BOOK OF MORMON CONFERENCE
Was Native American history purposely lost?
- Genelle Pugmire Daily Herald Apr 26, 2014
OREM — Were the Native American tribes, once honored for their agriculture and building prowess by the pilgrims and others, demoted to mere savages by the United States government as a way for them to lose their history and to be better controlled?
Steven E. Smoot believes so, and he shared his story with nearly 800 people attending the Saturday session of the Book of Mormon Evidence Conference at the SCERA Center for the Arts.
The 13th semi-annual conference [Now on our 25th Conference, Information here], is neither sponsored nor supported by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, SCERA’s Xango Theater was filled to capacity with LDS church members seeking more information on a variety of topics all focused on the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi and his descendants, where and how they lived, and how they vanished into thin air.
Smoot’s hypothesis is based on earthen mounds and archaeological artifacts found throughout Ohio, Mississippi and other heartland states between the Canadian border and the Gulf of Mexico. Most notable are the mound cities and burial grounds like those found in the Mississippi Valley.
“This was a more highly advanced civilization than previously thought,” Smoot said.
In a recent documentary Roger Kennedy, retired director of the Smithsonian Institute, said he had never heard of such civilizations. He had never considered the numerous mounds throughout the area to be more than piles of dirt. But that has changed.
After archaeological digs and significant artifacts and documentation had come forward over the years, Kennedy said the Smithsonian had to take another look.
“We now realize that tens of thousands of archaeological consequences are now hidden in our ground,” Kennedy said.
“One city across the river from St. Louis, the Cahokia Mounds, are bigger than the pyramid of Giza,” Smoot said. “There are 500 mounds in just one county dating back from 1,000 B.C. to 400 A.D.”
The fleeting notion that Columbus was the first to step foot on American soil is more sullied by the findings of modern archaeologists, Smoot said.
“The question is, who wasn’t here,” Smoot said. He noted the evidence of Vikings, Greeks, Polynesians, Welsh, Chinese and others.
So where did all this history go? According to Smoot, at one time there were 500 Native American languages and 50 linguistic families.
“Explorers were amazed at what they were finding in the early 1800s. They were finding symbols with old-world connections,” Smoot said. “We found early Jesuits seeking the lost 10 tribes. They thought the American Indians were of Jewish descent. They believed the Indian people worthy of salvation.”
Smoot said there were notes with opinions of the Jesuits stating that Indians in the Pennsylvania area were similar to the Jews of England.
All that changed when three men — John Wesley Powell, Lewis Henry Morgan, and E.B. Squier — first documented the mounds in the mid-1800s. They formed an association for the advancement of science and promulgated the evolution of societies.
HISTORY OF AAAS
The formation of AAAS in 1848 marked the emergence of a national scientific community in the United States. While science was part of the American scene from the nation’s early days, its practitioners remained few in number and scattered geographically and among disciplines. AAAS was the first permanent organization formed to promote the development of science and engineering at the national level and to represent the interests of all its disciplines.
Smoot continues, “The evolution began with savages, then to barbarians and eventually civilized man. They categorized Indians as savages, thus sufficiently taking away their societal influence. Religionists like Joseph Smith and his church were considered barbarians.
Smoot quickly noted that both Powell and Morgan’s fathers were Methodist ministers who preached in Palmyra, N.Y., in 1830 and were instrumental in spreading some of the radical thinking against Smith, founder of the LDS Church.
Smoot believes the Indian history got lost through political debunking and battles over opinions that escalated in the late 1800s. Powell wrote the blueprint for how to handle Indians based on them being deemed savage.
By 1894 the mound investigation and archaeological digs had ceased. With the Indians now considered savages it was easier to convince people that Native Americans needed to be put away on reservations.
“The ancient inhabitants of this country must be lost,” Powell said.
“They pictured them in loin clothes running around with tomahawks in their hand,” Smoot said. “There are those who would seek to close the history book for a better world.”
