BACKWASH OF THE FRONTIER—HALLOWELL 461 
that “The Book of Mormon” supplements the Bible, since it is a history 
of God’s dealings with remnants of Israel and the Saviour’s ministra- 
tions among them in the Western Hemisphere.” For in America, the 
great Nephrite prophecy has been fulfilled—the second coming of 
Christ. After the Resurrection He appeared to a multitude of nearly 
8,000 people in Mexico, before a greater assembly the next day, and 
after this “he did show himself unto them oft.” The occurrence of 
the legendary figure of a so-called “white god” with certain as- 
sociated attributes among the Incas, Mayas, Aztecs, and Toltecs, the 
Mormons interpret as supporting evidence for the historic appearance 
of Christ in America. 
In the Mormon view, the aborigines of the United States were the 
descendants of the Lamanites, the “bad” people of the Mormon epic. 
Unhke the Spiritualists, the Mormons had nothing they could look to 
them for; still, a strange affinity connected them with the Indians. In 
Mormon hymnals there are songs about the red man. In the days 
before the rise of archeology or anthropology in the contemporary 
sense, “The Book of Mormon” was representative of the speculations 
that had been going on in Europe for several centuries about the 
peopling of the New World. These earlier theories had to be recon- 
ciled first of all with the account given in the Bible of man’s creation 
and dispersal. What is peculiar in the Mormon case, however, is the 
fact that a particular theory of the peopling of the New World was 
incorporated as a dogma of a religious sect. This could hardly have 
occurred anywhere but in early 19th-century America. The early 
Mormons easily reconciled their theory with the Bible, but since the 
sect has survived into a period of American culture when an enor- 
mous increase in our knowledge of New World prehistory from 
archeological investigations has taken place, a further reconciliation of 
the inspired history found in “The Book of Mormon” with this new 
knowledge is now being sought. 
Outside the Mormon church, the consensus is that in its nondoc- 
trinal aspects “The Book of Mormon” is derived from a romance 
written but not published by Solomon Spaulding, a clergyman who 
left the church and was in business in Ohio by 1812. There he dug 
into some mounds and became interested in the origin of the extinct 
people who had erected them. The theory that they were of Jewish 
origin was not original with him, since it was maintained by many 
prominent men in this country. If Spaulding’s manuscript had been 
printed in its original form as fiction, he would have anticipated those 
writers in America who were soon to exploit the Indian in the historical 
novel. Even when “The Book of Mormon” was published in 1830, it 
fell precisely in the period when the Indian was assuming great prom- 
7 Paul M. Hanson, “Jesus Christ Among the Ancient Americans,” p. 144, Independence, 
Mo. 1945. 
