Powell was, at heart, and at the end of the day, a racist; he believed that natives, while fascinating in their own right, were inherently inferior to Europeans. This belief, championed by the emerging science dubbed ethnology, and later anthropology, became a pseudoscientific and philosophical justification for the decimation of native tribes, the plundering of natural resources, and the ever-growing list of horrific consequences of westward expansion begun by Jefferson and Lewis. 

Lee Baker, professor of cultural anthropology and African American studies at Duke University, summarizes: 

Industrializing America . . . needed to explain the calamities created by unbridled westward, overseas, and industrial expansion. Although expansion created wealth and prosperity for some, it contributed to conditions that fostered rampant child labor, infectious disease, and desperate poverty. As well, this period saw a sharp increase in lynchings and the decimation of Native American lives and land. The daily experience of squalid conditions and sheer terror made many Americans realize the contradictions between industrial capitalism and the democratic ideals of equality, freedom, and justice for all. Legislators, university boards, and magazine moguls found it useful to explain this ideological crisis in terms of a natural hierarchy of class and race caused by a struggle for existence wherein the fittest individuals or races advanced while the inferior became eclipsed.

Professional anthropology emerged in the midst of this crisis, and the people who used anthropology to justify racism, in turn, provided the institutional foundations for the field. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, college departments, professional organizations, and specialized journals were established for anthropology. The study of “primitive races of mankind” became comparable to geology and physics. These institutional apparatuses, along with powerful representatives in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), prestigious universities, and the Smithsonian Institution, gave anthropology its academic credentials as a discipline in the United States. The budding discipline gained power and prestige because ethnologists articulated theory and research that resonated with the dominant discourse on race.6 

In an article written for American Anthropologist in 1888, titled “From Barbarism to Civilization,” Powell made his views about natives and the so-called Indian Problem very clear: “In setting forth the evolution of barbarism to civilization, it becomes necessary to confine the exposition . . . to one great stock of people—the Aryan Race.”7 

This view—that native and African American races were inherently inferior to Europeans—became institutionalized thanks to Powell and powerful allies of his, including Powell’s mentor, ethnologist, lawyer, senator, and railroad baron Lewis Henry Morgan; finance lord and museum magnate George Foster Peabody; publisher, AAAS president, and key developer of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History Frederic Ward Putnam; and influential educator Nathaniel Shaler, who worked tirelessly to produce scientific rationale for segregation and mistreatment of African Americans. 

The views created by these so-called vanguards of cultural study persist, and only now have begun to unravel in the face of modern inquiry. In fact, during the past several decades, archaeological and ethnic studies have eroded, and in some cases obliterated, the notion that natives of the American continents were simple folk who lived in perfect harmony with the land around them. Authors such as Jared Diamond and Charles Mann, for example, have collected and presented evidence that natives molded and shaped the land, created technologies and systems of government, institutions, advanced agricultural practices, public sanitation, plumbing and other artifacts previously believed to be the sole province of non-natives. 

In his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Mann notes that 

there is a cohort of scholars that in recent years has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation that continents remained mostly wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to summarize the views . . . would be to say that . . . this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind . . . some researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness.8 

Mann quotes the Smithsonian Institution’s Betty J. Meggers in relating a conversation about the Beni, a remote province in Bolivia that is host to a unique matrix of forest islands and mounds linked by causeways built by what many scholars believe to have been a vast, technologically advanced culture that inhabited the region. 

“I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in Beni,” Meggers once told Mann. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.”9 

From this reasoning stems a view that Mann dubs “Holmberg’s Mistake,” after Allan R. Holmberg, a young doctoral student who studied the best-known of the Beni-region natives, the Siriono, during the early 1940s. 

The Siriono, Holmberg wrote in an account of his studies titled Nomads of the Longbow, were “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world.” They were poor and impoverished, lived without clothes, had no domestic animals, no musical instruments, no art or design, and no discernable religion. They were, from Holmberg’s perspective, living evidence of the failure of aboriginal culture to thrive and a justification of so-called civilized European influence. They were, he wrote, the “quintessence” of “man in the raw state of nature.”10 Holmberg also believed that this was the state the Siriono lived in for thousands of years. That is, until they encountered Spanish explorers and stepped into the river of modern history. 

“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 arguably 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 passed several very bad riffles this morning and at 11 O'clock 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 cleared 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 elevated 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 describe a semi circle around it of which the river is the diameter, 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 description 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 circumference at its base and 65 feet high terminating in a blunt point whose diameter is 30 feet, this point is concave being depressed about five feet in the center, around the base runs a ditch 60 feet in width which is broken or intersected 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 appears to have formed the entrance to the fortified mound—near the summit of this mound grows a white oak tree whose girth is 13½ feet, from the aged appearance of this tree I think it’s age might reasonably [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 immense 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 quarter 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 watchful and are 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 attempt 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 sacrifice to their merciless fury not many years since so much do the Mahas Sioux Ottoes and other neighbouring 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?

next

Lewis and Clark and the Journey West

footnotes

Introduction 

1. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, 76. 

Chapter 1. The Olmec Riddles 

1. Whittaker, Africans in the Americas Our Journey Throughout the World, 15. 

2. O’Halleran, “Another Mystery of Mesoamerica.” 

3. Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, 124–25. 

4. Ibid., 137. 

5. Ibid., 140. 

6. Ibid., 148–49. 

7. Stengel, “The Diffusionists Have Landed,” 35–48. 

8. Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization. 

9. Science Daily. “Researchers Find Evidence of the Earliest Writing in the New World.” 

10. Cooper, Leap of Faith, 211. 

11. Ibid., 214. 

Chapter 2. Florida and the Fountain of Youth 

1. Cabeza de Vaca, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 31–32; Bourne, A Narrative of de Soto’s Expedition. 

2. Lasater, Spain to England; Reuters, “Copperfield ‘Finds Fountain of Youth.’” Notes H 149 

Chapter 3. The Mysteries of the Mississippi Mound Builders 

1. Bourne, Narratives of the Career of Hernando De Soto. 

2. Silverberg, The Mound Builders, 259–64. 

3. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants and Ancient American Warfare,” 6–13. 

4. Gauss, We the People, 297. 

5. To John C. Breckenridge, Monticello, August 12, quoted in DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 183–84. 

6. Baker, From Savage to Negro, 26–54. 

7. Powell, From Barbarism to Civilization, 109. 

8. Mann, 1491, 4. 

9. Ibid. 

10. Ibid., 9. 

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid., 13. 

13. Ibid. 

14. Hamilton, The Mystery of the Serpent Mound. 

15. Lewis and Ordway, The Journals of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Sergeant John Ordway, 40. 

16. Lewis and Clark, The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark, Vol. 2, 505. 

17. Saindon, “Lewis and Clark and the Legend of the ‘Little People,’” 478. 

18. Romain, “Serpent Mound Revisited.”

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