The idea that American Indians could have built something resembling a city was so foreign to European settlers that encountered the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois in Midwest America, they thought they must have been he work of a foreign civilization: either the Phoenicians or the Vikings. Even today the idea of an Indian city runs so contrary to American notions of Indian life that no Anglo-Saxon American can absorb it. The first person to write an account of the Cahokia Mounds, the earliest and finest city built by Indians, was Henry Brackenbridge in 1811. When he reported his discovery, likening it to Egyptian pyramids, newspapers widely ignored it. He complained of this to his friend, former president Thomas Jefferson, and the word of "Cahokia" did eventually get around. Unfortunately, most Americans were not very interested. The United States was trying to get the Indians out of the way, not appreciate their history. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 which ordered the relocation of eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi was based on the assumption that Indians were nomadic savages with no ability to make good use of land. Evidence of an ancient city, close to the size of Washington, D.C. at that time, would have spoiled the story line.