PART THREE
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WHEN THE EARLIEST EUROPEAN EXPLORERS came down the Mississippi in the seventeenth century, they had been startled to find, everywhere they went, evidence that somebody else had been there before them. The evidence was cryptic but irrefutable: it took the form of gigantic earthen mounds, some of them more than a hundred feet tall, piled up in the open land along the riverbanks. Some mounds stood in clusters like mushrooms; others were posed in solitary isolation against the prairie sky; many had been worn down by the weather and were half covered by the wilderness, barely distinguishable from natural forms. The farther the explorers went, the more of the mounds they found. There were hundreds of them and then thousands and then tens of thousands, all along the Mississippi valley to the delta and up the Ohio to the Alleghenies.
But what were they? Monuments? Observation posts? Funeral mounds? Nobody knew. The only thing that seemed obvious to the explorers was that they couldn’t possibly have been the work of the Native Americans. The Indian nations of the river valley had no contemporary large-scale works like these, no lasting constructions of any kind; they lived in small transitory villages and in nomadic camps. Then, too, the mounds were clearly the product of a unified culture, and the Native Americans were fractured into hundreds of warring splinter societies with no common language. (By one count there were two hundred mutually incomprehensible languages spoken in North America when the Europeans arrived.) And lastly, none of the Native American societies laid claim to the mounds; in fact, they professed to be just as baffled by them as the whites were.
But the Cherokee did tell one story. They said that when they had first arrived in the river valley, it had been inhabited by strange beings with milky white skin and eyes like moons who could do many cunning things in the dark but couldn’t see in the daylight. They were long gone, the Cherokee couldn’t say where—maybe they were the ones who had made the mounds.
Inevitably they came to be called the Mound Builders. In the nineteenth century, people along the frontier began excavating the mounds systematically to see whether the builders had left any traces of themselves behind. What was found was strange and tantalizing. The Mound Builder culture had plainly been enormous: it had thoroughly explored the Mississippi River system out to its remotest tributaries and beyond. A single mound along the banks of the Ohio proved to contain silver pieces from Lake Superior, alligator teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, chalcedony from North Dakota, and volcanic glass from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The Mound Builder craftsmen had been remarkable and subtle artists: the mounds contained exquisitely carved statues and pieces of jewelry. The Mound Builders had had a peculiar religion of their own: there were ritual masks in which human faces were fused with those of hawks and wolves, as though illustrating some form of spirit possession. And, most sinister of all, there were signs that the Mound Builders had been practitioners of human sacrifice: some mounds held rows of human skeletons, each with a puncture wound at the base of the skull.
But in none of the mounds was there any writing: not a symbol or a hieroglyph; nothing to indicate who the builders of the mounds were, what they’d called themselves, where they’d come from, or where they’d gone.
There were countless theories. The Mound Builders had come to America from across the Pacific—from China or from India: they were Siberians, or else Tatars, or possibly Mongols. Or they had come across the Atlantic: Vikings from Greenland or Irish who had migrated during the Dark Ages. Or else they might have been a branch of the Toltecs or Mayans or Aztecs who had come up from South America. Maybe—and this theory was especially popular—they were the lost tribes of Israel. Or—an even more popular theory—they were refugees from the sinking of Atlantis.
Whoever they were, they had to have resembled the Europeans more than they did the Native Americans. A story that some of the skeletons were holding cross-shaped objects suggested that they might even have been Christian—or if not Christian exactly, then proto-Christian, or quasi-Christian. Maybe, as one writer put it, “some stray fragments of the holy structure [had been] obscurely delivered over to them by paternal or patriarchal hands.”
As for what had happened to them, there were still more theories about that. Were they destroyed by a plague, or an earthquake, or a volcano? Or was it some deep cultural malaise, some collective loss of will, like the spiritual decadence that was believed to have brought down the Roman Empire?
A novel published in 1839 offered a particularly garish solution to the mystery. It was called Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders. The author, Cornelius Mathews, was a well-known poet and editor. He took his inspiration from the gigantic bones of prehistoric creatures that were often found in the river valley. He imagined that one of these monsters had been the leveler of the Mound Builder civilization. Behemoth describes how a woolly mammoth of unimaginable size, a kind of proto-Godzilla, appears out of the mountains of the Far North and comes rampaging down through the river valley, trampling everything before it into the ground. The Behemoth is so large that “the whole region trembled as when a vast body of waters bursts its way and rolls over the earth, ocean-like, wave shouting to wave, and all crowding onward with thunderous tumult.” Nothing can stand up to him: “In vain was the solid breast-work; the piled wall was in vain; in vain the armed and watchful sentry.” Soon whole cities are falling before him: “Like some stupendous engine of war, he bore down on them, rendering human strength a mockery and human defences worse than useless.… He swept through the towns and villages, the tilled fields and pleasure gardens of the Mound-builders—desolating and desolate—none daring to stand before his feet thus dreadfully advanced.”
