The Davenport Tablets
On 10 January 1877 Jacob Gass dug two engraved slate tablets from a mound at Cook Farm near Davenport, Iowa. A later study concluded that Academy members likely planted them as a joke on him.
Jacob Gass, a Swiss minister who led the First Lutheran Church, was a keen amateur antiquarian. On 10 January 1877 he found two slate tablets. They lay inside a burial mound at Cook Farm, southwest of Davenport, Iowa. Wikipedia says he was carrying out an emergency excavation, and names it as Mound No. 3. One tablet showed scenes of cremation and of hunting, one on each side. The other looked like a calendar.
The finds thrilled Davenport Academy members, who urged Gass to dig again. Wikipedia reports that a year later Charles Harrison, the Academy's president, dug there with Gass and found a third tablet.
The Davenport Public Library's account describes later research by McKusick. It says that work found the perpetrators were likely a handful of Academy members who played a joke on Gass. He had irked some of them by bragging about his finds. In that account they etched the tablets and planted them in the mound, and left in place the nail holes from the slate's earlier use on a roof.
"The first two tablets were discovered on January 10, 1877, at the site known as Cook's Farm by local clergyman the Reverend Jacob Gass, while he was engaged in an emergency excavation due to the imminent transfer of the access rights. They were found in one of the mounds on the site, Mound No. 3.[1] In an excavation a year later (the access rights having been restored), Charles Harrison, the president of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences, while excavating there with Gass, found a third tablet in Mound No."
- The Davenport Conspiracy, Davenport Public Library Special Collections (2022)
- The Davenport Conspiracy (Little Village), Little Village