Moundbuilder Myths and Indian Traditions

When white men first took serious notice of the great earthen mounds that dot the American southeast and the Mississippi Valley, around the mid 1700s, they asked the Indians they knew who had built them. And the strange thing is, most of the Indians had no idea. If they did give answers, they were garbled. Archaeology shows us that the mounds were built by Indians, some of them as recently as AD 1400, but by 1750 that had largely been forgotten. So the white men dreamed up their own stories about the "Mound Builders," calling them Phoenicians or the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. In some versions of the myth, the white colonists had held out for generations against Indian attacks before being overwhelmed in a final onslaught:

All is gone;
All - save the piles of earth that hold their bones,
The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods,
The barriers which they builded from the soil
To keep the foe at bay - till o'er the walls
The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one,
The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped
With corpses. The brown vultures of the wood
Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres,
And sat unscared and silent at their feast.

As William Cullen Bryant put in it "The Prairie."

Bradley Leper, a well-informed amateur historian and archaeologist who writes a column for the Columbus Dispatch, thinks that those stories derive ultimately from Indian oral traditions:

The Shawnee chief Cornstalk is reported to have told Alexander McKee, a British officer who was friendly with the Shawnee, that an ancient race of white people had built the earthworks and that only after many years of bloody conflict had the Indians succeeded in exterminating them.

I find this quite interesting. In my own article on this question I noted that the mound building habit was never that widespread among Indians, so that at any given time most Indians would have belonged to tribes that did not build mounds. They may have been enemies of the mound builders or tributary to them, but either way they did not remember the mound Indians as being their own ancestors. I think it is possible that in the world of the later 1700s, with their way of life under attack by Europeans and their tribal memories confounded by decades of movement and population loss, some Indians conflated their old enmity against the mound builders with their new struggle against white men. Perhaps by populating the mound cities with white men they gave themselves new hope in their contemporary struggles: just as their ancestors had overthrown the Mound Builders, they would eventually prevail against the white men of their own time.