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Thomas Ashe
(1770-1835)
Memoirs of Mammoth...
(Liverpool: G. F. Harris, 1806)


  • Title page

  • Contents


  • Transcriber's Comments



  • Mormons & Mound-Builders   |   The Conneaut Giants   |   Behemoth

     






    ( this text is under construction)

     




    ( this volume has not yet been transcribed)





    TRANSCRIBER'S COMMENT'S

    Thomas Ashe's reporting on America

    (under construction)



    According to some accounts, the Irishman Thomas Ashe was "a slippery character" whose "entire career was checkered with intrigue, misrepresentation, and fraud." Be this as it may there is no reason to suspect that explorer Ashe did not actually make an extensive trip on a flatboat, down the Ohio and parts of the Mississippi in 1806. The modern reader should be on guard for Ashe's misrepresentation and exaggeration, here and there, but his account certainly gives the flavor of life on America's frontier rivers during the period when he conducted his journey.

    Mr. Ashe's account is of particular interest to anyone seeking to envision the process and results encountered in examining the early Republic's "western antiquities and monuments." Unlike many contemporary observers, Thomas Ashe concluded that the mounds and related earthworks of the American wilderness were the handiwork of ancient Indians, and not the long forgotten importation of exotic labor and workmanship from the Old World. In ascribing the mounds to the ancestors of the American tribes, Ashe avoids altogether any pretentious discussion of an ancient white race living in the Americas, of Welsh Indians, or wandering Israelite tribes.


    Thomas Ashe and Solomon Spalding

    Ashe's three volume work was reprinted in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the very same year is it first appeared in London (1808) and it is likely that Solomon Spalding had access to the American edition. In 1809 Spalding moved to the Ohio frontier, but previous to his relocation there he was living in Otsego Co., New York and probably was able to purchase an occasional book in the Cooperstown or Albany book-shops. Ashe's book would have been an interesting literary production, newly available, just as Spalding was making plans to pack his belongings and move to the Conneaut Creek region of northeastern Ohio. It is not unreasonable to suspect that he took with him a copy of Travels in America, or, at least obtained the loan of the book at some point before he departed Ohio for Pittsburgh in the fall of 1812.

    There are numerous instances in Spalding's extant writings where it appears that he imitated or paraphrased Ashe's accounts regarding the ancient inhabitants of the Americas and their remarkable artifacts. In his Letter V Ashe tells of visiting ancient Indian mounds in the "neighbourhood of Brownsville," Fayette Co., Pennsylvania in 1806. This was not too far distant from the town of Amity, in Washington Co., where Solomon Spalding died ten years later. While exploring the Brownsville area Ashe says he came upon a peculiar slab of stone, something like a large tablet, half buried in the ground, in the vicinity of an ancient fort, and covered on one side with strange engravings. This account, along with Ashe's futile attempt to read anything intelligible on the inscribed stone, reads much like Solomon Spalding's fictional description of a similar tablet. However, in Spalding's story the find excites his anticipation of find evidence of a forgotten civilized people -- in Ashe's case the stone was only a disappointment, convincing him "that the predecessors of the Indians were not... a different sort of men from the present race... [and were not] equal ... to the inhabitants of polished Europe."

    The large number of ill-buried skeletons Ashe found in the Brownsville mounds led him to a probable explanation later shared by Solomon Spalding, that the "irregularities in the barrows" arose "from the [ancient] bones deposited in them, having been those of persons killed in battle, and collected by the survivors in order to be buried under one great mound." Spalding puts forth this notion at the beginning of his Oberlin manuscript and in that same work of fiction gives an account of just such a grave mound being thrown up over bodies of warriors killed in a terrible battle in antiquity.

    Again, Ashe decided that the mound-builders did not make use of "iron, and steel." At first he includes copper as a metal unknown to the ancient Indians, but later in his book concedes their use of "brass." In this particular Solomon Spalding's fiction departs from Ashe's candid reporting -- Spalding allowed his ancient Americans the use of iron, some pieces of which were almost of the quality of steel. Perhaps in deference to opinions such as those expressed by Thomas Ashe, Spalding made his mound-builder iron a great rarity, the value of which was so high that its owners used pieces of the metal as money.

