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The Cross and the Mound: An Excerpt from My New Book in Progress

3/24/2018

42 Comments

 
Earlier this week, I briefly discussed a book I have been working on for the past few years, which will tell the story of the mound builder myth and how it affected the growth and development of the United States. As I described in my earlier blog post, so far no agent or publisher has expressed interested in the book. In lieu of a blog post today, I would like to share the first few pages of the book so you can get a sense of my approach to the topic. The book opens with a brief preface providing a factual overview of the history of mound building in North America, after which our story begins. The pages below are, of course, a draft, and they will likely undergo further revision, fact-checking, and correction should the book ever proceed to publication.

Prologue
The Cross and the Mound

On Monday March 29, 1540, the day after Easter, the six hundred Spanish and Portuguese volunteers of Hernando de Soto’s exploratory army were cold and wet and miserable. Several of their number had already died from illness or clashes with Native Americans, and more than a few had become convinced that death awaited them, too. [1] They had been tramping across the damp expanses of what is today the southeastern United States for nearly eleven months, tracing a jagged northward course from Espíritu Santo, now known as Shaw’s Point, in southern Florida, dragging in tow more than two hundred horses, upwards of two hundred pigs (though some say as few at ten or twelve), and sundry other livestock. They were largely young men, most barely in their twenties, many only just established in their chosen professions—craftsmen and priests, farmers and merchants. All had come with the promise of gold, glory, and God. A few had brought their families with them, imagining wealthy fresh lives in the New World. But things were not going particularly well.

Already some of the lean, long-legged Alentejano, or Black Iberian, pigs had gotten loose, a few here and there as the ragtag caravan had marched slowly across woods and plains and streams. Lost in the unending expanses of primeval forests, the pigs had vanished into the darkness but would not be forgotten. Someday these pigs would grow wild and mean and come back out of the forest as feral razorback hogs. In the woods, they would give to the deer and turkeys a host of European diseases to which the indigenous peoples of North America had no immunity. When the Native Americans hunted and ate the deer and turkeys, their chief game, they grew sick and many died. None of De Soto’s men would live to see razorbacks, but the pigs became a kind of cameo of the expedition as a whole, a symbol of European arrogance grown into something angry and dangerous.

Worse, the expedition had failed in its first objective. They had recovered none of the vast reserves of gold that De Soto, whom they all called “The Governor,” for he was by royal appointment the Spanish ruler of Cuba, had promised they would find hidden among the temples and tombs of the Native Americans, treasures every bit as fabulous as the immense wealth of Peru that had made De Soto one of Spain’s wealthiest men. A decade ago, the Governor had aided the bloodthirsty and illiterate Francisco Pizarro in conquering and enslaving the vast empire of the Inca far to the south. Pizarro had held the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, ransom for a room full of gold, and when he received it, he killed Atahualpa anyway. De Soto, untroubled by this, gladly received his share of the ransom. The nearly limitless gold and silver of the Inca had made Spain’s monarch, King Carlos I, better known by his other title, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the wealthiest man in all the world. Surely if Charles V and Hernando De Soto promised a life of wealth in a new, Catholic colony, the gold must be there. So they had traveled from Spain to Cuba to stage a massive expedition to the uncharted mainland in the north. For most, this would be their first trip outside their native villages in Iberia. The search across Florida turned up little gold in its first months. In the winter of 1539-1540 De Soto heard rumors that the gold he sought could be found where the sun rose, and so they marched north and east.

It was now spring, and there was still no gold. In more than a thousand miles of walking from one miserable Native village to the next, the hundreds of Spaniards and Portuguese had found little more than wood and maize—endless fields of yellow maize, the closest thing to fields of gold any would see on this trek. An idol of a rooster or chicken atop a temple they had visited the previous June had gilded eyes, but this was a far cry from the temples whose walls dripped with gold that De Soto had seen in Cuzco. The only similarity between the golden Inca land and this wretched wooden village with its pagan rooster idol, if one could call it a similarity, was the large earthen mound, which a later chronicler would describe as “a very high mount made by hand for defense,” [2] on which the chief’s house stood. If De Soto saw a similarity between the earthen mounds that his army came across with disturbing regularity in Native villages and the great stone platform temples he had witnessed in Peru, the chroniclers did not record it. So far as the Catholic priests in the Governor’s retinue were concerned, the whole sorry mess was the work of the Devil. One can only imagine what they made of the temple topped with a statue of a chicken. The only wealth worth mentioning in that village was some burned pearls they found while ransacking and razing the town, a cache like the one they would later find in a South Carolina village, in the tombs of dead chiefs that they unearthed in their greed.

