MOUND BUILDERS CLUNG TO THE WATER COURSES-- CHAIN OF PREHISTORIC FORTS--WAR AND DOMESTIC IMPLEMENTS-- NATURE OF HABITS INFERRED FROM RELICS-- SOMEWHAT COMMERCIAL--NO HIEROGLYPHICS OR EFFIGIES --CONCLUSION: "WE KNOW NOTHING"-- PROBABLY A RACE OF SLAVES-- PERHAPS THE MOST ANCIENT OF PEOPLES-- WERE THEY FATHERS OF THE TOLTECS?-- A STAGGERING CYCLE-- PERCHANCE, THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE WORLD.
The instinct of the normal mind is to be active, whether the results of its exertions are of practical value or not. Man is proud of his mental nimbleness and especially delights in speculating as to his own origin and evolution. There is no subject which has given him such unfailing pleasure and which has been the source of a greater charm to young and old than the consideration of dead types of civilization which have left their faint finger-prints in architectural ruins, vast sepulchres, fortresses of war, domestic utensils and skeletons of man and beast.
In the impressive remains of the prehistoric peoples of the central Americas the speculator reads the fact that in the very dim past the most advanced civilization of the western hemisphere was near or in the tropical zone, which, during that period, might have carried with it the present invigorating elements of the temperate clime. Whether that ancient American civilization originated in wanderers from the orient of the Old World, or was itself the father of what has been thus designated with questionable authority, is a subject which has been turned through the mill of argument and logic in all its bearings since men commenced to use their eyes and minds in the New (?) World.
In our United States of North America, the prehistoric races were evidently of a lower order than those of Mexico, Central and Northern South America. They left no great architectural ruins pointing to a decided advance in art, mechanics, and even astronomical science, but rather rude earthworks and burial places, as of semicivilized people, who were warring among themselves, living as nomads and hunting and fishing along the valleys of the great waterways. The most striking, as well as the most general fact which applies to the Mound Builders of the United States, whose most favored haunts were the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio, was that they never wandered far from the Great Lakes or the Great Rivers. Therefore, in Indiana, their earthworks are more numerous in the southern part of the state than in the central or northern. In White County itself many of the smaller mounds have been found on the banks of the Monon, in its northern sections, especially near the confluence of the Little and Big Monon.
As stated by Smith, in his History of Indiana. the mounds in the Hoosier State have been divided into three classes, designated as burial, temple and habitation mounds. It is evident that all the mounds were built by the same race, although in some of them the remains of a later race have been found buried. The mounds designated as forts have been traced from the southern part of New York diagonally across the country to the Wabash River, and another chain from the Ohio River, in Clark County, northward into Madison County; thence eastward to Central Ohio, and thence southward through Kentucky to Tennessee. It will thus be seen that the valley of the Wabash was a most important link in the chain of fortifications, which, as a whole, appear to have been erected in an effort to hold the great river valleys against some powerful enemy; in historic times, the French fortified the same routes against the English. Who were the warring nations in the times of the Mound Builders is beyond conjecture, but their undeveloped civilization had disappeared long before the traditions of the red man commenced to filter into the racial literature of the western world.
In some of the Indiana mounds ashes and charred remains of animals and human bones have been found; in others, the graves contained human skeletons encased in stone sarcophagi, with various utensils and implements of war and domestic use. The mortars were usually made of bowlders [sic] cut into bowl shape for grinding corn and seeds. There were stone axes of various shapes, and scrapers, peelers or fleshers. Arrows and spear heads, drills made of hard stone, knives of flint, flint saws, pipes artistically carved, crude hoes and spades and ornaments of colored stone abounded. The material used in the manufacture of pottery was a clay mixed with powdered shells, which thus formed a kind of cement of great tenacity and fire-resisting qualities. The specimens of pottery found in the mounds throughout Indiana are rude when compared with the work of civilized people in a similar line, and when you have named cooking utensils, water vessels, cups and vases you have about completed the scope of their efforts.
