New Perspectives on the Origins of Americanist Archaeology

3. Roots of the Walam Olum: Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and the Intellectual Heritage of the Early Nineteenth Century

Cuvier . . . took bones of extinct animals and restored them out of many or even a few! I take scattered words of extinct Nations and Languages, and out of a few or any number, I restore them to our historical knowledge. Therefore I imitate or rather emulate Cuvier; he has been greatly praised! shall I be? —Ra¤nesque (1840:69) Introduction In December 1834, a hastily written letter was sent from Philadelphia to a distinguished committee of scholars in Paris. Penned by the wellknown naturalist Constantine Samuel Ra¤nesque (1783–1840), the letter announced the discovery of an ancient North American epic that would ultimately excite, confound, and captivate the anthropological world. “There is in Philadelphia,” Ra¤nesque wrote, “among several fragments of Neobagun1 and Wampum ¤gures . . . a manuscript on tablets of cedar wood (the sacred tree of the Linnique peoples).2 . . . The whole of it . . . offers new philological and also graphic materials. . . . The name of the manuscript merits attention, it is wallam olum” (Ra¤nesque 1834b:266).3 The Wallam Olum, Ra¤nesque explained (hereafter spelled Walam Olum),4 was a series of wooden tablets inscribed and painted with the “hieroglyphics” of the Lenape or Delaware Indians.5 Although he stated that the symbols were at ¤rst inexplicable to him, Ra¤nesque also claimed to possess a series of epic songs that had been transcribed from the Lenape tongue which accompanied the glyphs. Each verse in the 3 Roots of the Walam Olum Constantine Samuel Ra¤nesque and the Intellectual Heritage of the Early Nineteenth Century David M. Oestreicher epic corresponded to a pictograph on the tablets. Ra¤nesque claimed that after a decade of diligent work, and with the help of Lenape dictionaries compiled by Moravian missionaries, he had at last succeeded in translating the songs and unlocking the mystery of the tablets. His efforts seemed to reveal an astonishing saga. Reaching deep into antiquity, the Walam Olum related a creation myth, a deluge story, and the sweeping migration of ancient Lenape people out of Asia into North America. It told of their journey across America, their conquest of the Mound Builders’ civilization, their fracturing into the various Algonquian-speaking peoples who spanned the North American continent , and the ultimate settlement of the main body of the tribe along the Atlantic coast. Ra¤nesque hoped the Walam Olum would furnish important evidence about the peopling of America to the scholarly committee and win him the International Volney Essay Contest, over which the committee presided. A prize of 1,200 francs was to be awarded the author of the most informative paper on the languages of the “Leni-Lennape, Mohegan et Chippaway” (Boewe 1988:14; Ra¤nesque 1834a). Although Ra¤nesque failed to win the prize, he refused to give up on the Walam Olum. In 1836 he published a translation of the epic in his book The American Nations, unleashing a controversy that would perplex some of the most renowned scholars over the ensuing century and a half. Ephraim G. Squier (1849a) and Daniel G. Brinton (1885), both pivotal ¤gures during the formative years of anthropology, published their own translations and commentaries of the epic. Cyrus Thomas, who conducted the Smithsonian Institution’s classic study of the Mound Builders, regarded the Walam Olum as a critical piece of evidence in his determination of the identity and fate of the Ohio Valley Mound Builders (Thomas 1889, 1890, 1891). Horatio Hale, Mark R. Harrington, James Mooney, Frank G. Speck, Clinton A. Weslager, and other noteworthy scholars endorsed the document’s validity in their writings. Although an increasing number of scholars would question the Walam Olum’s historical reliability and antiquity (the development of radiocarbon dating in the mid–twentieth century, for example, contradicted the time frame of ancient history presented in the epic), most continued to accept the Walam Olum as genuine Lenape folklore. Among the most ambitious efforts to determine the credibility of the Walam Olum was an interdisciplinary 20-year study funded and directed by pharmaceutical tycoon Eli Lilly under the auspices of the Indiana Historical Society. Lilly employed a team of more than a dozen scholars to authenticate the document on linguistic, ethnographic, hisRoots of the Walam Olum / 61 torical, and archaeological grounds. In 1954 the Lilly team published Walam Olum, or Red Score—The Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians, a lavishly bound and gilded volume with a new translation by the...