This day, however, De Soto’s group stood on the banks of a small stream, soaked through to the skin in the midst of a driving rain. The stream was rising rapidly in the downpour, and De Soto’s personal secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, dryly noted in his journal that the ensuing flood conditions threatened the entire company of men and animals, prompting them to hasten across the river into the territory called Ichisi, a Native chiefdom on the Ocmulgee River in what is today Georgia. Four days earlier, dignitaries from the Ichisi had met with De Soto and asked three questions: “Who are you, what do you want, where are you going?” [3] De Soto told them that he was the representative of the King of Spain and had come to convert them to Christianity, and they needed to submit to the Supreme Pontiff at Rome and the Emperor-King in Madrid at once. Ranjel did not record the Ichisi response. Now, on the other side of the river, the Ichisi greeted the Spanish with great hospitality, as was Native custom, presenting them with corn cakes and young onions. Ranjel found the food especially welcome since the large group had been perpetually in want of food and under orders from De Soto to ration provisions carefully. Ranjel recorded in his journal that the onions, whether eaten boiled, roasted, or raw, “were a great refreshment, for they are very good.” [4]

The next day, they rested in a small Ichisi village, eating the villagers’ food. The hundreds of young European men must have consumed far more than the small village could reasonably have afforded to spare. The villagers, too, must have shuddered to see the vast caravan of white men dragging with them many Native slaves captured en route. On Wednesday, the Governor and his men crossed the “Great River,” probably the Ocmulgee, in a fleet of canoes appropriated from the local people, [5] and they arrived at a village overseen by a one-eyed ruler, who welcomed them with hospitality, offering food and the service of fifteen porters to the visiting army. De Soto’s army could not have known that as they crossed the river, they and their animals also brought with them anthrax, tuberculosis, trichinosis, influenza, and sundry other illnesses to which they had a degree of immunity but to which the Native Americans did not.

Through the services of the interpreter traveling with De Soto, a guide named Yupaha, and a villager De Soto had enslaved, the chief told the Governor that the Spaniard’s horses caused much astonishment, being unknown in that country, “things so altogether new as to strike awe and terror to our hearts.” The chief pledged his resources to De Soto, begging that “with my person, my country, and my vassals, you will do as with your own things.” [6] At least that was the story the Portuguese chronicler of the expedition gave out. The chief also asked the identity of his distinguished guest, and the Portuguese chronicler says that De Soto made it known that he was the son of the Sun God. There is no record of whether the Ichisi believed him, but when De Soto tried the same trick again after crossing the Mississippi, the Natchez told him they would believe him only when he caused the great river to run dry.

This submission of the Ichisi village was apparently a surprise to De Soto, for Ranjel reports that this one-eyed chief was the first who greeted them peacefully. The Governor, Ranjel said, “did not wish to burden him overmuch” as a reward. [7] This translated into the army refraining from razing the village and cutting down all its maize. The King’s agent on the expedition, Luys Hernandez de Biedma, gives a slightly different account, more plausibly stating that the town submitted in order to bargain for the release of their friends and relatives, whom De Soto had captured and enslaved from the neighboring town. [8] Sometime that night, the first bacteria would have moved from their European hosts to some of the Ichisi.

On the morning of Thursday, April 1, the Governor and his men surveyed the relatively large village, which Ranjel said was the regional capital, taking note of the two large earthen mounds that formed its most important feature. Like many villages in the region, the people were in the habit of building large mounds, as their ancestors had for centuries, and as other peoples of North America had been doing for thousands of years. These particular mounds were not impressive enough for the Spanish secretary Ranjel to make much note of. He recorded only one mound at the site, and in the later memory of the Portuguese chronicler, even this mound vanished altogether, becoming little more than the town square.

Today, most historians believe this place was the Lamar site at the Ocmulgee National Monument, home to two large earthen mounds on either side of a broad open court. The village was surrounded by a wooden palisade 3,500 feet in length. One of its two mounds was rectangular, the other round, with a spiral ramp leading upward to its summit. Both survive today. The whole site, however, was nestled on a ridge surrounded by swamp not far from an even larger collection of mounds—the older, more mysterious remnants of an ancient population today called Mississippian that, so far as the Ichisi knew, were lost to the sands of time. They had all died out centuries before, around 1050, and only the Ichisi’s two small mounds, built around 1350, preserved the memory of their ancient culture. Nobody went to the old mounds anymore, and they were overgrown with shrubs and trees. The Governor and his men may not have even known the old mounds in the woods were anything but hills.

That Thursday the Governor had a large wooden cross nailed together and brought up to the top of one of the Ichisi village’s mounds, and the expedition’s priests preached to the Ichisi the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But the expedition was in a hurry to get moving, so De Soto ordered the priests to cut the Bible lesson short. According to the Portuguese chronicler, “as time did not allow more to be done, the Indians were instructed that it [the cross] was put there to commemorate the suffering of Christ, who was God and man; that he had created the skies and the earth, and had suffered for the salvation of all, and therefore, that they should revere that sign.” [9] Ranjel records that “they received it and worshipped it devoutly to all appearances.” [10] It was not as though they had a choice.

