Walam Olum Hokum

Eccentric nineteenth-century scholar Constantine Rafinesque composes a Native American epic....

According to the 19th-century scholar Constantine Rafinesque, an ancient Lenape (Delaware) Indian tradition preserved the memory of the tribe crossing the frozen Bering Strait from Asia into America thousands of years ago. Rafinesque said his source, which he translated himself, was the Walam Olum or "Red Record," a bundle of wooden plaques engraved and painted with supposed Lenape symbols. It told how the Lenape entered the New World, overcame a Midwestern mound building people, and continued eastward, giving rise to the Algonquian-speaking tribes.
But there are gaps in Rafinesque's story. He claimed that he got the plaques in 1822 from a Dr. Ward, who had received them two years earlier from a Delaware patient. (The physician is not traceable in any historical source.) The symbols each stood for a verse in the Lenape epic, and Rafinesque said that he obtained the actual 183 verses two years later (from whom is unknown). Rafinesque published his translation in his 1836 book The American Nations, but the wooden plaques were lost (Rafinesque doesn't say how).
Via