Mound-Builders | Page 7

in great numbers.
Such advancement in mining, sagacity in warfare, industrial pursuits,
and geometric skill, as their works display, prove their great superiority
of race over the modern Indian. Their implements, some of them most
elaborately made, their brick-making and various other ingenious
works, enable us to place them high as an industrial people, while their
sacred enclosures, and altars, and tablets, together with the numerous
evidences of their being an agricultural nation, enable us to place them
far above the modern Indian in the scale of civilization.
The people of the United States, though much to be commended
because of their prudence and forethought in laying out their modern
towns and cities along the various water courses, which serve as the
different highways of commerce, have by no means shown a superior
sagacity in that respect to the Mound-builders, whose great centres of
population are now mostly occupied, or are encroached upon by the
modern cities.
We may with safety assert that the population about Newark, and Xenia,
and Mound City, was far above what it is now. The country about
Dayton, Miamisburg, Oxford, Hamilton and Marietta was, undoubtedly,
in the days of the Mound-builders moving with a greater mass of

human beings than it can boast of to-day.
And if those peaceable and industrious inhabitants were as numerous as
their remains indicate, what must have been the strength of those
invading hordes who caused their downfall and perhaps wiped out
forever every living representative of that ancient race, who could leave
no more lasting memorial of their existence and struggles than those
mysterious mounds which have given them their name.
ANTIQUITY OF THE MOUND-BUILDERS.--Upon this point there
are many theories, some regarding them as the earliest of the Indian
tribes. Others give them a very great age and claim them to belong to
preadamite man. By far the greater number of archæologists, however,
place their existence at about 2,000 years ago.
In favor of the latter view we may call as evidence the present forest
trees, which, though of great age, still flourish on some of the ancient
remains. On one of the mounds at Marietta, Ohio, there stood a gigantic
tree, which, when cut down, displayed 800 rings of annual growth. In
many other places, trees of the age of 750 years have been cut, and
underneath them evidences of previous forests found. One tree 750
years old was found to have underneath it, on the walls of one of the
forts in Ohio, the cast of another tree of equal size, which would carry
us back at least 1,500 years since those trees began to grow on those
deserted walls of that ancient fortification.
We have some data in the vegetable accumulations in the ancient
mining shafts near Lake Superior, as well as in the vegetable and other
matter deposited in the numerous pits and trenches found among the
works. Though these evidences cannot give the exact time of their
accumulation, yet they give it approximately, by comparison with
similar recent deposits.
There is another still stronger argument in favor of their antiquity, viz.,
the decayed condition of the skeletons. The skeletons of the oldest
Indian tribes are comparatively sound while those of the
Mound-builders are much decayed. If they are sound when brought out,
they at once begin to disintegrate in the atmosphere, which is a sure

sign of their antiquity. We know that some skeletons in Europe have
lately been exhumed, which, though buried more than 1,000 years, are
comparatively firm and well-preserved. We are, I think, bound to
ascribe a greater antiquity to the Mound-builders' skeletons than to
those found in the ancient barrows of Europe. Other considerations,
such as stream encroachment, and river-terrace formation, might also
be brought in as presumptive arguments in favor of their great
antiquity.
ORIGIN OF THE MOUND-BUILDERS.--This is a question not easily
answered. It brings me into no discredit before the educated world to
acknowledge ignorance on this mysterious point. The study of
Craniology and Philology, in connection with Ethnology, shall alone
throw light on this subject. Dr. Wilson says, in his "Prehistoric Man" (p.
123), "The ethnical classification of this strange race is still an unsettled
question," and he declares without fear of contradiction, "that
especially concerning the Scioto Mound skull, the elevation and
breadth of the frontal bone, differs essentially from the Indian, and that
the cerebral development was more in accordance with the character of
that singular people, who without architecture have perpetuated, in
mere structures of earth, the evidences of geometric skill, a definite
means of determining angles, a fixed standard of measurement, and the
capacity as well as the practice of repeating geometrically constructed
works of large and uniform dimensions."
Undoubtedly they were skilled in agriculture, from the remains of
ancient garden-beds, which were