De Soto and his six hundred companions moved on, leaving behind the wooden cross atop the Ichisi’s mound and a host of diseases that entered the villagers just as invisibly, but more potently, than the Holy Ghost. Many among the Ichisi must have grown sick, though we can never know if they blamed the cross up on the mound for the illnesses that caused many of the tribe to waste away and die. Within a generation, the Ichisi chiefdom had crumbled; its population collapsed. With no people to grow food, agriculture fell in to abeyance, and without food there was no labor to maintain the village mounds. The great mound-building project launched more than two millennia earlier ground to halt. The story repeated in villages across what is now the southern United States. A regional population that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands dwindled to just tens of thousands within a century. Mounds were still being built here and there into the 1600s, but by 1700, the mound builders were no more.

Leaving the cross up on the village mound ended the official interest of Hernando de Soto, illustrious Governor of the Island Cuba and Adelentado of Florida, in the mounds of the territory of Florida. The Crown of Spain would not trouble itself with the mounds again. De Soto would die in 1542. His followers weighted down his body and sunk it into the Mississippi to hide it from the Native Americans to preserve the illusion that he was the immortal sun god. When the 311 survivors of the expedition entered Mexico and some returned to Europe to record their adventures, all they had to say about the mounds of North America was that they were built of earth and used as platforms for temples and chiefs’ houses.

The Portuguese chronicler traveling with De Soto had made plain that such mounds were built “by hand” by the Native peoples, and fifty years later the writer Garcilasco de la Vega, who wrote an account of de Soto’s expedition, even witnessed one such mound being built in Florida by packing earth into a large pile until the mound was tall enough and wide enough to hold houses or temples. Several French explorers in the 1600s saw the same thing. But in time this would be forgotten.

The devastation caused by the diseases De Soto and his fellow conquistadors had introduced into North America had by the eighteenth century left the mounds desolate and abandoned. Radically smaller Native populations moved about the country in response to European colonization. Tribes combined; cultures adapted or vanished. Eventually, even the Natives themselves forgot who had built the mounds or why. When American explorers asked after the origin of mounds near St. Louis in the nineteenth century, the Native peoples told them that they had no legends or traditions of the mounds; they knew nothing of them and considered them mysterious and possibly supernatural. [11] In what is now South Dakota, the Maha people would tell Lewis and Clark that Spirit Mound was the secret home of a race of miniature leprechaun-like demons. [12] The Choctaw, the first tribe forced from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma under the 1830 Indian Removal Act, were heavily influenced by Christianity and remembered the mounds of their ancestors only as the Biblical Tower of Babel. [13]

By that point most educated Euro-Americans believed the mounds were the remains of a lost white civilization whose lands America had a duty to reclaim from the Red man. Exactly how that happened is an epic all its own.

​
Notes
[1] De Soto’s expedition left from Havana with 620 men, but after a year at least 20 had died.

[2] The Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando de Soto, ed. Theodore H. Lewis, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 147. The identity of the chronicler, known only as “the Gentleman of Elvas” has never been conclusively established, but he was certainly among De Soto’s men and witnessed accounts firsthand.

[3] Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, A Narrative of De Soto’s Expedition Based on the Diary of Rodrigo Ranjel, His Private Secretary, trans. Buckingham Smith, in Narratives of the Career of Hernando De Soto, ed. Edward Gaylord Bourne, vol. II (London: 1905), 87.

[4] Oviedo, Narrative, 87-88.

[5] The Gentleman of Elvas omits the river and instead says they crossed a small stream by a bridge they built.

[6] Narrative of the Expedition, 167.

[7] Oviedo, Narrative, 89.

[8] Luys Hernandez de Biedma, Relation of the Conquest of Florida, trans. Buckingham Smith, in Narratives of the Career of Hernando De Soto, ed. Edward Gaylord Bourne, vol. II (London: 1905), 10.

[9] Narrative of the Expedition, 167.

[10] Oviedo, Narrative, 89.

[11] J. Thomas Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts & Co., 1883), 101.

[12] Official narrative of Lewis and Clark Expedition for August 25, 1804, at Spirit Mound, South Dakota.

[13] Allan A. Macfarlan, North American Indian Legends (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2001), 21.
42 Comments
B L
3/24/2018 10:28:17 am

Interesting. I'd read more for sure. Thanks for sharing.

Reply
orang
3/24/2018 11:36:11 am

Great introduction. It was informative, flowed effortlessly, and kept my interest. Can't understand why you can't find a publisher or agent for this work. Having been to Cahokia Mounds in IL and Effigy Mounds in IA, I think there must be thousands of potential readers and libraries that would buy your book, especially in the eastern half of the country where all the mounds are.