A study of such relics as these, in connection with the earthworks whose indistinct outlines could be traced until advancing industries and modern activities of all kinds leveled them, has led to various conclusions which are of ingenious and of speculative interest. Their methods of tilling the soil must necessarily have been of the most primitive character, for their implements were very rude, usually chipped out of quartz. No bones of domestic animals have been found, and all the tillage of the soil must have been done by hand. But the mounds have yielded many implements of the chase and others evidently designed for the treatment of furs and skins, while the immense shell heaps that have been unearthed in some places point to the abundance of fish food in the lakes and rivers. As they were compelled to rely upon the chase, fishing and the limited cultivation of the soil for subsistence, they did not gather in large bodies or centers of population. One of the strongest evidences of their migratory character is that they had no general burial places.
Nearly all the burial mounds discovered show that they were the resting places of a very limited number of individuals. The few exceptions only prove that occasionally a considerable number found such permanent abiding places that they could enjoy the historic satisfaction of burying their dead in companies.
It is evident from the discovered specimens of cloth that the Mound Builders of Indiana and the Ohio Valley were clad in what resembled hemp garments, spun with a uniform thread and woven with a warp and woof. A shuttle has even been found. While this cloth was of coarse texture, it was often highly ornamented.
Archaeologists have concluded that the comparatively large number of copper implements present in the mounds of the Ohio Valley can be accounted for only upon the supposition that the Builders were in direct touch with the Lake Superior region. They were to some extent a commercial people, not only trading for Lake Superior copper, but for Georgia mica.
As noted, they were somewhat advanced in the manufacture and adornment of vessels for domestic use, but on none of them has been found a letter or symbol that would give a clew [sic] as to the language or origin of the Mound Builders. It has been the theme of much comment on the part of those who dispute the theory that the earthworks, known as Effigy mounds, were constructed in the form of animals; that such forms (corresponding to the Indian totems) were never represented either as ornaments or structural designs in the various bowls, vases, water jugs, pitchers, drinking cups and sepulchral urns which have been unearthed in such numbers.
A fair example of the way in which American archaeologists have thrashed out the problem of the Mound Builders, with the final conclusion that they really know nothing more than when they commenced, is given in Smith's "History of Indiana" in the following words: "Nothing can be gathered of their burial customs. It is true that quite a number of skeletons have been found, but their positions or conditions give no clew [sic] to any settled or definite custom of disposing of the dead. The theory has been advanced that they were cremationists, and urns have been found which enthusiasts at once classed as burial urns. There is little or no foundation for the cremation theory. In some of the mounds flat stones covered with charcoal have been found. Beneath the stones, in a sort of vault was a black mold which has been taken as the dust of the dead remaining after cremation. There is no stone in Indiana that would bear heat enough, applied in that way, to consume a body beneath it. The presence of the mold can be accounted for in a dozen ways that are far more reasonable.
"It has been held that in religion they were worshipers of the sun, and that they offered human sacrifices. The fact that all the mounds look to the east is about the only thing upon which the theory of sun worship is hinged, and that proves very little. Practically there are no evidences that they offered human sacrifices.
"Were they a warlike race? That is a question hard to determine. The remains of their fortifications, except in a few instances, are of low earthworks, not over four or five feet high. It is evident that they were a race of slaves, and such a race is seldom warlike. The burial mounds seldom contain more than two or three skeletons, and the positions in which they are placed give evidence that one was the superior and the others the inferiors. The crania prove the same fact. With many of the ancient races it was the custom to bury one or more slaves with the dead ruler, or master, and this was likely the case with the Mound Builders.
"To what age of the world are they to be assigned? How many centuries have rolled away since they disappeared? These are perplexing questions. It is a strange thought that away back in the dim past,perhaps as far back as the days of the Pharaohs, there existed in what we delight to call the New World, a people numbering millions, who have died and left no trace of their history. Even the Moabites have left their stones covered over with strange symbols, but the Mound Builders have left nothing of the kind. On some of the mounds trees of more than a thousand years growth are standing. The most ancient remains of man found on the earth are distinguished by the flattening of the tibia, and this peculiarity is found in an exaggerated degree in those of the Mound Builders. A distinguished writer on this subject says: 'From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon we have bones at least two thousand five hundred years old; from the pyramids and catacombs of Egypt, both mummied and unmummied crania have been taken of still higher antiquity, in perfect preservation; nevertheless, the skeletons deposited in our mounds from the Lakes to the Gulf are crumbling into dust through age alone. The peculiar anatomical construction of the few remaining crania not only prove the Mound Builders to have been very ancient, but that they were wholly unlike any other race known to have existed. A critical examination of the remains of this ancient race of America, and a comparison with those of all the other races of the world, tend to throw a doubt over the theory that all mankind descended from one common father.