With renewed interest in the mound cities and the early Native Americans, Smoot believes it’s time for people to look at all the possibilities.
“There is a larger history with implications for our day,” Smoot said.
For more information about the conference visit www.BookofMormonEvidence.org.
Powell Family, Palmyra and the Book of Mormon
Lost American Antiquities by Steven E. Smoot Chapter 34
“In the Arlington Cemetery Eulogy of John Wesley Powell’s life, G. K. Gilbert of Rochester, New York remarked:
The qualities, which enabled him so splendidly to perform his many self-imposed tasks, were an inheritance from his parents, who possessed more than ordinary intelligence. Joseph Powell, his father, had a strong will, deep earnestness, and indomitable courage, while his mother, Mary Dean, with similar traits possessed also remarkable tact and practicality. Both were English born, the mother well educated, and were always leaders in the social and educational life of every community where they dwelt. Especially were they prominent in religious circles, the father being a licensed exhorter in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Both were intensely American in their love and admiration of the civil institutions of the United States and both were strenuously opposed to slavery, which was flourishing in America when they arrived in 1830. For a time they remained in New York City and then re-moved to the Village of Palmyra whence they went to Mount Morris, Livingston County, New York, where, on March 24, 1834, the fourth of their nine children, John Wesley, was born. Because of the slavery question Joseph Powell left the Methodist Episcopal Church on the organization of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and became a regularly ordained preacher in the latter. It was in this atmosphere of social, educational, political, and religious fervor that the future explorer grew up.283
The Powell’s had found their way to one of the most intensely evangelical districts in America. All during the building of the [Erie] canal and well into the 1830’s western New York was on fire with religion, as Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists vied to save souls; observers called this “the burned-over district” because of the frequent revivals that raged like forest fires through the countryside. Rochester was the persistent center of the fire. In 1830 a New England preacher, Charles Grandison Finney, with bulging blue eyes and tense, gripping voice, came to that city and for six months preached nearly every night and three times on Sunday, converting thousands.284
While Rochester could point to Finney and his stupendous achievements, Palmyra made its own contribution to the religious ferment, one that would eventually reverberate to the far western deserts. Palmyra was the birthplace of Mormonism. Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, was an uneducated farm boy living south of the village center. Smith’s tales and teachings would cause reverberations throughout the region, as the doctrines he espoused would be heard far and wide.
The Book of Mormon rolled off the press in Palmyra, New York in 1830. Its publication created no small stir with much controversy in the area. The book tells of ancient cultures that migrated to America hundreds of years before Christ.
However, the Mormon story had begun years earlier near the Palmyra Township of western New York, with stories of heavenly visitations to its youthful founder, Joseph Smith. His audacious claims were met with either delight or disdain, depending on the listener. For many, he was either a deluded dreamer or a charlatan. For others, he was a prophet, raised up by God, who had personally appeared to him in 1820 and later sent angels to guide Smith to an ancient record inscribed on gold plates and buried in a hill. Of this experience, Smith said:
“I was also informed concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country and shown who they were, and from whence they came; a brief sketch of their origin, progress, civilization, laws, governments, of their righteousness and iniquity, and the blessings of God being finally withdrawn from them as a people, was made known unto me; I was also told where were deposited some plates on which were engraven an abridgment of the records of the ancient prophets that had existed on this continent.” 285
This claimed ancient record was found in an area of the country where many other artifacts were being retrieved from mound explorations. Joseph Smith claimed to have translated the record and to have shown the plates to eleven others, who reportedly witnessed and gave testimony that they did indeed, see and handle the plates. Upon the translation of the record according to Smith, it was returned to a heavenly messenger, as instructed. Smith’s translation of this record would go on to be printed and published in Palmyra in 1830 as the Book of Mormon.
