The "lost race" story: who got credit for the mounds (US, 1833 onward; Bureau of Ethnology report 1894)

SUMMARYThe "lost race" story: who got credit for the mounds (US, 1833 onward; Bureau of Ethnology report 1894) [Connections: Tech of the Americas, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDWikipedia's "Mound Builders" article says Josiah Priest's 1833 American Antiquities traced the mounds to "a lost race that had inhabited America even before the Native Americans," and that Priest found it inconceivable that "a race so lazy and inept could conceive and build such huge, elaborate structures" (the source's paraphrase of Priest's view, citing Harpster & Stalter). William Pidgeon "created fraudulent surveys of mound groups that did not exist" (1858), exposed in 1886. The article names Cyrus Thomas's 1894 Bureau of American Ethnology report as "a major factor contributing to public acceptance of the earthworks as a regular part of North American prehistory."

PATTERNThe same decades that wrote the copper mines off to "an ancient people... of whom history gives no account" also wrote the mounds off to a lost race. Credit for the engineering was moved away from the living nations

LENS (WW9)Two resets, same century: the mines and the mounds

OPENThe fetched article does not tie the lost-race story directly to Indian Removal policy. That link needs deep research in period speeches and newspapers before it is stated as RECORD

SOURCEWikipedia, "Mound Builders". Primary: Josiah Priest, American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (1833); Cyrus Thomas, "Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology" (1894).