quartz. In this superincumbent mass no crack or crevice was apparent through which the bone could have fallen to so great a depth, and the inference therefore is that it was deposited in the place where it lay when that was on the surface of the earth's crust, and that over it in subsequent ages were piled up the successive beds of gravel and volcanic cinders. If this be true of these skulls, then the men whom they represent lived before the human race appeared in Europe, so far as is yet ascertained; and before the stupendous peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California were lifted from the sea.

Though the number of alleged facts bearing upon the antiquity of the human family on this continent are still few and need unquestioned confirmation, the inclination of scientific belief is that the evidence exists and will yet be found. When this shall be done beyond cavil a new foundation will be laid on which to base the inquiry as to the earliest people of the Western World. However strong may be the probability of the Asiatic origin of the North American Indians, behind them appears another race which must have been displaced by that Mongolian migration. If here as elsewhere there were races more ancient than has hitherto been supposed, we can no longer look upon the Western Hemisphere as solitary and unpeopled, unknown and useless to man till he, grown old in the East, was numerous enough and far enough advanced in intelligence and wants to wander abroad upon the face of the earth in search of a new home.

1 See ante, p. 16. Note from Silliman's Journal.

CHAPTER II.

THE MOUND BUILDERS.

PROGRESS IN CIVILIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN. - PRE-HISTORIC RACE IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. - EARTHWORKS IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. BIG ELEPHANT MOUND. GARDEN-BEDS. MILITARY WORKS. TEMPLE AND ALTAR MOUNDS. RELICS FOUND IN THESE TUMULI. — ANCIENT COPPER-MINING AT LAKE SUPERIOR.CONNECTION BETWEEN THIS AND LATER CIVILIZATIONS. REMAINS IN MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA. · - SKULLS FOUND IN THE MOUNDS.

The North

Indian.

THE North American Indians are, as a race, in no higher plane of culture now than they were three hundred years ago. If they have any inherent capability for progress-if they American could, had they remained isolated and unmolested, have ever raised themselves above the conditions of the second age of stone implements, that progress was arrested when they came into subjection to another and a higher race. It has been easy enough to intensify the weaknesses which distinguished them as savages, by adding to these the most sensual and degrading vices acquired from the whites; and in that process of degradation has been lost whatever of stern and manly virtue is supposed to be the compensation in the simple child of nature for the minor morals of civilized life.

It seems irrational to assume that such a people, whose contact for two centuries and a half with the culture of another race has been unproductive of any good, can have once fallen from a semi-civilization possessed by their ancestors, but of which they have neither distinct. inheritance nor even dim tradition. There is no influence visible or conceivable to account for a change so remarkable. They had evidently never lost their physical vigor; no enemy had ever before come to dispossess them of the soil which they claimed as their own, or to trample out by conquest and servitude the feeble sparks of nascent development; and no higher civilization had invaded and overwhelmed the feeble efforts of the childhood of a race. It is to set aside all the facts of history, as well as all rational conjecture, to suppose that a race now apparently so hopelessly incapable of improvement had, without cause, at some former period, fallen from the condition of a partially cultivated people, to that of savage hunters in a country

which had become a wilderness through their own voluntary degrada

tion.

Race in

America anterior to Indians.

But behind these Indians, who were in possession of the country when it was discovered by Europeans, is dimly seen the shadowy form of another people who have left many remarkable evidences of their habits and customs and of a singular degree of civilization, but who many centuries ago disappeared, either exterminated by pestilence or by some powerful and pitiless enemy, or driven from the country to seek new homes south and west of the Gulf of Mexico.

The evidences of the presence of this ancient people are found almost everywhere upon the North American Continent, except, perhaps, upon the Atlantic coast. They consist of mounds sometimes of imposing size, and other earthworks, so numerous that in Ohio

alone there are, or were till quite recently, estimated to be not less than ten thousand of the Mounds, and fifteen hundred enclosures of earth and stone all evidently the work of the same people. In other parts of the country they were found in such numbers that no attempt has ever been made to count them all.

