American Indians Part 8

XV. MOUNDS AND THEIR BUILDERS.

In many parts of the United States, from western New York to the Rocky Mountains and even beyond, there are great numbers of artificial heaps and extensive embankments of earth. These show skill in construction, and from them have been dug many relics of artistic merit and good workmanship. At one time these earthworks and relics were generally believed to be the work of a single, highly civilized people, who preceded the Indians, who were not related to them, and who are now extinct. To this people the name "mound-builders" was given.

There are three ways in which we can learn about these so-called "mound-builders." We may learn something from the mounds themselves, from the relics found in the mounds, and from the bones of persons who were buried in them.

Studying the mounds themselves, we find that they differ in different areas. We will look at three areas:

(1) In Ohio there are thousands of mounds and earthworks. Near every important modern town there are groups of them. Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Dayton, Xenia, are all near important mounds.

The regular enclosures are numerous in this area: these are great embankments of earth inclosing a regular s.p.a.ce. Some are in the form of circles; others are four-sided; in a few cases they are eight-sided.

Sometimes a square and a circle are united. There is one such combination at Hopeton; one of the embankments is a nearly true circle containing twenty acres; joined to it is a square of almost the same area.

At Newark there was a wonderful group of enclosures. The group covered about two miles square and consisted of three divisions, which were connected with one another by long parallel embankment walls. One circle in this group contained more than thirty acres: the walls were twelve feet high and fifty feet wide; a ditch seven feet deep and thirty-five feet wide bordered it on the inner side; a gap of eighty feet in the circle served as an entrance. In the center of the area enclosed by this great circle was a curious earth heap somewhat like a bird in form. Northwest from this great circle, nearly a mile distant, were two connected enclosures, one octagonal, the other circular: the former contained more than fifty acres, the latter twenty. East from these and northeast from the great circle was a fine twenty-acre enclosure, nearly a square in form. Besides these great walls, there were long parallel lines of connecting embankment walls, small circular enclosures, and little mounds in considerable variety. This great ma.s.s of works represented an enormous amount of time and labor.

What was the purpose of these regular enclosures? Some writers claim that they were forts for protection; others consider them protections for the corn-fields; others think they were places for games or religious ceremonials; one eminent man insists that they were foundations upon which were built long and narrow houses.

"Altar mounds" occur in Ohio. Professor Putnam and his a.s.sistants opened a number of these. They are small, rounded heaps of earth. At their center is a basin-shaped ma.s.s of hard clay showing the effect of fire. These basins are a yard or four feet across and contain ashes and charcoal. Upon these are found many curious objects. On one altar were two bushels of ornaments made of stone, copper, mica, sh.e.l.ls, bears' teeth, and sixty thousand pearls. Most of these objects were pierced with a small hole and were apparently strung as ornaments. These objects had all been thrown into a fire blazing on the altar and had been spoiled by the heat. After the kindling of the fire, and the destruction of these precious things, earth had been heaped up over the altars, completing the mound.

The most famous mound in Ohio is _the great serpent_ in Adams County. It lies upon a narrow ridge between three streams, which unite. It is a gigantic serpent form made in earth; across the widely opened jaws it measures seventy-five feet; the body, just behind the head, measures thirty feet across and five feet high; following the curves the length is thirteen hundred forty-eight feet. The tail is thrown into a triple coil.

In front of the serpent is an elliptical enclosure with a heap of stones at its center. Beyond this is a form, somewhat indistinct, thought by some to be a frog. Probably this wonderful earthwork was connected with some old religion. While there are many other earthworks of other forms in Ohio, the _sacred enclosures_, the _altar mounds_, and the _great serpent_ are the most characteristic.

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Great Serpent Mound: Ohio. (From The Century Magazine.)

(2) In Wisconsin the most interesting mounds are the _effigy mounds_.

