The success of Egyptian decipherment made other unread inscriptions newly promising. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840), a naturalist with wide interests in languages and antiquities, attempted to interpret the glyphs of Palenque. In 1832 he sent proposals to Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), connecting the signs with conjectures about early populations and movements across the Atlantic. Champollion died before the letters arrived, leaving Rafinesque without the response he had sought.
A few years later he offered a different kind of American record. In The American Nations (1836), he published the Walam Olum, or Red Record, as a translation of ancient Lenape history preserved on painted sticks. The narrative supplied a migration and a succession of events, allowing an account of American origins to appear in the voice of the people whose past was being reconstructed. It seemed to provide the testimony that comparisons among monuments and customs could only suggest.
Readers could examine the printed account but not the alleged original. That imbalance made Rafinesque’s role essential to every claim about what the record contained. The Walam Olum is now recognized as a fabrication. Its place in this history concerns how a purported Indigenous text could acquire authority through a learned writer’s presentation and through readers’ desire for a connected American past.
The publication came six years after the Book of Mormon, a chronology that matters when the two are discussed together. They were different undertakings in a world interested in recovered records and vanished histories. Rafinesque presented his book through the claims of scholarship and translation. The painted sticks supplied an origin for the account, but the evidence available to his readers began with the pages he had printed.