As audiences in the East were used to science finding fantastic new things, it hardly seemed impossible to a person in the 19th century that the country had once been inhabited by giants, or that ancient, incredible civilizations could still lie undiscovered in the vast west. Some newspaper writers were more than happy to simply make great discoveries up, and readers just as happy to take them at their word.
The unsung heroes of the naval war in the Western theater weren’t the city class casemate ironclads, but a much larger and more active fleet of more than seventy, much smaller, lightly armored vessels. The “Tinclads” of the US Civil War deserve to be remembered.