There are great numbers of them in parts of this and a few adjoining states. They are earthen forms of mammals, birds, and reptiles. They are usually in groups; they are generally well shaped and of gigantic size.

Among the quadrupeds represented are the buffalo, moose, elk, deer, fox, wolf, panther, and lynx. Mr. Peet, who has carefully studied them, shows that quadruped mammals are always represented in profile so that only two legs are shown; the birds have their wings spread; reptiles sprawl, showing all four legs; fish are mere bodies without limbs. We have said these earth pictures are gigantic: some panthers have tails three hundred and fifty feet long, and some eagles measure one thousand feet from tip to tip of the outspread wings. Not only are these great animal and bird pictures found in Wisconsin in relief; occasionally they are found cut or sunken in the soil. With these curious effigy mounds there occur hundreds of simple burial mounds.

The purpose of the effigy mounds is somewhat uncertain. Some authors think they represent the totem animals after which the families of their builders were named, and that they served as objects of worship or as guardians over the villages.

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Ground Plan of Earthworks at Newark, Ohio. (After Squier and Davis.)

(3) Farther south, in western Tennessee, another cla.s.s of mounds is common. These contain graves made of slabs of stone set on edge. The simplest of these stone graves consist of six stones: two sides, two ends, one top, and one bottom. There may be a single one of these graves in a mound, or there may be many. In one mound, about twelve miles from Nashville, which was forty-five feet across and twelve feet high, were found about one hundred skeletons, mostly in stone graves, which were in ranges, one above another. The upper graves contained the bones of bodies, which had been buried stretched at full length; the bones were found in their natural positions. The lower graves were short and square, and the bones in them had been cleaned and piled up in little heaps. This mound was very carefully made. The lids of the upper graves were so arranged as to make a perfectly smooth, rounded surface. Sometimes these stone graves of Tennessee are not placed in mounds, but in true graveyards in the level fields. In these stone graves are found beautiful objects of stone, sh.e.l.l, and pottery. The stone-grave men were true artists in working these materials.

In the same district are found many dirt rings called "house-circles."

These occur in groups and appear to mark the sites of ancient villages, each being the ruin of a house. These rings are nearly circular and from ten to fifty feet across, and from a few inches to two or three feet high.

Excavation within them shows old floors made of hard clay, with the fireplace or hearth. The stone-grave people lived in these houses. They often buried little children who died, under the floor. Their stone coffins measured only from one to four feet long. They contain the little skeletons and all the childish treasures-pretty cups and bowls of pottery, sh.e.l.l beads, pearls, and even the leg bones of birds, on which the babies used to cut their teeth as our babies do on rubber rings.

These are but three of the areas where mounds are found; there are several others. If the "mound-builders" were a single people, with one set of customs, one language, and one government, it is strange that there should be such great differences in the mounds they built. If we had s.p.a.ce to speak about the relics from the mounds, they would tell a story.

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Sh.e.l.l Gorgets: Tennessee. (After Holmes.)

They would show that the builders of the mounds, while they made many beautiful things of stone, sh.e.l.l, bone, beaten metals, could not smelt ores. They were Stone Age men, not civilized men. The objects from different areas differ so much in kind, pattern, and material as to suggest that their makers were not one people. Study of skulls from mounds in one district-as Ohio or Iowa-show that different types of men built the mounds even of one area.

So neither the mounds, the relics, nor the remains prove that there was one people, the "mound-builders," but rather that the mounds were built by many different tribes. These tribes were not of civilized, but of barbarous, Stone Age men. It is likely that some of the tribes that built the mounds still live in the United States. Thus the Shawnees may be the descendants of the stone-grave people, the Winnebagoes may have come from the effigy-builders of Wisconsin, and the Cherokees may be the old Ohio "mound-builders."

E. G. SQUIER and E. H. DAVIS.-Authors of _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, published in 1847. It was the _first_ great work on American Archaeology.

