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[Showing interior location of remains]

Coming down to a smaller scope of territory, can it be shown that in the case of any one state the early Indians occupied the portions most heavily populated today? It has been said that, in Ohio, four counties contain evidence of having been the scenes of special activity on the part of the earliest inhabitants: Butler, Licking, Ross, and Franklin. These are interior counties (at a distance from the Ohio and Lake Erie) and, of the remaining sixty-three interior counties in the state, only seven exceeded these four in population in 1880—when the cities had not so largely robbed the country districts of their population as now. Thus the aborigines seem to have been busiest where we have been busiest in the last half of the nineteenth century.

In Wisconsin the mound-building Indians labored most in the southern part of the state, where the bulk of that state’s population is today—seventy-five per cent being found in the southern (and smaller) half of the state.

In Michigan, a line drawn from the northern coast of Green Bay to the southwestern corner of the state includes a very great proportion of the archæological remains in the state. That line today embraces on the southeast thirty-three per cent of the counties of the state, yet sixty-three per cent of the population.

Thus it can be said that in a remarkable measure the mound-building peoples found with interesting exactness the portions of this country which have been the choice spots with the race which now occupies it.

Here, in the valleys, and between them, toiled their prehistoric people. Their low grade of civilization is attested by the rude implements and weapons and domiciles with which they seem to have been content. Divided, as it is practically sure they were, into numerous tribes, there must have been some commerce and there was, undoubtedly, much conflict. Above their poorly cultivated fields, or in the midst of them, they erected great earthen and stone fortresses, and, flung far and wide over valley and hill, stand the mounds in which they buried their dead.