Who Invented America's Giants — The 1894 Report That Ended the Story
In eighteen eighty-one, Cyrus Thomas took a federal job with his mind already made up. He believed a vanished race had built the earthen mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and he had said so in print. Twelve years and two thousand excavations later, he published the seven-hundred-page Smithsonian report that ended the idea for good. This is the story of the Mound Builder myth: where the "lost white race" came from, why nineteenth-century America wanted so badly to believe in it, and what that belief was used to justify. The giants were never real. The story of who invented them is real, and it runs through the Smithsonian's first publication, a sitting president's address to Congress, and a century of newspaper hoaxes whose descendants are still circulating today. The mounds were built by the ancestors of Native nations who are here now. This video treats them as the builders they were. SOURCES Cyrus Thomas, "Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology," Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1894, pages 3 to 730. Free via the Smithsonian Research Online repository. E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis, "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Volume 1, 1848. Cyrus Thomas, preliminary conclusions, Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1887. Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1830. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990. UNESCO World Heritage inscription, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, 2023. Cahokia, Poverty Point, the Newark Earthworks, and Serpent Mound are ancestral sites, and some remain sacred to descendant nations. If you visit, stay on marked paths and follow site guidance. #MoundBuilders #CyrusThomas #ForgottenHistory #NativeAmericanHistory #Archaeology
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