Reply
Clete
3/24/2018 12:22:42 pm

Very well written. It flows well and covers the material. I, too, am surprised that no agent or publisher has agreed to publish this. I would change only one word. When you write about Pizarro killing the Inca emperor when he received the ransom. I would change the word when to the word after.

Reply
Americanegro
3/25/2018 08:11:36 pm

Let's ALL nitpick, shall we?

I find it interesting that according to the Indians the Mound Builders had managed to die out all on their own with no need for intervention from disease-riddled Hispanics invading their land.

"They're murderers, they're rapists..."

Reply
Klukowski
3/24/2018 12:27:51 pm

Was interesting to read and well done. I think your woes with the publishing industry are a sign of the times. If per chance you were born about forty years earlier you would be published. The world just isn't what it used to be in those terms. I think musicians and visual artists are experiencing the same thing during this era.

Reply
Gunn
3/24/2018 01:04:42 pm

I very much enjoyed reading this. I think you did a good job of melding together history as a time-line with a comfortable narrative approach as an interesting storyline, too.

Cahokia comes to my mind, and I'm sure you'll have a lot to say about these mounds. I'm interested in a northern riverway system that reaches down to the merging place of the Mississippi River with the Missouri River, and I'm not referring to the Mississippi River coming down from Minnesota.

Some of us "fringe people" tend to believe that there was a "Hudson Bay river-route" coming down to the South Dakota and Minnesota border area, culminating at Lake Traverse. But, another river begins near this area...the Big Sioux River, and it continues southward until it empties into the Missouri River.

I discoverd last year that there are what are referred to by we in the "fringe" as "Norse evidences" at both ends of this Big Sioux River. Those at the beginning of the river are concentrated along the Whetstone River in South Dakota, and those at the end of the river are concentrated in the northern Iowa area, along the Little Sioux River.

This means that any conjectured Norsemen leaving Greenland, for instance, in medieval times, likely traveled straight downward through Canada and very far into America. If we were to entertain ourselves by taking a humerous approach here, we might see a scenerio where Norsemen would be escorted farther south even, all the way to Cahokia--perhaps a "take us to your Leader" kind of approach.

And, this could fit well into the waning years of Cahokia's existence. I wonder if disease from far-traveling Norsemen may have contributed to Cahokia's demise? We could look at the mid-1200's perhaps, or a bit later--but a time earlier than the self-dated Kensington Runestone, for instance (1362).

As an aside, I began an interest in Native American history as a lad studying arrowheads, and it was apparent right away that the Hopewell culture seemed to be far advanced in the arrowheads they made, as objects of art. It would be a visual delight in any future book you may publish to include a study of some "mound-builder" arrowheads--but I would stay away from bashing whites too vigorously, as the book could end up being a turn-off to a very large segment of the book's potential readership. I think you can pull this off without being overly offensive.

One thing did stand out in a negative way in the book's opening, and I offer this advice in a constructive way, to avoid turning off--again--a large segment of your much-wanted readership ($). "De Soto and his six hundred companions moved on, leaving behind the wooden cross atop the Ichisi’s mound and a host of diseases that entered the villagers just as invisibly, but more potently, than the Holy Ghost."

Not to belabored the point, but millions upon millions of people believe to their deaths that there is no force more potent than the Holy Ghost: The Holy Ghost is God's Power. (Check out the Book of Acts.)

All said in good-will. I hope you succeed. I believe you will have a better chance at breaking into writing success ($) if you don't alienate white people, specifically, and Christians of all color. Peace.

Reply
A Buddhist
3/24/2018 04:34:33 pm

Yet the Holy Ghost was not killing these people, and YHVH the Holy Ghost's alleged master can be stopped by iron chariots (Judges 1:19). So as far as these people were concerned, diseases were more powerful than the Holy Ghost.

Reply
Americanegro
3/24/2018 07:17:43 pm

"Not to belabored the point, but millions upon millions of people believe to their deaths that there is no force more potent than the Holy Ghost"

Millions upon millions of people believe in the occultation of the 12th Imam. So at least the 12th Imam has an excuse because he's occulted (went down a well don't you know) but where was the Holy Ghost when I needed TP for my bunghole?

Your Easter Bunny religion is no better and no more deserving of special handling than someone else's Tooth Fairy religion.

Your objection boils down to "Well, the Holy Ghost could have killed them if he wanted to." Super comforting, bro.

Reply
Pops
3/25/2018 05:41:57 pm

“ stay away from bashing Whites to vigorously...” So... why? To get a book published? To not upset white people? Really? You gotta love your pro-Christian spin on this too. whitewashing history to make the European conquest and destruction of the Americas more “likeable” to a “likely” audience is just silly. It’s almost like you think white people are the only ones who enjoy reading about history. Imagine this scenario. Let’s say a book about the Arab conquest of Iran only throws heap of praise to the conquerors and downplays the immediate aftermath suffered by the locals (Zoroastrians, Mandaeans, Syriac Christians, etc.) and the book pretends like Iran became Islamic overnight despite it taking 200 years to. You wouldn’t read that book because it wouldn’t be accurate. So you wouldn’t read the book you are making suggestions for either.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
3/24/2018 01:41:54 pm

Very nice.

