“The brain is the seat of mental activity, and we place the seat of the intellectual faculties in the anterior lobe; of the propensities which link us to the brute, in the middle lobe; and of those which appertain to the social affections, in the posterior lobe. The predominance of any one of these divisions in a people would stamp them as either eminently intellectual, eminently cruel, or eminently social.” From an examination of the few authentic skulls of the Mound-builders, we are confident that these people were neither eminent for great virtues nor great vices, but were a mild, inoffensive race, who would fall an easy prey to a crafty and cruel foe. The Mound-builders entered the Mississippi Valley by way of Mexico, being drawn thither by the superior attraction of the soil and climate of our river terraces and bottoms, and they remained here until crowded out by the savage hunting tribes of red Indians, when they retraced their steps to Mexico and developed that higher intellectual and architectural skill which we will now consider.
And now, having hastily glanced at a very few of the tens of thousands of mounds familiar to every inhabitant of the Mississippi Valley, we will follow the trail of the Mound-builders as evinced by their works, through Phillips County, Arkansas, four miles from Helena, thence to Red River, where they disappear.
Taking up the trail again at the Hollywood plantation, near Saint Joseph, Louisiana, in Tensas Parish, we find ten mounds in a circle facing the temple. A few miles southward, facing Natchez, in Catahoula Parish, is another group. Crossing Louisiana, we enter Texas, and from the Trinity to the Colorado River there are millions of mounds, all of a conical form, that have baffled ethnologists for the last fifty years. They are from one to five feet in height, and from thirty to one hundred and forty feet in diameter. All scientists who have examined them have pronounced them the “inexplicable mounds.” During the summer of ’87 and ’88 I have traveled for days among the same mysterious mounds in Texas, stretching in an unbroken line toward the Rio Grande, and have pronounced them “landmarks” that indicated the line of departure of the Mound-builders, in their migration across the treeless prairies.
This conclusion brings us to consider the Mound-builders after the migration, in their new home.
II.
The Mound-builders in Mexico.
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“Nations melt
From Power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt
The sunlight for a while, and downwards go.”
We know that the Mound-builders had a knowledge of Mexico before their southwestern migration, because obsidian was found in their mounds, and this mineral is found only in Mexico.