When the first scientific studies of the mounds were made in the eighteen-twenties and thirties, popularizers speciously combined those views with the old Lost-Tribes theories in books which had a wide vogue and went into many editions. The most interesting of these efforts was that of an obscure pastor of Poultney, Vermont, the Reverend Ethan Smith. In 1823 he published his View of the Hebrews; or, the Tribes of Israel in America, in which he summarized the conclusions of those inhabitants of the mound area who thought that a mound in their back yard made them proper archaeologists. He backed them up by using the results of Caleb Atwater in Ohio and of Humboldt in Central America. The resulting theory was that there had been a great battle of annihilation between two Indian peoples on the banks of the Ohio. The heaps of bones found in the mounds were, he thought, the tombs of an entire race rather than a mere cemetery.

The principal importance of Ethan Smith was that he inspired Joseph Smith, later founder of the Mormons, when he was growing up in the mound area of Western New York near Palmyra. As a young man Joseph used to entertain his family and friends with accounts of what the Moundbuilders looked like and what they did. Ethan Smith had said that one day their actual records would be found. Joseph Smith determined to write his own history of the Moundbuilders that would answer the questions of his neighbors. The result was, of course, not a history but a great work of the imagination, The Book of Mormon. This book, coming directly out of popular theory, was the story of two peoples: one kind and gentle, founded by a prophet who had left Jerusalem about 600 A.D.; the other, fierce and warlike, founded by his evil brother. Joseph Smith, proceeding from Ethan Smith’s account of Quetzalcoatl as a “type of Christ,” even held that Christ had visited America between the Resurrection and his final Ascension. In the end, the good people were wiped out in battle by the bad. The mission of the new American republic was now to make Christians of the evil people, whose descendants were the contemporary Indians, and so hasten the millenium.