The first plundered place Puglionesi looks at is the Grave Creek Mound, on the Ohio River in what is now West Virginia. Locals dug a tunnel into the sixty-foot-high mound in the late 1830s at the behest of its then owner; he added a gift shop and made the mound a riverside tourist trap. Archaeologists say the mound was built by the Adena people, an early Native culture, more than two thousand years ago. Thousands of ancient human-built mounds and other earthen structures can be found in Ohio, West Virginia, and other states in the Mississippi watershed. The ancestors of modern Native Americans almost certainly built them; Indians in more recent times were still burying their dead in mounds. But if, as the white Mound Builders theory claimed, a race of Danish Vikings (for example) had built them, and their descendants were no longer here, then the ancestors of the resident Indians must have come from somewhere and wiped them out; therefore, the Danes’ recently arrived fellow white people would be justified in wiping out the Indians.
Civic leaders said that inside the Grave Creek Mound the diggers had found a stone inscribed with twenty-four characters in an unknown language. The stone appears to have been a fraud intended to raise money for the dig. In 1842 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, purveyor of tales acquired from his part-Ojibwe wife—tales that inspired Longfellow’s popular “The Song of Hiawatha”—sent a drawing of the stone to scholars in London. It got them excited; they speculated that the writing might be Celtic, Phoenician, or Hebrew. Schoolcraft thought it was “Druidical runes.” An authority from the Smithsonian Museum called the stone a fake, but the white Mound Builders myth persisted. Of its empire-creating purpose, Puglionesi says, “Controlling the past and the story of origins is essential to controlling the future.” In this case, the myth’s suppositions were used to justify the theft involved in Manifest Destiny.
From the Grave Creek Mound, Puglionesi goes about 150 miles northeast, to western Pennsylvania, site of the world’s first oil boom. Oil was so plentiful there that it seeped from the ground. Native Americans had dug pits as deep as ten feet, lined them with timber to collect the seeps, and used the oil for medicine and trade. The Seneca, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, still had large holdings of land in the region in 1859 when Colonel Edwin Drake, who wasn’t a colonel, drilled the first commercially successful oil well, near Titusville. The rush that followed gave a preview of the suicidal modern world.