Reply
Machala
3/24/2018 01:43:37 pm

I enjoyed what you've written so far and look forward to reading more - hopefully in a published book form.

I've always been interested in the Mound Builders and the mounds themselves. I never lived in any part of the U.S. that had them, so I know little about them except what I've read.
I'm much more familiar with the Anasazi in the Southwest and the pre-Incan cultures of the Chorrera and Moche here in Ecuador and Peru.

You're a good writer. Don't be discouraged. I know you'll eventually get your book published, DLTBGYD ! ( Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down )

Reply
Bill
3/24/2018 02:26:59 pm


Well written and interesting. I happen to have an interest in pre-Columbian history right now, so this resonated with me. I appreciate that you included a reference section. My question would be why a theory of white men making the mounds arose back in those times when large pyramids were being discovered in Mesoamerica and South America by the Spaniards around that same time. Wouldn't they just put two and two together and figure that the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere had built it all?

Reply
David Bradbury
3/24/2018 04:42:43 pm

Maybe Jason should set up a subscription list for the book; if you want Jason's explanation, put yourself on the list and when enough people subscribe, they'll each get a signed and numbered copy of the completed work.

Reply
Americanegro
3/24/2018 07:21:26 pm

Oh, Triple D....

peter kirchmeir
3/24/2018 02:32:13 pm

Well done; can't ai for the book.
It will be printed for sure.

Reply
A Buddhist
3/24/2018 04:35:42 pm

Jason: Is it really necessary to describe the villages as miserable? This plays into stereotypes of Native Americans as savages.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/24/2018 04:49:49 pm

I wasn't calling the villages miserable. I was narrating the Spanish perspective. They thought they were miserable.

Reply
David Bradbury
3/24/2018 04:54:22 pm

You beat me to it! I was about to post this example from Biedma's narrative:
"caminamos ocho dias por tierra pobre i misera de comida fasta que llegamos a una tierra que llaman de Xuala, i aqui allamos poca Poblazon por ser la tierra aspera"

A Buddhist
3/24/2018 06:31:04 pm

Fair enough, but maybe you could emphasize this in another draft. It would be unfortunate for your text to be debunking some stereotypes while appearing to support others.

For example:
In more than a thousand miles of walking from one miserable Native village to the next...
could be
In more than a thousand miles of walking from one Native village to the next - all of which to the Spanish and Portuguese were miserable - ...

Americanegro
3/24/2018 07:26:42 pm

It's important to remember that Native Invaders I mean Americans spent most of their time levitating huge stones to build their epic structures and getting wiped out by mismanaging their environment.

They totally did not cut out anyone's heart or throw anyone into a pit. Those are just ugly rumors. And because they didn't have scrapbooks so couldn't do scrapbooking, they played lacrosse.

Reply
Eric
3/24/2018 07:27:12 pm

If this were an excerpt of an existing book I would be trying to buy it.

I think you've demonstrated both an expert's command of the history and a writer's deft hand with the narrative. I hope you find a way to get this into press - whether that's through a traditional publisher (which may be a dying route) or otherwise.

Reply
Titus pullo
3/24/2018 08:24:07 pm

Great writing. Taking history and turning it into an attention catching narrative. When does chapter 2 come out!

Reply
Joe Scales
3/24/2018 09:46:27 pm

The first sentence didn't really set the right tone; and I would have gone cold, wet and miserable, without the added conjunction. But the tone set was rather plodding from there, and didn't hold my interest.

Just keepin' it real.

Reply
David Bradbury
3/25/2018 04:39:03 am

Tricky. Plodding is the essence of the story ...

Reply
Enid McConnell
3/25/2018 08:22:05 am

Right. Where's the hook? You have to have something to hook the readers emotionally, fire their imagination. It can't all just be a logical argument. Why not begin with why the whites perceived the mounds as so majestic and mysterious that they could not have been conceived or constructed by Native Americans? What about Cahokia or the Great Serpent Mound? So far, the mounds you describe are unremarkable, could have been constructed by anyone, and do not excite the readers interest...

Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/25/2018 09:07:46 am

The book has a preface describing the mounds and their real history before the story starts, evoking the size and grandeur of them and explaining that the first went up centuries before the Egyptian pyramids. The prologue is where the story starts, not the book.

Reply
Enid McConnell
3/25/2018 10:55:58 am

Okay, good...

My goodness me...
3/27/2018 08:32:10 am

Goodness me Enid!
The man has shown you a scant couple of pages and you are complaining already!
Bet you are fun at parties.

