SOURCE: “Notes on the Vanishing Aborigines,” in Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Belknap Press, 1999, pp. 75-107.

In the following essay, Wallace discusses the sections of Notes on the State of Virginia that deal with Native Americans and claims that many of Jefferson's facts were inaccurate.

After Jefferson left the Virginia governor's office in 1781, his letters to George Rogers Clark shifted from matters of war—which continued unabated in both the east and the west—to matters of science. In December 1781 he asked Clark to send to Monticello “some teeth of the great animal whose remains are found on the Ohio” and commented that in his retirement he was eager to pursue studies in natural history. In Clark's reply, in addition to remarks about animal bones, he alluded to “the powerful nations that inhabited those regions,” perhaps a reference to the vanished builders...