"Of other races we know something of their origin. We can account for the origin of all the races of Europe, Asia and Africa, but no one has yet been able to tell whence sprang the American Mound Builders, nor to present even a plausible theory on that much disputed point. We examine the relics they have left behind; we study their rude carvings; we measure the crania of their dead, and then we put this and that together and build up a theory as to their origin and proper place in history; but all we can do is to theorize.
"That the Mound Builders antedated by many years, perhaps centuries, the Toltecs of Mexico, can hardly be doubted, and the history of the Toltecs can be traced back nine centuries before the Christian era. The ancient records of the Toltecs repeatedly speak of a great empire to the northwest of them, and these same records declare that the Toltecs migrated from that empire to Mexico, and it is supposed that this migration took place a thousand years before Christ. Whether the Toltecs were descendants of the Mound Builders and became civilized after their migration to Mexico is yet an unsettled question. If the great empire referred to by the Toltecs was that of the Mound Builders, it becomes evident that the origin of the Mound Builders and their first occupation of American soil must have been thousands of years ago. It is beyond all question that they disappeared more than a thousand years ago. Were they driven out by the Indians? If so, what a vast amount of sympathy we have wasted on the Red Men, for the Whites have only taken from them what they themselves had taken by violence before! Had the Mound Builders come into America by way of Behring Straits, as has been claimed, or in any other way, it is apparent that some of the remains of the race from whence they sprung would have been found in some of the old countries.
"The countless years they must have lived upon this soil fairly staggers us. When their mounds were piled up and their fortifications erected Babylon was yet in the womb of time. They were hoary with the frost of centuries before Romulus and Remus traced the foundations of the Eternal City. Their builders had been moldering in the dust for half a thousand years when Alexander swam the Hellespont. The more one studies the works of this ancient people the more he is lost in wonder that a race so numerous and powerful could so completely have passed away that even the period of its existence is the merest conjecture. It is as if they had existed before the flood and that the mighty storm which Noah and his family alone were able to safely outride, had swept them suddenly from the face of the earth in the midst of their power and glory. It is hard to believe that they were utterly annihilated by another race. If so, whence came that other race, in numbers and power great enough to work such mighty devastation? What a vast period of time separates us from the Mound Builders! What great strides the world has taken since they disappeared! From the stone age to the age of steel, what wonders have intervened! Truly, the Old World has passed away and all things have become new. There is a chasm of time, of history, between the two that man has not been able to bridge. The period of their existence is a blank leaf in the history of the world that has not been written over. They were a race without a written language of any kind.
"Modern civilization, with all its knowledge and wisdom, stands at the edge of the abyss of time which separates the present from the past, when this buried race lived and flourished, and can only speculate as to its origin, its life, its history and fate. We stand upon the mounds erected by them and wander around the fortifications; we gaze upon the implements of warfare left behind them, dropped perhaps by the warrior stricken by death and never touched by man again until picked up by the curious seeker after relics in these happy times of ours; we look at the skeletons as they are unearthed, speculate and theorize, and are forced to admit that of their time, manners, customs, origin and fate—the mystery is still impenetrable."
The picture is certainly confused when the scattered and disconnected fragments of the mysterious race point to a people of slaves—at the same time, to a nation of warriors; to a semi-civilized race of unsettled hunters and fishermen, yet who have builded an empire which the Toltecs remember by tradition; to a seething, unformed conglomeration of tribes and families, spreading over the valleys and prairies of interior America, and yet completely obliterated either by ages of attrition, or racial displacement, of which not even tradition has left the faintest clew [sic]. The entire unsolved problem is perhaps the greatest wonder which the Creator has left to the solution of mankind, and is the weird background for the writing of any history which would picture the authentic development of the splendid country which was once held by the Mound Builders of Ancient America.