The Origin of the Mound Builders

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

These mounds are divided into three classes, according to their use. The most northern remains of the Mound-builders yet discovered are on the southern shore of Lake Superior, and in the valley of the Wisconsin River. All of these mounds are representations of animals on a gigantic scale—hence we will call them effigy mounds—and seem to represent their religious rites. No other mounds are found here, which was not a place of residence, and this character of mound is not found elsewhere except the great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio. Around Chicago the mounds are not more than twelve feet high, but in Iowa they were so plentiful that the French named the river in that State “Des Moines,” which means “the mounds.” Where St. Louis stands was once so thickly studded with mounds, that the city has been called “The Mound City.” In the State of Mississippi the largest river was so thickly strewn with these prehistoric ruins that the Choctaws called it “Yazoo-okhinnah”—“The River of Ancient Ruins.” In Illinois the mounds are oblong, square, ellipsoidal and conical. Cahokia, the largest mound in the United States, stood here. It formed a parallelogram with sides respectively seven hundred and five hundred feet long and ninety feet high, and covered fifteen acres—larger than the largest pyramid in Egypt. On the top of this mound was probably a temple, for many bones and funeral vases were taken from the interior; so we call this a temple mound. The banks of the Ohio, Scioto, Wabash and Muskingum are so thickly covered with mounds and tumuli, that Squier and Davis estimate that Ohio alone contains ten thousand, and plainly indicate that this was the capital of the Mound-builders’ empire. A number of these are conical mounds, and the bones and charcoal indicate that they were sacrificial mounds. Near Newark, Ohio, occur the most stupendous of the Mound-builders’ works, covering two square miles, and containing walls, pyramids, circles and turrets, which in our day, with machinery and horse-power, would require many thousand men many months to perform.

One of the wonders of the world is the great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, which stamps the religious character of the vanished race. The total length of the serpent is fourteen hundred and fifteen feet, and the distance between the jaws one hundred feet. It lies on the crest of a hill, and its folds correspond with the windings of the hill. Is this serpent an emblem of the one that plays such a part in the mythology of the old world? “This symbol prevails in Egypt, Greece, Assyria, and among the superstitions of the Celts, Hindoos and Chinese. Wherever native religions have had their scope, this symbol is sure to appear.”

On the Ohio River, twelve miles from Wheeling, in West Virginia, stands the Grave Creek Mound, seventy feet high and a thousand feet in circumference. This was a signal mound, from the summit of which signal fires could be seen far down the valley, and others transmitted the message in like manner, till it reached Cahokia on the Mississippi.

The growth of civilization has always been along the courses of great rivers—the Nile, Euphrates, Ganges, Hoangho, Danube, the Mississippi and Ohio. The Mound-builders were an agricultural people, for maize has been found in the mounds, and nowhere do we find the mounds where maize will not grow. Where the population of the United States is growing densest every year, there, too, the Mound-builders reached their acme, showing that what we consider natural advantages so did they. Ohio, the second State in the Union, was likewise their capital, with its ten thousand mounds to-day marking the spot where flourished their vanished cities.

They were an agricultural people, because no other occupation could have supported so vast a concourse of people. Their government was despotic; for when we consider that they had no metallic tools or beasts of burden, but that these mounds were raised by earth scraped from the surface and carried up in baskets, we are bound to conclude that these mounds are the work of slaves; for, studying the history of Egypt, we know that no wealth or power on earth could have erected these pyramids by freemen working in competition for freemen’s wages.

Two thousand men were employed three years in carrying a stone from Elephantis to Sais, and the building of one pyramid required the labor of three hundred and sixty thousand men for twenty years.

They understood political economy and the division of labor; else so many men could not have been fed, while their labor was withdrawn from production and locked up in this yearly labor, unless there was a powerful reserve force like Joseph to store the granaries in time of plenty.

They were a commercial people; for in these mounds we find copper from Lake Superior, shells from the Mexican Gulf, mica from the Alleghenies, iron pyrites from Missouri and obsidian from Mexico.

They were an inventive people; for we find specimens of cloth, woven from a vegetable fibre, in several different patterns; and they were not warlike, for most of the instruments taken from the mounds are of agricultural pattern. They were not of the same stock as the red Indian, because the Indian, even in the nineteenth century, is still in the Stone Age, roving in feral tribes, and starving to death annually rather than taint his inherited dignity by manual labor. The Indian’s implements are of flint, and always on the surface of the ground. The Mound-builder’s implements are of argillite, and found beneath the surface and gravel. The Indian’s habitation is never durable enough to be traced by his succeeding progeny, while the Mound-builder has left his mark which ten thousand years will but intensify.

The Mound-builders can not be identified with the Pueblo Indians, because the pottery of the Puebloes is corrugated and indented, and never has the semblance of any animal form whatever; while that of the Mound-builders is striated, and eminently characterized by animal forms and statuettes of the human form divine. They can not be classed with the Esquimaux, because the Esquimaux are a strictly Orarian people, and we have no evidence of their ever having been aught else.