INCREASE ALLEN LAPHAM.-Civil engineer, scientist. His _Antiquities of Wisconsin_ was published in 1855.

STEPHEN D. PEET.-Minister, antiquarian, editor. Established _The American Antiquarian_, which he still conducts. Wrote _Emblematic Mounds_.

CYRUS THOMAS.-Minister, entomologist, archaeologist. In charge of the mound exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology. Wrote _Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States_ and _Report of the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology_.

FREDERIC WARD PUTNAM.-Ichthyologist, archaeologist, teacher. For many years Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology, at Cambridge, Ma.s.s. Has organized much field work upon mounds of Ohio and Tennessee. Also Curator in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

XVI. THE ALGONKINS.

Algonkin tribes occupied the Atlantic seacoast from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick south to Virginia, and stretched west as far, at places, as the Rocky Mountains. They also occupied a large area in the interior of British America north of the Great Lakes. Brinton names more than thirty tribes of this great group. Among the best known of these were the Lenape (Delawares), Blackfeet, Ojibwas, and Crees.

It was chiefly Algonkin tribes with whom the first white settlers met. The Indians who supplied the Pilgrims with corn in that first dreadful winter were Algonkins; so were Powhatan and Pocahontas, King Philip and Ma.s.sasoit. Of course whites came into contact with the Iroquois in New York, and with the Cherokees, the Creeks, and their kin in the south, but much the larger part of their early Indian acquaintance was Algonkin.

There are a number of borrowed Indian words in our English language of to-day. _Wigwam_, _wampum_, _squaw_, _papoose_, _moccasin_, are examples.

These have been taken from the Indian languages into our own, and most of them-all of those mentioned-are Algonkin. They soon became common to English speakers, and were carried by them everywhere they went. All the western tribes had their own names for all these objects, but we have forced these upon them, and to-day we may hear Utes speak of _wigwams_ and Navajo talk about _squaws_ or _moccasins_.

We shall speak of two Algonkin tribes. One-the Lenape-is eastern; the other-the Blackfeet-is western. The former are woodland, the latter Plains Indians. The Lenape lived in settled villages, and had a good deal of agriculture; they were also hunters, fishermen, and warriors. Their houses were like those of their Iroquois neighbors, but each family had its own.

They were huts of poles and interwoven branches with a thatching of corn leaves, the stalk of sweet-flag, or the bark of trees. Sometimes at the center of the village, surrounded by the houses, was a sort of hillock or mound from which the country around might be overlooked. The women made good garments of deerskin with skillful beadwork. In cooking they used soapstone vessels. For pounding corn they had mortars of wood, dug out of a section of a tree trunk, and long stone pestles.

In districts where the wild rice or _zizania_ grew abundantly great quant.i.ties of it were gathered. The women in canoes paddled out among the plants, bent the heads over the edge of the canoe and beat out the grain.

This was a food supply of no importance to the Lenape, but the Ojibwas and their neighbors used much of it.

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Ojibwa Women Gathering Wild Rice. (After Schoolcraft.)

In war, the men used the bow and arrows, spear and tomahawk. They protected themselves with round shields. They speared fish in the streams and lakes or caught them in brush nets or with hooks of bone or bird-claws.

There were three totems of the Lenape. Every man was either a wolf, turkey, or turtle. He had one of these three animals for his emblem, and was as fond of drawing or carving it as a boy among us is of writing his name. This emblem was signed to treaties, it was painted on the houses, it was carved on stones. But only those who were turtles drew their totem entire; usually the wolf or the turkey were represented only by one foot.

Between a person and his totem there was a curious friendship, and it was believed that the animal was a sort of protector and friend of those who bore his name. All who had the same totem were blood-relations.

All Algonkins were accustomed to draw pictures to record events. The blankets of chiefs were decorated with such pictures. The Ojibwas were fond of writing birch-bark letters. One of the most interesting Indian records known is the _Walam olum_; this means the red score or red record.