Those who identified Indians with the lost ten tribes attempted to rescue them from the negative consequences of the mound builder myth. Rather than seeing them as subhuman or inherently savage, proponents of the ten tribe theory saw them as potential converts worthy of salvation. They linked Indians with Old Testament prophecy regarding the gathering and restoration of Israel, suggesting that Native Americans might represent the last mission field before Jesus’ return. This was the view of Ethan Smith, a Congregational clergyman who published View of the Hebrews: or, The Tribes ofIsrael in America in Poultney, Vermont, in 1823 and 1825. “If our natives be indeed from the tribes of Israel,” he wrote, “American Christians may well feel, that one great object of their inheritance here, is, that they may have a primary agency in restoring those ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel.’”

In View of the Hebrews, the Reverend Smith united the mound builders and their Indian destroyers into branches of the same race. Conforming to the restriction imposed by Esdras, he discarded the assumption of two migrations in favor of a single exodus from northern Israel, the resulting population subsequently dividing into two warring nations. In this view, Native Americans were not inherently savage but were rather conditioned by environment and tradition.

Joseph Smith was not under the same restrictions as the Reverend Ethan Smith, but he nevertheless retained the notion of a single migration party reaching America and that the mound builders had been destroyed by their own kinsmen. Joseph Smith rejected the ten tribe theory while also deriving inspiration from it.