Hi Cecil, I am commenting on a five-year-old post regarding the 1492 C. Columbus poem. This is just to add to what you already wrote there:
Washington Irving (author of Sleepy Hollow) helped promote the Columbus myth with the 1828 publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
In a recent (Feb 2012) search via Google, the earliest text which included the opening lines of this poem already referred to it as common knowledge:
The natives of the United States one and all are familiar with American history from the time when, as the rhyme runs,
“In fourteen hundred ninety-two,
Columbus saild far o’er the ocean blue,”
to the present moment. Every man knows what men dwelt here before his fathers came. Every town and almost every ancient family has its tales of savage warfare; and even the scholar who has grown up among books might add many pleasing and thrilling incidents to his stock of historical information, by listening for an evening to those unwritten traditions which are handed down from father to son in every village of New England…
–“The knowledge of the people,” in Yale Literary Magazine, vol.6, p.137 (1841)
My guess is that the original rhyme was probably published in a schoolbook before 1830, given the attitude of the writer in 1841.
Here are three threads in which we discuss the idea that Washington Irving’s book was what populatized the notion that Columbus proved the Earth was round:
There are various other threads in which we discuss the fact that before Columbus people knew perfectly well that the Earth was round.
That sentence reads to me that natives are familiar with American history since 1492, not that they are all familiar with the rhyme. The rhyme was pre-existing certainly, and probably something that his audience would be familiar with, but that statement doesn’t make any claims about its ubiquity.
Here’s the original column. Your Google Books find is a great one, since it pushes back almost a century before Cecil’s claim.