Nation in a Nutshell | Page 2

artistic people, spread over an
immense area, and leaving behind them the most positive testimony,
not only of their existence, but of their manners and customs, their arts,
their trade, their methods of warfare, and their religion and worship.
Compared with this people, the Red Indians found here by the Pilgrims
and the Cavaliers were modern intruders upon the land. These ancient
Americans, indeed, were far superior in all respects to the Red Indian
of our historic acquaintance. When the Red Indians replaced them, the
civilization of the continent fell from a high to a much lower plane.
[Sidenote: The Mound-Builders.]
The great race of which I speak is known as "the Mound-Builders."
Like the "Wall-Builders" of Greece and Italy, they stand out, in the
light of their remains, as distinctly as if we had historical records of
them. The Mound-Builders occupied, often in thickly settled
communities, the region about our great Northern Lakes, the valleys of
the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the regions watered by the
affluents of these rivers, and a wide and irregular belt along the coast of
the Gulf of Mexico. There is little or no evidence that the same race
inhabited any part of the country now occupied by the Eastern and
Middle States; but some few traces of them are found in North and
South Carolina.
[Sidenote: Ancient Mounds.]
The chief relics left by this comparatively polished race are the very
numerous mounds, or artificial hills, found scattered over the country.
These are sometimes ten, and sometimes forty and fifty, feet in height,
with widely varying bases. They present many forms; they are circular
and pyramidal, square and polygonal, and in some places are
manifestly imitations of the shapes of beasts, birds, and human beings.
There are districts where hundreds of these mounds appear within a
limited area. Sometimes--as at Aztalan, in Wisconsin, and at Newark,

in the Licking Valley--a vast series of earthwork enclosures is
discovered, sometimes with embankments twelve feet high and fifty
broad, within which are variously shaped mounds, definitely formed
avenues, and passages and ponds. These enclosures amply prove, aside
from the geological evidences of their antiquity, the existence of a race
very different from the Red Indians. They were clearly a people not
nomadic, but with fixed settlements, cultivators of the soil, and skilful
in the art of military defence.
[Sidenote: Altars and Temples.]
The excavations of the wonderful mounds have brought to light many
things more curious than the mounds themselves. It seems to be
established that the mounds were used for four distinct purposes. They
were altars for sacrifice, and, like the Persians, whose sacrificial
ceremonies strikingly resembled those of the Mound-Builders, they
were sun-worshippers. They offered up the most costly gifts, and even
human victims. The pyramidal mounds, with avenues leading to the
summits, were the sites of the stately sun and moon temples. Here,
undoubtedly, imposing ceremonies were often performed. The lower or
"knoll" mounds were used as the sepulchres of the dead. They yield up
to the modern antiquary numberless skulls, of a type distinctly different
from those of the Red Indians. The Mound-Builders buried their dead,
most often, in a sitting posture, adorned with shell beads and ivory
ornaments. Sometimes the dead were burned. Finally, the mounds were
employed as points of observation.
[Sidenote: Relics of the Mounds.]
[Sidenote: Early Arts.]
That the Mound-Builders were a far more civilized race than the
Indians is clearly revealed by the relics found in and about the mounds.
They have left behind them thousands of flint arrow-heads, many of
beautiful workmanship. They used spades, rimmers, borers, celts, axes,
fleshers, scrapers, pestles, and other implements whose use cannot now
be determined, made of various stones, such as porphyry, greenstone,
and feldspar. They knew well the use of tobacco, for among their most
artistic and elaborately carved remains are pipes, some of them
representing animals and human heads. It seems to be certain that they
had even attained the art of weaving cloth fabrics; for pieces of cloth,
of a material akin to hemp, have been found in the mounds, with

uniform and regularly spun threads, and every evidence that they were
woven by some deft invention or mechanical device. It is certain that
the Red Indian was ignorant of this valuable art.
[Sidenote: Primeval Mining.]
Among the highly wrought remains of the mounds are fanciful
water-jugs, well carved and symmetrical in shape, some of which were
evidently made to keep water cool. The human heads represented on
these bear no resemblance to the Indian types. Drinking cups with
carved rims and handles, sepulchral urns with curious ornaments,
kettles and other pieces of skilful pottery, copper chisels, axes, knives,
awls, spear and arrow heads, and even bracelets, come to light, here
and there. There is no doubt that