The Michigan Relics, and the Greatest Fraud in American History
The year is 1890, and James O. Scotford of Edmore, Michigan, is about to make an astonishing claim. Scotford reveals to the world his “discoveries”: a series of relics including a cup and several flat panels covered in what appear to be hieroglyphics.
These were only the first finds, and more and more artifacts began to appear out of the woodlands around Edmore. As treasure hunters poured into town Scotford and his associates hired themselves out as treasure finders, for a fee of course.
Scotford was well known in the area for the holes he kept digging, and it certainly seemed like his years of prospecting for anything and everything had been rewarded with these finds. He certainly showed an uncanny knack for locating these treasures, and nobody else in town seemed to have his luck.
Scotford would go on to uncover thousands of artifacts in the local area. A major Pre-Columbian culture appeared to have been discovered across 16 different counties in Michigan state.
Scotford, finding support from such exalted public figures as former Michigan Secretary of State Daniel Soper, would go on to hold a major exposition and presentation of the finds. Boxes, coins, tablets with strange markings, all were on display.
There were even stranger finds, too. Scotford and Soper offered clay tablets with pictures depicting Moses and the Ten Commandments, and copies of Noah’s diary, items which would seem unusual to be in the possession of a Pre-Columbian culture. Copper crowns for sale, found in the heads of ancient kings, also raised questions.
The whole thing was a fraud of course, one of the biggest in American history. How were so many fooled?
The Trickster’s Game
The central loop to this fraud is a very familiar one, to be sure. As any art forger will tell you, the last person who wants to be told that their artifact is a fake is the person who has just paid a lot of money for it, and so it was here.
Scotford or an associate would therefore be paid to source these artifacts, but they would only find the site itself. Once they had “located” the find associated with their latest hire, they would invite the person who had hired them to dig the find up themselves, adding to the sense of reality.
Of course, Scotford found his fair share of artifacts on his own, too. Happily, he would often find something new just as someone was passing by, allowing the stranger to witness the unearthing of this latest treasure.
This was a time when Americans were finding lots of treasures from a mysterious past dating to before the white man arrived. Evidence was emerging everywhere of a sophisticated network of interconnected cultures spread across the landscape of North America, many of which had vanished long before 1492.
The finds also seemed to support many local assertions about their flavor of Christianity, as well. Some believed that some of the artifacts supported the emigration of the lost ten tribes of Israel, who vanished in the 8th century BC, to North America in a thesis which echoes Mormonism and that other great Christian “discovery” of the 19th century, the Golden Plates of the Book of Mormon.
The Mormons themselves would take an interest in Scotford’s finds, with Mormon scientist James E. Talmage taking some to his own lab for testing in 1908. Putting aside for a moment why the Mormons have a lab like that, they concluded that these were fake, but even their opinion went unheard.
And of course, the more finds which appeared from the valleys of central Michigan, the more people flocked to Scotford seeking help in finding something special. Business was booming, and nobody involved really wanted to question things too much.
The more respectable end of the archaeological community was, of course, scandalized by these fakes. As early as 1891, a year after the first discoveries, Professor Albert Emerson visited the sites and pronounced the discoveries “humbugs of the first water.”
An attempt to read the hieroglyphs the following year cast further doubt in these finds in the professional community. The writings were found to be unintelligible, a “horrible mixture” of snatched phrases and characters from various ancient cultures, all mixed together.
Other problems came thick and fast now that the objects were being subjected to closer scrutiny. The clay artifacts were found to dissolve in water, suggesting that they could not have been buried where they were found for very long. Furthermore, the impression left on the back of the tablets showed they had dried on a wooden plank with a machined edge, something to which these ancient cultures could not have had access.
But this didn’t stop Scotford finding these artifacts, and Soper selling them to an enthusiastic public, for year after year for almost three decades. Both Scotford and Soper died in the 1920s insisting the finds were genuine, and even a signed affidavit from Scotford’s own stepdaughter in 1911 as to the fraud could not persuade them to confess.
But the final word in this story comes again from the Mormons. The man who believed the finds offered evidence about the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, James Savage, died in 1927 and bequeathed the relics he himself had acquired to the University of Notre Dame.
There they lay until a man named Milton R. Hunter rediscovered them in 1960. Hunter would spend the rest of his life trying to prove that these artifacts were genuine, and that they were the vital supporting evidence that the Book of Mormon needed in order to be proven true.
The Mormons themselves held these artifacts until giving them in turn to the Michigan History Museum in Lansing. There they remain to this day, a tribute to American fakery and the gullibility of a general public who so desperately want to find some archaeology that they will turn a blind eye to fraud.
Top Image: An example tablet from the Michigan Relics, including crude and inaccurate representations of Egyptian headwear. Source: James E. Talmage / Public Domain.
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