Benson may have been referring to the fortified villages or traditional longhouses built by the Oneida and Onondaga tribes of the Iroquois Six Nations in central New York. He also may have seen forts built during the French and Indian War, some of which were constructed on the ruins of American Indian villages. The forts described by Benson also may have had connections to other indigenous people. Contemporary accounts identified several mounds in western New York and associated these mounds and their fortifications with an ancient moundbuilding people. (Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, 27–33, 78, 107; Hamilton, French and Indian Wars, 161–184, 239–249; Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, 24–30.)

Hauptman, Laurence M. Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Hamilton, Edward Pierce. The French and Indian Wars: The Story of Battles and Forts in the Wilderness. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.

Vogel, Dan. Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon: Religious Solutions from Columbus to Joseph Smith. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986.

The theory of polygenism, or different origins for different races, emerged in European scholarly thought in the sixteenth century. As Europeans encountered new cultures and races, polygenism attempted to explain their origins. Discussions of this theory were particularly widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Enlightenment thought led to the development of racial science and the categorization and ranking of different races. Some scholars tried to make the Bible compatible with polygenism, creating theories of multiple or simultaneous creations besides the creation of Adam. Polygenism and its underlying racial concerns are found throughout nineteenth-century popular and religious literature. For many nineteenth-century Christians, the theory was a direct challenge to Christianity’s single biblical creation and the religious requirement of redemption after the fall of Adam and Eve. JS, like other Christians of his day, emphasized the single creation found in the Bible and humanity’s common descent from Adam and Eve. (Kidd, Forging of Races, 121–167; Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors, 169–201; Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 131.)

Kidd, Colin. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Livingstone, David N. Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Reeve, W. Paul. Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

See Book of Mormon, 1830 ed., 539 [Ether 1:33–35]; and Title Page of the Book of Mormon, ca. Early June 1829.

The letter was not published in either the Elders’ Journal or the church’s later publication, Times and Seasons.