THE CALAVERAS SKULL.

17

At this exhumation, Dr. Koch always affirmed that twenty persons of the vicinity were present; others have vouched for his integrity and general truthfulness; and though he had little knowledge of scientific facts and methods, and made grave mistakes in the classification of fossil bones, his experience and success in recovering them was greater than that of any other explorers.2 If such a scene, then, the evidences of which he claims to have uncovered, ever occurred scene in itself by no means improbable if man and the mastodon lived at the same time in the same region of country - a picture is presented of a hunt by pre-historic men on this continent vivid enough to appeal to the dullest imagination, and more remarkable than any similar incident yet found anywhere else.

a

A year later than this asserted discovery on the Bourbeuse River, the same diligent collector claimed to have made another which must be considered on the same grounds. In the bottomlands of the Pomme de Terre River, in Benton County, Missouri, he dug up, he asserts, an almost entire skeleton of another mastodon, beneath which were two stone arrow-heads in such a position that they must have been there when the animal fell. They lay in a bed of vegetable mould, covered by twenty feet of alternate strata of sand, clay, and gravel, hitherto undisturbed, and on the surface of the ground grew a forest of old

trees.

Dr. Koch's Arrowhead.

Fossil human skull in California.

Later discoveries of other fossils are not less significant, in the controversies to which they have given rise, of growing interest in the importance of the subject. In 1857, the fragment of a human skull was taken, it is asserted, from the gold drift of California, one hundred and eighty feet below the surface of Table Mountain, in association with the fossil bones of extinct animals. More recently, in 1867 or 1868, another human cranium was found in a mining shaft in Calaveras County, which Professor Whitney, of the State Geological Survey, believes to have been an authentic "find." To all the alleged circumstances in regard to it he gave a careful examination, and his testimony is accepted as conclusive by many eminent scientific men. The shaft in which the bone was buried is one hundred and fifty feet deep, and was sunk through five beds of lava and volcanic tufa, and four beds of gold-bearing

1 Pre-historic Races of the United States, by J. W. Foster, p. 62. Charles Rau, in Smithsonian Report for 1872.

2 The Mastodon giganteus mounted in the British Museum was found in Missouri by Dr. Koch, and a representation of it, copied from Owen, is given in Dana's Manual of Geology, 1875, p. 566.

Among others, by the late Professor Jeffries Wyman.

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.

Indian.

THE North American Indians are, as a race, in no higher plane of culture now than they were three hundred years ago. If The North 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