On Jan. 10, 1877, Reverend Jacob Gass, who was known for his amateur archeological finds and as a part-time charlatan, excavated a mound in a field near Davenport, Iowa. The burial mounds along the Mississippi were of great interest to archeologists at the time, as there was a widespread (and racist) theory that they were built by a civilization which predated the Native American tribes who had inhabited the area when settlers arrived, because they wouldn’t be capable of it. There was a push to discover artifacts which could prove this theory; such finds would not only be monumental, but make the finder famous.
The then-recently formed Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences, now known as the Putnam Museum, had a collection of artifacts which rivaled the Smithsonian. Even still, the old codgers who ran the place were jealous of Gass, who had a string of luck finding valuable artifacts in various mounds, while the majority of their attempts were fruitless. And so they hatched a plan… allegedly.
Inside the mound Gass excavated in January 1877, and which already showed signs it had been disturbed, he found two graves. In one of them, Gass found two tablets. These tablets had strange markings and what appeared to be writing in an ancient script. A third tablet was found a few days later by the farmer who owned the land while plowing. Gass believed he had hit the jackpot.
He donated the tablets to the Academy and when the description of Gass’ discovery was published, there was an uproar in the archeology world. Scholars the world over attempted to translate the tablets, but no one succeeded. For 10 years, the tablets fascinated the public, but after a decade of study, expert opinion shifted and the tablets (among other dubious items found in the mound) were dismissed as a fraud, although they were cited as “proof” in a few academic papers up until 1978.
University of Iowa Professor Marshall McKusick, author of The Davenport Conspiracy (1970, revisited in 1991), claimed he met one of the people involved, who admitted that the Academy fabricated the tablets to discredit Gass, but kept up with the charade when the discovery received global attention. McKusick concluded the tablets originated not with an ancient civilization, but were modified roof tiles from a nearby brothel.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2023 issue as a part of Peak Iowa, a collection of fascinating state stories, sites and people.
