This mound was used, at least in part, for burial purposes. Nearly fifty years ago, when the writer of this note explored this remarkable artificial elevation of eighty feet in height, he found in the excavation numerous beads of shell or bone, or both, ornaments of the dead buried there.––L. C. D.
This proves nothing. A silver medal of John Quincy Adams’s administration, evidently presented to some Indian chief was, in 1894, found in Wisconsin, twelve feet below the surface. Iron and silver tools and ornaments, evidently made in Paris for the Indian trade, have been found in Ohio and Wisconsin mounds. It is now sufficiently demonstrated that the mound-builders were the ancestors of the aborigines found in the country by the first white settlers, and that the mounds are of various ages, ranging perhaps from three hundred to a thousand years. Various Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology go into the matter with convincing detail.––R. G. T.
Jacob Wolf, in digging a well on Hacker’s creek, found a piece of timber which had been evidently cut off at one end, twelve or thirteen feet in the ground––marks of the axe were plainly distinguishable on it.
Footnotes for Chapter 1
King Shingiss was a famous village chief, “a terror to the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania.” A brother, and later the successor of King Beaver, his camp was at the mouth of Beaver Creek, which empties into the Ohio twenty-six miles below “the forks” (site of Pittsburg). Christopher Gist visited him November 24, 1750. In 1759, when Fort Pitt was built, Shingiss moved up Beaver Creek to Kuskuskis on the Mahoning, and finally to the Muskingum. The land about the mouth of Beaver Creek is called “Shingis Old Town” in the Ft. Stanwix treaty, 1784.––R. G. T.
The numbers here set down and those given below, are as they were ascertained by Capt. Hutchins, who visited the most of the tribes for purpose of learning their population in 1768.