Reply
Cesar
3/25/2018 01:43:43 pm

One of the praiseworthy features of this blog is that each incidence of anti-Catholic bigotry in the fringe world is readily pointed and rejected by Colavito.

And now this “just as invisibly, but more potently, than the Holy Ghost”. Please, it is not even necessary to the text.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
3/25/2018 02:05:04 pm

It's not anti-Catholic, Cesar. Since the Natives didn't actually convert for De Soto in any meaningful sense, except by force while De Soto's men were pointing weapons at them, they were not visited by the Holy Ghost. I used the phrase to contrast what the Spanish pretended was happening with what was really happening.

Reply
A Buddhist
3/25/2018 09:12:00 pm

Jason, do you believe that the Holy Ghost can visit people? And would such visits always be good?

Americangaon
3/25/2018 10:28:31 pm

I don't know what Jason would say but it seems Christian teaching is that the answer to both your questions is yes. Keep in mind that the Easter Bunny religion of the New Testament, the Church Fathers, and Constantine's grabbing of the steering wheel in 300 something AD is COMPLETELY separate from the Catskills religion of the Old Testament and the Talmud.

Regardless of what you may have been told.

Hanslune
3/25/2018 02:21:03 pm

Good stuff Jason and well written.

Start your own publishing company for anti-fringe, pro science writers and self-publish.

Reply
Richard Rogers
3/25/2018 09:16:40 pm

I've looked at the bookstores of a few sites for a good book on the history of the mound builders that a lay person like me can understand and have come up lacking. I've seen 2 or 3, but they are often local or regional. I guess I'm saying I'm interested in "the mound" half of the book.

Reply
Bob Jase
3/26/2018 01:06:58 pm

"Eventually, even the Natives themselves forgot who had built the mounds or why."

So much for the supposed ability of people to pass down information undiluted & unchanged for millenia.

You'd think they'd have remembered the alien spaceships.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
3/26/2018 11:41:06 pm

Jason -

The standard practice today is to use short parts of sentences in the text in the footnotes instead of numbers. Readers get spooked by footnotes.

The usual phrase is "European Americans", but there may be other terms.

I do not have time to check on the particulars for the Ichisi, but you have to remember that the Mushkogean peoples had just arrived in the area recently, and they may have wished to conceal their conquest from the Spanish.

Why not find a local newspaper writer whose work you admire, and hire them to go through your manuscript word by word, expression by expression, and sentence by sentence? If you do this you will likely end up with something pretty good that says what you want it to say..

Reply
Huh? What?
3/27/2018 12:27:24 pm

"The standard practice today is to use short parts of sentences in the text in the footnotes instead of numbers. Readers get spooked by footnotes."

Not in my style manuals.

"European Americans" for Europeans from Europe?

Reply
Red NickFern
3/27/2018 08:29:34 am

I really enjoyed the early taste of the book Jason & I really hope I get to read and enjoy the full version one day soon sir.

Why not ask the two V brothers?
Perhaps they could help you find a publisher, in the spirit of balance and fair play, etc?

All the best.

Reply
Americanegro
3/27/2018 06:50:58 pm

Sorry to be so late with this but just wanted to get my recognition of the Ancient Goddess Religion symbolism in the title on the record.

Reply
Renee
3/27/2018 08:17:53 pm

What you wrote is very interesting and I enjoy your writing style. If you finish this book I will buy it since history is my go-to subject for reading. I just bought "Knowing Fear" from Barnes and Noble.

Reply
MJW link
3/29/2018 06:37:48 pm

Hi Jason,

I enjoy reading your blog; I have a long-standing interest in the fringe, I’m not a true believer but it occasionally shines on inconvenient questions orthodoxy prefers to skip. I regularly buy quality ‘popular’ history books and occasionally speculative fringe stuff. So, I'm potentially the kind of buyer your hypothetical publisher would be chasing, but I wouldn't buy this. I think you are good writer, but your sample prose lacks vividness and colour and without some startling insight it’s too niche.

You have to watch out for self-righteousness which is an unlikeable trait. By all means have strong opinions, being abrasive isn’t an issue, but if you veer towards polemic you can’t claim critical balance. Lines like 'European arrogance grown angry and dangerous' smack of cliched, whitey-guilt-trip Anti-Imperialism rather than rounded historical analysis. There's a market for that type of crude, polemical, partial, morally relativistic history, but I think you're aiming for something more sophisticated and scholarly. Don’t let your politics run away with the analysis. I don't believe you should sanitise anything; but show more nuance. There were lots of terrible consequences from European contact with the 'New World' but such narratives can be woven around every conquest in history, if you ditch the phoned it in Anti-Imperialism why is this conquest really any different?

I sympathise with your predicament in terms of getting published. However, there is very little money in writing these days, unless you have patronage, you’re already successful for something else, or you hit it lucky with genre writing.