Purporting to be a historical record of migrations of ancient near Eastern cultures to the Americas, the book tells of their rise to glory and their tragic fall. The thrust of this religious narrative is an abridgment of records comprising the writings of a number of different religious leaders and includes the record of a visit to these people of the resurrected Christ. The historical account also foretells modern day events and a latter-day rise of the descendants of those ancient populations.
The Book of Mormon, along with the claims of its translator and the missionary-minded church he established—a restoration, he insisted, of Christ’s ancient church—created no small stir in Palmyra and indeed throughout the young nation. As it turns out, two of the preachers vying for converts in the immediate area of Palmyra had sons who would go on to play a significant role in how the knowledge of ancient American cultures would be handed down. The two preachers’ sons were E. G. Squier and John Wesley Powell.
Upon arriving in America, the Powell family, steeped in their Methodist beliefs, would be confronted continually with a myriad of religious views, as many religions in the area were vying for converts. This battle for converts “was another American strangeness to absorb along with Jacksonian politics, Manhattan street life, wild forest scenes, and Yankee twang. They had brought with them the true Christian faith, based on the traditional Bible, and they needed no other, certainly not one from an upstart bumpkin who said he had seen angels.”286
In Powell of the Colorado, William Culp Darrah writes:
The Powell family moved on to Palmyra, New York, as another station on the road to (the western) wilderness. The town was still excited over the new sect, which called themselves Mormons. The first printing of the Book of Mormon of five thousand copies had but recently been finished. A few years earlier, Joseph Smith, a young farmer, had received a vision revealing to him the existence of that record of the fullness of Christ’s Gospel, and on September 22, 1827, … gold tablets bearing cryptic characters were delivered into (Joseph) Smith’s hands… Joseph Powell [John Wesley’s Father] did not find the opportunity he sought in Utica. Tailoring was not satisfying; it was but a means to an end. A licensed exhorter of the Methodist Church was expected to follow his regular trade or profession, but there had been little chance for him to carry on religious work. There were six churches in the town and all who desired to attend services had an opportunity to do so. Joseph Powell wanted to bring religion to those who were beyond his reach.287
Despite the comfortable life they were enjoying in western New York, John Wesley Powell’s father, Joseph became restless “and informed the family that he now had his eye on Ohio. God was summoning to move once more. Joseph longed not merely to build churches but to preach the gospel and save souls. He had come to the New World with a mission to evangelize as well as prosper. Western New York State had plenty of preachers; Ohio did not. So, with many tearful good-byes, the family packed their clothes and portable goods and headed deeper into the nations interior.”288
Powell’s family life from birth, moving ever westward, would shadow the westward migration of the early Mormon pioneers from New York to Ohio then on to Illinois. His interests and business would also drive his steps to follow the trails blazed by these early pioneers across the open plains, over the Rocky Mountains and into the valleys of the Great Salt Lake on numerous occasions.289
The Powell’s moved westward to Ohio…“taking a steamer across Lake Erie, then making a long canal trip south from Cleveland through Akron, Massillon, Coshocton, Newark, Columbus getting off at the former capital of Chillicothe. Inspired by the Erie Canal’s success, developers dug the Ohio Canal over three hundred miles long (going all the way to the Ohio River), with 152 locks and 16 aqueducts. When linked to the Erie Canal, it put much of the state within cheap, easy reach of New York City.”290
“Over the next three decades hundreds more followed them, clustering together in what became southern Jackson County, Ohio, trying to keep their language and culture intact.”291
In Ohio the Powell family was looking to buy a small parcel to build a home when they met Big George Crookham, a large robust man who invited them to setup camp at his farm, as he would help them find a small property near Jackson, Ohio. Big George would become a real influence in Wesley’s life as later he became Big George’s pupil.