    When Ashe had descended the Ohio as far as the road to Marietta, he again indulged his curiosity about the mounds. In his Letter XIV Ashe describes "taking a ramble to the spots where by tradition, the monuments of Indian antiquity were said to abound." Not far from the bank of the Muskingum, opposite Marietta, Ashe tells of mounting the "summit of the hill" which he soon "found to be artificial." The opening scene described in Spalding's Oberlin manuscript provides a striking literary parallel with Ashe's account. Like Ashe, Spalding envisions himself "on the top" of a similar mound, while out in the countryside on a similar ramble. On the "summit of the hill" Ashe discovers some flagstones which he and his helper lift with poles "cut in lieu of leavers." In Spalding's account, he says: "With the assistance of a leaver I raised the stone." Ashe says: "The manner the stones were placed led me to conceive the existence of a vault filled with the riches of antiquity." Spalding says in lifting his flagstone, he found it was the "cover to an artificial cave."


    Ashe's and Spalding's "Awful" Experience

    Having lifted the flagstones atop the ancient mound near Marietta, Thomas Ashe describes the aperture he finds beneath the cover: "The space out of which these materials were taken, left a hollow in an oblong square, lined with stone on the ends and sides; and paved with square stones, on the apparent bottom or upper surface, exactly fitting together, in diameter about nine inches." Spalding describes the somewhat larger aperture beneath the stone he lifted thusly: "an artificial cave... its sides lined with stones." In making further excavation, Ashe says he is halted by a sudden rush of feeling: "To tread on [the ancient work]... could not be done without an awful emotion. Overcome by feelings I could neither combat or suppress, I remained for sometime silent and inactive." Spalding says much the same: "My mind filled with awful sensations which crowded fast upon me..." Not long after this, both Ashe and Spalding climb out of their respective mound-builder vaults. Ashe later returns to his mound and discovers in the vault "a human skeleton of uncommon magnitude." Spalding, on the other hand, recovers an ancient record in his vault. Although he does not mention skeletons at this point, Spalding does speak of the "venerable dead," the remains of "thousands" of which are interred in or near the mound.


    Ashe's and Spalding's Discovery of Writing

    While exploring the vault in the top of the mound near Marietta, Ashe discovers "a parcel of brass rings...three inches in diameter" with an horizontal circumference [metal portion] half an inch wide..." What is especially remarkable about the flat surfaces of these hollow disks, is that "on both sides" they "are strongly etched [with] a variety of characters resembling Chinese..." The effect Ashe here attempts to describe must be rather similar to that provided by large old Chinese coins, some of which have their centers punched out and are inscribed or impressed with writing on both their obverse and reverse surfaces. Spalding finds nothing so wondrous -- his trove of ancient writing, supposedly recovered from the vault, is nothing but Latin writing on a bundle of scrolls. Has Spalding made a claim for finding characters on brass or golden plates, the parallel with Ashe would, of course, been much stronger.

    It is, however, noteworthy that Spalding does subsequently describe the writing of his extinct mound-builders. These people, he says, "had characters which represent words," and that they wrote these characters, Chinese-style, in columns. He further says that the man who introduced this kind of writing among the ancient Americans came from "a great distance from the westward," implying he came from eastern Asia.


    Ashe's and Spalding's "Giant Chief"

    In describing the body with which the inscribed metal disks were found, Ashe says: "the being to whom these remains belonged could not have been less than seven foot high." He subsequently tells how "The remarkable size of the skeleton would signify that the Indians of every time were fond of associating in their chiefs, physical as well as mental endowments." In other words, Ashe felt that both ancient and modern American Indians had a tradition of selecting giants as their rulers, when possible. Spalding parallels Ashe in this notion, telling how his mound-builders were large people to begin with, and how one of their kings (Sambul of Sciota) was a giant, even among those big ancients. The fact that Solomon Spalding made his extinct people very large need not be attributed to his borrowing from Thomas Ashe: very large "mound-builder" skeletons were common discoveries in the part of Ohio where Spalding was living when he wrote his Oberlin manuscript. The fact that Spalding makes a giant out of one of his most notable chiefs in that story supplies the clearer literary parallel with Ashe's account.




    Thomas Ashe's 1806 Recreation of a Mammoth Skeleton



    Ashe's and Spalding's "Mamoons"

    In a separate account, published in 1806, Thomas Ashe pays some special attention to ancient American elephants. The book was entitled: Memoirs of Mammoth... Found in the Vicinity of Ohio... This publication shows that Thomas Ashe, as well as Solomon Spalding, was fascinated with mastodons and mammoths, the preserved remains of which were first being sorted out and properly identified during the first years of the 1800s. Solomon Spalding called his huge elephants "mamoons," while Ashe used the more proper term, "Mammoths." Like Ashe, Spalding had the mistaken view that extinct American elephants were considerably larger than their African and Asian counterparts. It is not unlikely that Solomon Spalding read Ashe's Memoirs of Mammoth before he wrote the Oberlin manuscript.




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    last revised: July 31, 2002