Reply
T. Franke link
4/1/2018 01:46:00 pm

Good work, nothing wrong. But I could imagine that it is too long for some readers. Maybe it would be worth to put the key event as a kind of mysterious, intentionally not-fully-explained event in a two-pages section to the front, and then unfold the whole story with all backgrounds, revealing to the reader the mystery, in a second section.

Reply

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        • Aelian's Various Histories
        • Julius Africanus' Chronography
        • Eusebius' Chronicle
        • Chinese Accounts of Rome
        • Ancient Chinese Automaton
        • The Orphic Argonautica
        • Fragments of Panodorus
        • Annianus on the Watchers
        • The Watchers and Antediluvian Wisdom
      • Medieval Texts >
        • Medieval Legends of Ancient Egypt >
          • Medieval Pyramid Lore
          • John Malalas on Ancient Egypt
          • Fragments of Abenephius
          • Akhbar al-zaman
          • Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah
          • Murtada ibn al-‘Afif
          • Al-Maqrizi on the Pyramids
          • Al-Suyuti on the Pyramids
        • The Hunt for Noah's Ark
        • Isidore of Seville
        • Book of Liang: Fusang
        • Agobard on Magonia
        • Book of Thousands
        • Voyage of Saint Brendan
        • Power of Art and of Nature
        • Travels of Sir John Mandeville
        • Yazidi Revelation and Black Book
        • Al-Biruni on the Great Flood
        • Voyage of the Zeno Brothers
        • The Kensington Runestone (Hoax)
        • Islamic Discovery of America
        • The Aztec Creation Myth
      • Lost Civilizations >
        • Atlantis >
          • Plato's Atlantis Dialogues >
            • Timaeus
            • Critias
          • Fragments on Atlantis
          • Panchaea: The Other Atlantis
          • Eumalos on Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Gómara on Atlantis
          • Sardinia and Atlantis
          • Santorini and Atlantis
          • The Mound Builders and Atlantis
          • Donnelly's Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Morocco
          • Atlantis and the Sea Peoples
          • W. Scott-Elliot >
            • The Story of Atlantis
            • The Lost Lemuria
          • The Lost Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Africa
          • How I Found Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Termier on Atlantis
          • The Critias and Minoan Crete
          • Rebuttal to Termier
          • Further Responses to Termier
          • Flinders Petrie on Atlantis
        • Lost Cities >
          • Miscellaneous Lost Cities
          • The Seven Cities
          • The Lost City of Paititi
          • Manuscript 512
          • The Idolatrous City of Iximaya (Hoax)
          • The 1885 Moberly Lost City Hoax
          • The Elephants of Paredon (Hoax)
        • OOPARTs
        • Oronteus Finaeus Antarctica Map
        • Caucasians in Panama
        • Jefferson's Excavation
        • Fictitious Discoveries in America
        • Against Diffusionism
        • Tunnels Under Peru
        • The Parahyba Inscription (Hoax)
        • Mound Builders
        • Tales of Enchanted Islands
        • The 1907 Ancient World Map Hoax
        • The 1909 Grand Canyon Hoax
        • The Interglacial Period
        • Solving Oak Island
      • Religious Conspiracies >
        • Pantera, Father of Jesus?
        • Toledot Yeshu
        • Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay on Cathars
        • Testimony of Jean de Châlons
        • Rosslyn Chapel and the 'Prentice's Pillar
        • The Many Wives of Jesus
        • Templar Infiltration of Labor
        • Louis Martin & the Holy Bloodline
        • The Life of St. Issa (Hoax)
        • On the Person of Jesus Christ
      • Giants in the Earth >
        • Fossil Origins of Myths >
          • Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephants
          • Fossil Elephants
          • Fossil Bones of Teutobochus
          • Fossil Mammoths and Giants
          • Giants' Bones Dug Out of the Earth
          • Fossils and the Supernatural
          • Fossils, Myth, and Pseudo-History
          • Man During the Stone Age
          • Fossil Bones and Giants
          • American Elephant Myths
          • The Mammoth and the Flood
          • Fossils and Myth
          • Fossil Origin of the Cyclops
          • Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man
        • Fragments on Giants
        • Manichaean Book of Giants
        • Geoffrey on British Giants
        • Alfonso X's Hermetic History of Giants
        • Boccaccio and the Fossil 'Giant'
        • Book of Howth
        • Purchas His Pilgrimage
        • Edmond Temple's 1827 Giant Investigation
        • The Giants of Sardinia
        • Giants and the Sons of God
        • The Magnetism of Evil
        • Tertiary Giants
        • Smithsonian Giant Reports
        • Early American Giants
        • The Giant of Coahuila
        • Jewish Encyclopedia on Giants