There are no data by which the exact age of these singular relics of a once numerous and industrious people, living a long-sustained, agricultural life, can be fixed. But it is evident from certain established facts that this must date from a very remote period. The chief seat of their power and population seems to have been in the Missis

GREAT AGE OF MOUNDS.

Valley.

21

sippi Valley. The signs of their occupation are many along the banks of its rivers, but they are rarely found upon the last formed Mounds in terraces of those streams, those which have been longest Mississippi in formation, and which were the beds of the rivers when most of the earthworks were built. It is very seldom that the human bones found in them, except those of later and evidently intrusive burial, are in a condition to admit of their removal, as they crumble into dust on exposure to the air; while bones in British tumuli, known to belong to the Roman period and to ages older than the Christian era, are frequently taken entire from situations, as regards soil and moisture, much less conducive to their preservation, than those of the mounds. They are often, also, covered by the primeval forests, which are known to have grown undisturbed since the country was first occupied by the whites, and the annular growth of these trees has been ascertained to be sometimes from five to eight centuries.

But this, so far from fixing the date of the occupation of these works, does not even indicate the time when they were abandoned; for a considerable period must have elapsed before the ground was occupied by trees of any kind, and before the forest, in its gradual and slow encroachment, obtained complete possession of the ground; and then forest after forest may have grown, and fallen, and mingled with the soil through the progress of many centuries, before the seed of the latest growth was sown, five hundred or a thousand years ago. The first President Harrison, who was considered an authority on questions of arboriculture, and who has been quoted by almost every writer on this subject, maintained, in an address before the Ohio Historical Society, that a long period elapsed before the growth which came in upon abandoned cleared land became assimilated in kind to the trees of the surrounding forest. For that reason alone he believed the works of the Mound Builders to be of "immense age."

Even the purpose for which they were erected is often doubtful; and one class of them baffles all rational conjecture. In the State of Wisconsin, occupying the region between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, are many earthworks of a peculiar character, which find few parallels in other parts of the country, while in the same region is remarked the absence of the circumvallations and immense mounds so numerous elsewhere. The significance of these works in the northwest seems to be in their configuration alone, though what that significance could have been is altogether inexplicable.

Generally, these figures are in groups, though sometimes they stand alone; they represent animals, usually in relief, though frequently the

1 Squier and Davis: Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Pre-historic Man, etc., Dr. Daniel Wilson, p. 228.

reverse, and the figures are varied enough and distinct enough, to

Shapes of

Animal Mounds.

show that they were meant to be the effigies of perhaps every quadruped then known in the country, of birds with outstretched wings, of fishes with fins extended, of reptiles, of man; and of inanimate things, the war-club, the bow and arrow, the pipe, the cross, the crescent, the circle, and other mathematical forms. They

rise above the surface two, four, sometimes six feet in height; the animal figures vary from ninety to one hundred and twenty the mounds. feet in length. But there are rectangular embankments, only a few feet in height and width, that stretch out to a length of several hundred feet. Among all these representations of animals there is no one more remarkable than that recently described, called the Big Elephant Mound, found in Wisconsin a few miles below the mouth of the Wisconsin River. Its name indicates its form; its length is one hundred and thirty-five feet, and its other proportions are in accordance with that measurement.1 It

Big Elephant Mound.

does not seem probable that the people who piled up these mysterious earthworks could represent a mastodon or elephant if it were not a living creature with which they were familiar.

Objects of

In other parts of the country walls of stone and earth were raised for defence; mounds of great or small dimensions were the builders. heaped up to cover the dead, or erected to their memory, or set up as monuments where some mysterious rites of incremation, or sacrifice, or worship had been celebrated; or they marked the former site of temples or of habitation. The precise object of the builders, or how they attained it, can often be only guessed at; but that there was a purpose connected, in some way, with the civil er 1 Smithsonian Report, 1872.