But what proves to be far worse than the physical destructiveness of the Behemoth is the psychological damage he leaves in his wake. His nightly stampedes break the will of the Mound Builders; they can see no point to going on when their proudest achievements are being so casually smashed down all around them:
The voice of joy died away into a timid and feeble smiling; proud and stately ambition fell humbled to the earth, and love and beauty trembled and fled before the gloomy shadow of the general adversary. Men shunned each other as if from a consciousness of their abasement, and skulked away from the face of day, unwilling that the heavens should look in upon their desolation and shame.
In the later sections of the novel, a lone hero rises up and inspires the Mound Builders to one last supreme effort: they capture and kill the Behemoth. But the damage to their civilization is irreversible, and they go down into oblivion, brought to their ultimate ruin by their own failure of spirit. Their great mounds become their mass graves, and the rest of the works of their civilization disappear.
Behemoth the novel is itself forgotten, pretty much on its merits. (Edgar Allan Poe once reviewed a book of Mathews’s poetry and pronounced it, not unfairly, “gibberish.”) The only influence it may have had on American literature is indirect and speculative: Mathews happened to know Herman Melville, and it’s conceivable that Behemoth provided an initial stirring of inspiration for Melville’s world-shaking Leviathan. But as ephemeral a novel as it was, its premise was not that far removed from what the most respected scholars of the time were actually saying. They, too, assumed that the Mound Builders must have been done in by some dark and mysterious power. Not a woolly mammoth, but one they regarded as quite as sinister: the Native Americans.
The way it was imagined, the Mound Builder civilization at its height had been as rich and profound a culture as ancient Greece. The Mound Builders had cultivated the land, built monumental cities, created a sophisticated society that was spread out all down the river valley and throughout the forests of the eastern seaboard—but they had proved helpless before the danger of the primitive and cunning Indians. There had been, centuries before the Europeans arrived, a vast war across America, in which the Mound Builder civilization had at last been overrun and all its great works, except the mounds, wiped off the face of the earth.
The story can be found in a poem by William Cullen Bryant called “The Prairies,” first published in 1832. This is the section about the mounds:
A race, that long has passed away,
Built them;—a disciplined and populous race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his manèd shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came—
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.
The solitude of centuries untold
Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone;
All—save the piles of earth that hide their bones.
The great masterpiece about the fate of the Mound Builders, though, wasn’t a poem but a work of art: Thomas Cole’s series of five paintings known collectively as The Course of Empire. They trace the rise and fall of an unknown civilization deep in the American wilderness. The civilization is never named; there are no markings or inscriptions or hieroglyphs on their buildings; the citizens are seen only at a great distance, so that it’s impossible even to say what race they are. The only clue to their identity is in their style of architecture: a wild, classical jumble that simultaneously recalls Rome, Carthage, the Aztecs, and Atlantis—just the same chaos of origins attributed to the Mound Builders.
The first painting, titled The Savage State, shows the American landscape in its primeval desolation. There is a wigwam village in a hollow sheltered from an autumnal storm, figures are paddling a canoe up a creek, and in the foreground a hunter with a bow and arrow pursues a deer. The second painting, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, shows the same scene now in the springtime of civilization: the land is tamed and cultivated; there are shipbuilders at work along the shore; the village has been supplanted by a fuming stone temple resembling Stonehenge; in the place of the hunter is an old Socrates-ish philosopher scratching some sort of calculation in the dirt with a stick. The third painting is called The Consummation of Empire, and the scene is now a summery high noon. The pastoral world has been wholly covered over by a kind of classical version of urban sprawl: instead of the serene meadows and forests there is a fantastic clutter of colonnaded marble buildings and towering monuments; the water of the harbor is swarming with sailboats, keelboats, triremes, and gondolas; the bridges and promenades are thronged by citizens in a riotous festival. In the foreground a general is seen making a victory procession across one of the great arched bridges, surrounded by solemn priests dressed in white. The fourth painting is the inevitable crisis: The Destruction of Empire. The harbor city of the third painting is shown in the midst of a vast disaster. The great palazzi are in flames, the bridges are collapsing, the sky is congealing into a furious storm. The throngs have become stampeding mobs; soldiers are everywhere, looting, torching the buildings, grabbing at fleeing women. It’s an invasion, an uprising, a natural disaster—maybe all of the above. The last painting is the dark and tranquil epilogue: Desolation. The imperial city is gone; the wilderness is reclaiming the land. In the background, over the placid ocean, the moon is rising into a clearing sky. A fading twilight plays over the deserted ruins that line the estuary; the broken arches of the bridges and temples are being overgrown by weeds and ivy. A lone pillar on the shore is home to seabirds. The people have all vanished, and the land will soon erase their last traces.
These paintings caused a tremendous stir when they were first exhibited in 1836. “A great epic poem,” James Fenimore Cooper called them. “The highest work of genius this country has ever produced.” While Cole never explained exactly how his paintings should be interpreted, few of the original spectators seem to have had any trouble decoding them. They were a rebuke to the idea that America had no history, that the land was a clean slate, that the new civilization the pioneers were building was its first. The truth was, the same grand historical cycles were playing out here just as they had in Europe or Asia. A great civilization had once risen up in the American wilderness, had reached the crest of the wave, and had toppled over into destruction and disappeared. And even as the spectators gawked at Cole’s paintings, far away, in the depths of the American interior, the whole story was happening again.