- Historic Sites “…and The Mound-builders Vanished From The
Earth” What became of the prehistoric race that built the
elaborate ceremonial mounds found in the Ohio and Mississippi
valleys? Nineteenth-century America had a romantic but self-
serving answer June 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 4 As Thomas laid his
plans, another Bureau of Ethnology staff member, Henry W.
Henshaw, fired the opening salvo of the campaign in the bureau’s
second annual report, published in 1883. Henshaw took out after
Squier and Davis, though paying homage to their “skill and zeal”
and to “the ability and fidelity which mark the presentation of
their results to the public.” He punctured certain erroneous
zoological conclusions that they had drawn from animal-effigy
pipes, which to them seemed to indicate Mound Builder commerce
with South America and Africa. Then he turned on the famous
elephant effigies “found” in Iowa, pronouncing them clumsy
fakes. This drew outraged cries from the Davenport Academy of
Natural Sciences in Iowa, which had