Gerard Fowke

Gerard Fowke (June 25, 1855 – March 5, 1933) was an American archeologist and geologist best known for his studies of Native American mounds.

Childhood Born Charles Mitchell Smith in Charleston Bottom, Mason County, Kentucky, near Maysville, his parents were John D. Smith and Sibella Smith. He was the eldest of five children and the only one to survive to adulthood.

Early career He worked as a bookkeeper and clerk in Nashville, Tennessee, before returning to Kentucky in 1873. In 1886, he studied the archeology of the Monongahela River Valley of Pennsylvania. Fowke worked for the Smithsonian Institution, under the Bureau of Ethnology, from 1885 to 1888, studying Native American sites in the eastern United States. In the 1890s, he continued excavations, including at the Linville Mound in Virginia. He searched for evidence of pre-historic settlements on Vancouver Island in Canada from 1896 to 1897. he travelled to Vladivostok in 1898 with fellow researcher Berthold Laufer. The two spent several months together, travelling the Amur River by boat and studying the Tungusic, Ainu, and Gilyak peoples. They took photos and recorded songs, and studied artifacts and native cultures. The two researchers later split up, with Fowke continuing to travel the Amur River by canoe, accompanied only by a stranded sailor and a Tungusic native.

Fowke spent much of his life studying ancient mounds of rocks and earth, trying to prove the existence of a civilization that pre-dated what we currently understand to be the Native Americans. He never found evidence of a civilization distinct from later Native Americans. His 1902 book Archæological History of Ohio, which summarized his research, helped to prove that these mounds were indeed made by the Native Americans. Fowke was a lifelong bachelor and died with no close kin. He moved to Madison, Indiana, in 1922 and lived there the remainder of his life. Fowke died in King's Daughters' Hospital in Madison of natural causes at age of 78 and was interred in Springdale Cemetery in Madison.