Adair’s commitment to situating the Americas within sacred history and his rejection of Catholicism made him a useful source for evangelical Protestants with a stake in the Hebraic Indian theory. Typical of this kind of engagement with Adair is Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, which was published in two editions—1823 and 1825—by the printing firm Smith & Shute, the proprietor of which was Ethan’s son, Stephen Sanford Smith. Adair is a primary source for Ethan Smith, who cites him throughout his treatise on the lost tribes theory.

Smith was a Congregationalist minister who served in several churches in New England and upstate New York over the course of his career. From 1821 to 1826, during the period in which he wrote and published View of the Hebrews, he was pastor of the Congregational church in Poultney, Vermont. His residence in Poultney overlapped with that of Oliver Cowdery, who traveled to western New York just a few years after the publication of View of the Hebrews and served as a scribe for Joseph Smith Jr. as he produced The Book of Mormon—perhaps the most famous text to present biblical origins for indigenous American peoples. (Joseph Smith and Ethan Smith were not related.) Cowdery was the first baptized member of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he was one of that church’s most important early members. The possibility that he was acquainted with Ethan Smith has generated much controversy in studies of The Book of Mormon. Some argue that Cowdery must have read View of the Hebrews and shared its contents with Joseph Smith, laying the groundwork for the latter’s development of The Book of Mormon’s Hebraic Indian plotlines. Others contend that it is unlikely Cowdery ever interacted with Ethan Smith— indeed, to date no archival evidence has surfaced to link them directly— and highlight the numerous differences in style and content between View of the Hebrews and The Book of Mormon.

This book’s fourth chapter discusses The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the Hebraic Indian theory in great detail, though it does not take a position on whether Joseph Smith was acquainted with Ethan Smith’s version of the theory. The temporal and geographic proximity of these two books, if nothing else, highlights the flurry of interest in Native American genealogy that was operant in the 1810s and 1820s. This chapter is concerned with how Ethan Smith combined his Christian millennialism with Adair’s empirical observations to make a case for American Hebraism.