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Full Text - History of the American Indians (1775)

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By Mason

History of the American Indians is an 18th-century work that argues many Native American peoples descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. James Adair bases his case on years of direct contact with Southeastern tribes. He points to practices he believed resembled ancient Israelite life, including ritual laws, priestly roles, annual festivals, places of refuge, ideas of atonement, fragments of Hebrew-like language, and belief in a single supreme God.

Adair presents this argument as a defense of the Bible. If Israel truly scattered, he reasoned, traces of that dispersion should exist somewhere in the world. Native traditions, in his view, preserved those traces in altered but recognizable form.

The book is openly apologetic. Adair writes against deism and religious skepticism, arguing that America belongs within biblical history rather than outside it. For him, Native cultures are evidence that scripture applies beyond the Old World.

This approach clearly anticipates later works such as A Star in the West and View of the Hebrews. Ethan Smith follows the same basic idea. Native Americans are Israelites in exile, their customs are remnants of Mosaic law, and their eventual restoration is tied to biblical prophecy.

Where Adair relies mainly on observation and comparison, Smith organizes the argument more systematically. He places it firmly within prophetic and millennial expectations, especially drawing from Isaiah. The core assumption stays the same, but the theological framing becomes stronger.

This background helps explain the emergence of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon appears in a culture already preoccupied with Israelite explanations for Native origins. Adair and Ethan Smith ask the question through history and theology. The Book of Mormon answers it through narrative, offering a full origin story that addresses the same concerns.

Adair’s book matters because it predates both A Star in the West and View of the Hebrews by decades. It shows the Israelite-Indian theory was already established in American religious thought. Taken together, these works form a clear intellectual path that places the Book of Mormon within its early American context, rather than as a sudden or isolated idea.

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