From what I have collected, therefore, it would appear that the only resident Indians at the time of the discovery who showed any evidence of mound-building comparable to that found in the Ohio valley were the Chahta-Muskokees. I believe that the evidence is sufficient to justify us in accepting this race as the constructors of all those extensive mounds, terraces, platforms, artificial lakes and circumvallations which are scattered over the Gulf States, Georgia and Florida. The earliest explorers distinctly state that such were used and constructed by these nations in the sixteenth century, and probably had been for many generations. Such too, is the opinion arrived at by Col. C. C. Jones, than whom no one is more competent to speak with authority on this point. Referring to the earthworks found in Georgia he writes: “We do not concur in the opinion so often expressed that the mound-builders were a race distinct from and superior in art, government, and religion, to the Southern Indians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”
It is a Baconian rule which holds good in every department of science that the simplest explanation of a given fact or series of facts should always be accepted; therefore if we can point out a well known race of Indians who, at the time of the discovery, raised mounds and other earthworks, not wholly dissimilar in character and not much inferior in size to those in the Ohio valley, and who resided not very far away from that region and directly in the line which the Mound-Builders are believed by all to have followed in their emigration, then this rule constrains us to accept for the present this race as the most probable descendants of the Mound Tribes, and seek no further for Toltecs, Asiatics or Brazilians. All these conditions are filled by the Chahta tribes.[[80]]
It is true, as I have already said, that the traditions of their own origin do not point to the north but rather to the west or northwest; but in one of these traditions it is noticeable that they claim their origin to have been from a large artificial mound, the celebrated Nanih Waiya, the Sloping Hill, an immense pile in the valley of the Big Black River;[[81]] and it may be that this is a vague reminiscence of their remote migration from their majestic works in the north.
The size of the southern mounds is often worthy of the descendants of those who raised the vast piles in the northern valleys. Thus one in the Etowah Valley, Georgia, has a cubical capacity of 1,000,000, cubic feet.[[82]] The Messier Mound, near the Chatahoochee River, contains about 700,000 cubic feet.[[83]] Wholly artificial mounds 50 to 70 feet in height, with base areas of about 200 by 400 feet, are by no means unusual in the river valleys of the Gulf States.
With these figures we may compare the dimensions of the northern mounds. The massive one near Miamisburg, Ohio, 68 feet high, has been calculated to contain 311,350 cubic feet—about half the size of the Messier Mound. At Clark’s Works, Ohio, the embankments and mounds together contain about 3,000,000 cubic feet;[[84]] but as the embankment is three miles long, most of this is not in the mounds themselves. Greater than any of these is the truncated pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois, which has an altitude of 90 feet and a base area of 700 by 500 feet. It is, however, doubtful whether this is wholly an artificial construction. Professor Spencer Smith has shown that the once famous “big mound” of St. Louis was largely a natural formation; and he expresses the opinion that many of the mounds in Missouri and Illinois, popularly supposed to be artificial constructions, are wholly, or in great part, of geologic origin.[[85]] There is apparently therefore no such great difference between the earth structures of the Chahta tribes, and those left us by the more northern mound-builders, that we need suppose for the latter any material superiority in culture over the former when first they became known to the whites; nor is there any improbability in assuming that the Mound-builders of the Ohio were in fact the progenitors of the Chahta tribes, and were driven south probably about three or four hundred years before the discovery. Such is the conviction to which the above reasoning leads us.
In the course of it, I have said nothing about the condition of the arts of the Mound-builders compared with that of the early southern Indians; nor have I spoken of their supposed peculiar religious beliefs which a recent writer thinks to point to “Toltec” connections;[[86]] nor have I discussed the comparative craniology of the Mound-builders, upon which some very remarkable hypotheses have been erected; nor do I think it worth while to do so, for in the present state of anthropologic science, all the facts of these kinds relating to the Mound-builders which we have as yet learned, can have no appreciable weight to the investigator.
[Investigations conducted since the above Essay was printed require some modifications in its statements. The researches of Professor Cyrus Thomas render it likely that the Cherokees were also Mound-builders, and that they occupied portions of Western Pennsylvania and Western Virginia less than two centuries ago. (See also my work The Lenâpè and their Legends, pp. 16–18. Philadelphia, 1885.) Probably the Ohio Valley Mound-builders were the ancestors of some of the Cherokees as well as of the Chahta-Muskoki tribes. Craniologic data from the Ohio mounds are still too vague to permit inferences from them.]
THE TOLTECS AND THEIR FABULOUS EMPIRE.
In the first addition of my Myths of the New World[[87]] published in 1868, I asserted that the story of the city of Tula and its inhabitants, the Toltecs, as currently related in ancient Mexican history, is a myth, and not history. This opinion I have since repeated in various publications,[[88]] but writers on pre-Columbian American civilization have been very unwilling to give up their Toltecs, and lately M. Charnay has composed a laborious monograph to defend them.[[89]]
Let me state the question squarely.