“Big George” Crookham was a strict but inspiring school master who had himself read as a lad such works as; David Hume’s History of England and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and other substantial books; but the intimate instruction which had the greatest influence on him was the field trips and walks through the countryside…They dug in the prehistoric mounds of Jackson and Ross Counties…during which he was introduced to the elements of geology, archeology and natural history.292
With the extended construction of the Erie Canal, the corridor to the west was established and the Powell family was there to see this mass migration of tens of thousands of pioneers moving ever westward in pursuit of their dreams. Many would settle in America’s heartland, amidst some of the largest concentration of the ancient mounds and earthworks of the Hopewell and Adena cultures.
One of the Powell’s’ residence was located near the edge of the plateau, and below they could see the tangled riverine forest of Little Salt Creek, which flows west to the Little Scioto, which enters the Ohio River about fifty miles away. An anonymous historian wrote, “Along most of these creeks, and especially along the [Salt], is some of the most beautiful, romantic, and picturesque scenery the eye of man ever beheld.”293 “Wildlife and humans had long come here looking for that very practical necessity after which the stream was called—salt. The valley offered several salt licks where bison and elk, and before them mastodons and giant bears, had congregated, sometimes leaving their bones. In 1836, geologists, while excavating salt deposits in Jackson County, unearthed the skeleton of a hairy mammoth whose tusks measured eleven feet and weighed 180 pounds each.”294 Also found in Jackson County and some of the neighboring counties of Ohio—Scioto, Butler, Montgomery and Ross County—are some of the largest and most impressive concentrations of ancient works and mound structures as surveyed by Squier and Davis in their 1848 report.
Figure 17 of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, near Marietta, Ohio
As one walks along the path leading past the many burial mounds at the Mound City Hopewell Culture Center in Ross County, Ohio, one can only guess about what additional knowledge is still buried in those mounds, decaying away with time. At what point does society stop and ask whether the silence and social engineering surrounding these ancient cultures has really led to a greater good for mankind?
The remaining mound sites which are found in National and State parks are but a vestige of a once large number of historical sites that Squier and Davis estimated would be in the thousands. Mounds, along with earthworks and enclosures, were estimated at over fifteen hundred in the state of Ohio alone. As of 2005, the Ohio Historic Preservation office had identified and compiled over 35,000 prehistoric sites in the state, with an estimate that over 60% of those, are located on private lands and with approximately 90% of those sites being referenced to be pre-Columbian.
As the late Roger G. Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service and former director of the American History Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, said:
“The search for harmony is not a new phenomenon in Ohio. Propitiatory sacrifice was not invented in the Middle East. Perhaps, as we move forward toward an attempt to restore our own harmonious relationship to our mound-building predecessors, we may find, in the Old or New Testament texts, analogies to the physical testaments they have left to us. Analogies do not explain things away. Instead, they may be opening to understanding, declaring that we are all baffled by the enigmas of the universe, and that it is possible that the American Indians, we, and ancient peoples of the Old World, including the Jews, may have sought ways of seeking harmony with mysterious systems we cannot understand and cannot control. In this spirit, let us return to the mounds, and risk some guesses about why and how they were built.295“
Hopewell Metal Artifacts Located on the banks of Scioto River
Metal Ornaments, Highly Valued by the Mound Builders
Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments, Fig. 88
Ancient Works, Ross County Ohio
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283 See: Arlington Cemetery Eulogy / J.W. Powell.Net
284 Johnson, P.E., Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 137.
285 Joseph Smith, Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith, compiled by Alma P. Burton, Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, 1977, 275-6.
286 Worster, 16.
287 William Culp Darrah: Powell of the Colorado, Princeton, University Press, 4
288 Worster, 20.
289 See: Ibid.
290 Ibid., 22.
291 Ibid., 21.
292 Darrah, William Culp: Powell of the Colorado, (Princeton University Press) 12: George L Crookham, History of the Hanging Rock Iron Region; 369-370: History of the Scioto Valley of Ohio, 471: see also Jackson Standard, March 5,1857.
293 See: Worster, 24-History of Lower Scioto Valley, 458
294 Worster, 23-24.
295 Kennedy, Hidden Cities; 242.