        • Index of Giants
        • Newspaper Accounts of Giants
        • Lanier's A Book of Giants
      • Science and History >
        • Halley on Noah's Comet
        • The Newport Tower
        • Iron: The Stone from Heaven
        • Pyramid Facts and Fancies
        • Argonauts before Homer
        • The Deluge
        • Crown Prince Rudolf on the Pyramids
        • Old Mythology in New Apparel
        • Blavatsky on Dinosaurs
        • Teddy Roosevelt on Bigfoot
        • Devil Worship in France
        • Maspero's Review of Akhbar al-zaman
        • The Holy Grail as Lucifer's Crown Jewel
        • The Mutinous Sea
        • The Rock Wall of Rockwall
        • Fabulous Zoology
        • The Origins of Talos
        • Mexican Mythology
        • Chinese Pyramids
        • Maqrizi's Names of the Pharaohs
      • Extreme History >
        • American Antiquities
        • American Cataclysms
        • England, the Remnant of Judah
        • Historical Chronology of the Mexicans
        • Maspero on the Predynastic Sphinx
        • Vestiges of the Mayas
        • Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
        • Origins of the Egyptian People
        • The Secret Doctrine >
          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
          • Volume 2: Anthropogenesis
        • Phoenicians in America
        • The Electric Ark
        • Traces of European Influence
        • Prince Henry Sinclair
        • Pyramid Prophecies
        • Templars of Ancient Mexico
        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
        • Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology
        • Book of the Damned
        • Great Pyramid As Noah's Ark
        • Richard Shaver's Proofs
    • Alien Encounters >
      • US Government Ancient Astronaut Files >
        • Fortean Society and Columbus
        • Inquiry into Shaver and Palmer
        • The Skyfort Document
        • Whirling Wheels
        • Denver Ancient Astronaut Lecture
        • Soviet Search for Lemuria
        • Visitors from Outer Space
        • Unidentified Flying Objects (Abstract)
        • "Flying Saucers"? They're a Myth
        • UFO Hypothesis Survival Questions
        • Air Force Academy UFO Textbook
        • The Condon Report on Ancient Astronauts
        • Atlantis Discovery Telegrams
        • Ancient Astronaut Society Telegram
        • Noah's Ark Cables
        • The Von Daniken Letter
        • CIA Psychic Probe of Ancient Mars
        • Scott Wolter Lawsuit
        • UFOs in Ancient China
        • CIA Report on Noah's Ark
        • CIA Noah's Ark Memos
        • Congressional Ancient Aliens Testimony
        • Ancient Astronaut and Nibiru Email
        • Congressional Ancient Mars Hearing
        • House UFO Hearing
      • Ancient Extraterrestrials >
        • Premodern UFO Sightings
        • The Moon Hoax
        • Inhabitants of Other Planets
        • Blavatsky on Ancient Astronauts
        • The Stanzas of Dzyan (Hoax)
        • Aerolites and Religion
        • What Is Theosophy?
        • Plane of Ether
        • The Adepts from Venus
      • A Message from Mars
      • Saucer Mystery Solved?
      • Orville Wright on UFOs
      • Interdimensional Flying Saucers
      • Flying Saucers Are Real
      • Report on UFOs
    • The Supernatural >
      • The Devils of Loudun
      • Sublime and Beautiful
      • Voltaire on Vampires
      • Demonology and Witchcraft
      • Thaumaturgia
      • Bulgarian Vampires
      • Religion and Evolution
      • Transylvanian Superstitions
      • Defining a Zombie
      • Dread of the Supernatural
      • Vampires
      • Werewolves and Vampires and Ghouls
      • Science and Fairy Stories
      • The Cursed Car
    • Classic Fiction >
      • Lucian's True History
      • Some Words with a Mummy
      • The Coming Race
      • King Solomon's Mines
      • An Inhabitant of Carcosa
      • The Xipéhuz
      • Lot No. 249
      • The Novel of the Black Seal
      • The Island of Doctor Moreau
      • Pharaoh's Curse
      • Edison's Conquest of Mars
      • The Lost Continent
      • Count Magnus
      • The Mysterious Stranger
      • The Wendigo
      • Sredni Vashtar
      • The Lost World
      • The Red One
      • H. P. Lovecraft >
        • Dagon
        • The Call of Cthulhu
        • History of the Necronomicon
        • At the Mountains of Madness
        • Lovecraft's Library in 1932
      • The Skeptical Poltergeist
      • The Corpse on the Grating
      • The Second Satellite
      • Queen of the Black Coast
      • A Martian Odyssey
    • Classic Genre Movies
    • Miscellaneous Documents >
      • The Balloon-Hoax
      • A Problem in Greek Ethics
      • The Migration of Symbols
      • The Gospel of Intensity
      • De Profundis
      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
      • Crown Prince Rudolf's Letters
      • Position of Viking Women
      • The Amazing James Dean Hoax!
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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