Gerard Fowke was an American archeologist and geologist best known for his studies of Native American mounds.
Background
He was born at Charleston Bottom, near Maysville, Mason County, Kentucky, the son of John D. and Sibella (Mitchell) Smith. He was named Charles Mitchell Smith; but on February 26, 1887, having followed the usual legal procedure, he adopted the name of Gerard Fowke, originally borne by a maternal ancestor who had settled in Virginia about 1650.
His father, a native of Wexford, Ireland, had settled in Kentucky in 1848; his mother was a daughter of Colonel Charles Smith Mitchell of Mason County, Kentucky.
Gerard was the eldest of five children, and his mother and the younger children died before he was ten years old.
After his mother's death he lived an unsettled life, mainly with his father, who was a pioneer teacher in Kentucky, Iowa, Alabama, and Tennessee. The father died in 1870, and thereafter for some years Gerard taught school intermittently, chiefly in Ohio and Illinois.
Education
Entering the Ohio State University as a special student in 1881, he specialized in geology and mathematics.
Career
His subsequent career was extremely varied and carried him to many different quarters of the world. His activities in approximately chronological order embraced archeological and geological investigations throughout most of the eastern United States; a search for evidences of Asiatic migration into the United States in the lower Amur Valley, Siberia, and on Vancouver Island; research in Columbia, South America; investigation of the classic Trenton (New Jersey) gravels for paleolithic man; compilation of archeological history of Ohio; mapping caves, prehistoric quarries, and flint mines from Ohio to the Ozarks; arrangement of the archeological displays at the St. Louis exposition; a visit to Guatemala; search for evidences of prehistoric man in Hawaii; investigations in Mexico; exploration of the Carlsbad caverns; and, during his later years, a study of the geology of the Ohio River Valley.
Among his sixty published writings, a list of which may be found in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, April 1929, are two that are of book length and of special interest. His Archaeological History of Ohio; the Mound Builders and the Later Indians (1902) summarized all that then was known of Ohio prehistory.
The author's critical analyses of several of his predecessors and contemporaries were at times definitely caustic, with the result that numerous controversies and near enmities resulted; however, in perspective, it cannot now be denied that the volume was both a contribution to archeological literature and a salutary influence in a comparatively young discipline.
He died in his seventy-eighth year as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Views
His unsparing criticism of anyone and anything falling short of his high ideals often made him temporarily unpopular and, for the same reasons, his institutional connections were not always prolonged or happy.
Quotations:
His second major monograph, The Evolution of the Ohio River (1933), appeared a few months after his death, with a prefatory note stating: "His striking personality endeared him to many friends, one of whom has completed arrangements for the publication of this monography. "
Personality
Those who knew Gerard Fowke remember him for his towering height, his Viking bearing, Spartan habits, fearlessness, uncompromising insistence on fact and truth, his whiskers, and his boots.