The artificial lakes in this account are the excavations made in obtaining material, since filled with water. The highways, which, in another passage, the above quoted writer describes as “about fifty yards wide, sunk a little below the common level, and the earth thrown up on each side, making a bank of about two feet high,”[313] seem, from both French and Spanish accounts to have been not unusual among the natives. Laudonniére mentions one of great beauty that extended from the village of Edelano to the river some three hundred paces in length,[314] and another still more considerable at the head quarters of the powerful chief Utina,[315] which must have been very near if not identical with that at Mount Royal. La Vega, in his remarkable chapter on the construction of the native villages,[316] speaks of such broad passages leading from the public square at the base to the house of the chief on the summit of the mound that the natives were accustomed to throw up for its site. What we are to understand by the royal highways, Caminos Reales, near Tampa Bay, that lead from one town to another, (que van de un Pueblo al otro,)[317] an expression that would not be applicable to mere trails, is not very evident.
Six miles by water above Lake Monroe, near the shore of a small lagoon on the left bank of the river, stands an oval mound of surface soil filled with human bones of so great an age, and so entirely decomposed, that the instrument with which I was digging passed through them with as much ease as through the circumjacent earth. Yet, among these ancient skeletons, I discovered numerous small blue and large white glass beads, undoubtedly inhumed at the formation of the tumulus. The bodies were all of adults and no special order in their deposition seemed to have been observed. Previous to my visit, I was informed that small earthenware articles had been disinterred, some of which were simply pyramids of triangular bases, whose use had much puzzled the finder. We know that this form, sacred in the mythologies of the old world to the worship of the productive power, had also a strong religious significance among the Natchez, and many other aboriginal tribes,[318] and probably in connection with the burial of the dead, it possessed among the Floridians, as it did among the ancients and orientals,[319] a symbolical connection with the immortality of the soul and the life after death.
In the rich hammock half a mile below Lake Harney on the left bank of the St. Johns, is a large oval mound, its transverse diameter at base forty yards, and thirty feet in height. It is surrounded by a ditch whence the soil of which it is constructed was taken. An extremely luxuriant vegetation covers the whole hammock and the mound itself, though few of the trees indicate a great age. On the same side of the river twenty miles above the lake, is another similar mound. They are abundant on the rich lands of Marion and Alachua counties, and in the hammocks of the Suwannee, and are found at least as far south as Charlotte’s Harbor and the Miami river. There is one on the government reserve in Tampa, another at the head of Old Tampa Bay, and a third on Long Key, Sarasota Bay. A portion of the latter has been washed away by the waters of the gulf and vast numbers of skeletons exposed, some of which I was assured by an intelligent gentleman of Manatee, who had repeatedly visited the spot and examined the remains, were of astonishing size and must have belonged to men seven or eight feet in height. This statement is not so incredible as it may appear at first sight. Various authors report instances of equally gigantic stature among the aborigines of our country. The chiefs of the province of Chicora, a portion of what is now South Carolina, were famous for their height, which was supposed to prove their royal blood;[320] some inhabitants of the province of Amichel on the Gulf of Mexico were not less remarkable in this respect;[321] and Beverly found among certain human bones religiously preserved in a temple of the Virginian Indians an os femoris, measuring two feet nine inches in length;[322] while in our own days, Schoolcraft saw a humerus at Fort Hill, New York,[323] and Lanman, sundry bones in a cave in Virginia[324] that must have belonged to men compared to whom ours is but a race of dwarfs.
On the opposite banks of Silver Spring run, respectively a quarter of a mile and a mile and a half below the head, there are two tumuli. Pottery, axes, and arrow-heads abound in the vicinity, and every sign goes to show that this remarkable spot was once the site of a populous aboriginal settlement.
What now are the characteristics of this class of Floridian mounds? In summing up the whole available knowledge respecting them, we arrive at the conclusion that to whatever purpose they may have subsequently been applied, they were originally constructed as vast cemeteries. Mount Royal tumulus is but a heap of bones covered with earth, and none have as yet been opened but disclosed the same contents. They are very simple in construction. I saw no well-defined terraces, no groups of mounds, none with rectangular or octagonal bases, no ditches but those made in excavating material, no covered ways, no stratification; in short, none of those signs of a comparatively advanced art that distinguish the earthworks of Ohio. Their age is not great. Some indeed are covered with trees of large size, and in one case the annual rings were said to count back to the year 1145,[325] (a statement, however, that needs confirmation,) but the rapid growth of vegetation in that latitude requires but a few years to produce a forest. The plantation of Lord Rolles, deserted some fourscore years since, is now overgrown with pines a foot in diameter, and I have seen old fields still bearing the marks of cultivation covered with lofty forests, and a spot of cleared land, forsaken for ten years, clothed with a thriving growth of palmetto and oak. Moreover, savage and civilized, all men agree in leaving nature to adorn the resting places of the dead, and hence it is an egregious error to date the passing away of a nation from the oldest tree we find on its graves. Rather, when we recollect that from the St. Lawrence to the Pampas, many tribes did religious homage to certain trees, and when we remember how universal a symbol they are of birth and resurrection, should we be surprised were they not cultivated and fostered on the sepulchres of the departed.[326]
We need no fanciful hypotheses to explain the reason and designate the time of these constructions. The bare recountal of the burial rites that prevailed among the aborigines is all sufficient to solve the riddle of bone-mounds both as they occur in Florida and all other States. The great feature of these rites was to preserve the bones of the dead, a custom full of significance in nature-worship everywhere. For this purpose the corpses were either exposed or buried till sufficient decomposition had ensued to permit the flesh to be easily removed. The bones were then scraped clean, and either carried to private dwellings, or deposited in public charnel-houses; such were the “Templos que servian de Entierros y no de Casas de Oracion,” seen by De Soto at Tampa Bay,[327] and the “Osarios,” bone-houses, in Cofachiqui, among the Cherokees.[328] Finally, at stated periods, they were collected from all quarters, deposited in some predetermined spot, and there covered with soil heaped into the shape of a cone. Annual additions to the same cemetery gave rise to the extraordinary dimensions that some attained; or several interments were made near the same spot, and hence the groups often seen.[329]
As the Natchez, Taencas, and other southern tribes were accustomed to place the council-house and chief’s dwelling on artificial elevations, both to give them an air of superior dignity, to render them easy of defence, and in some localities to protect from inundations,[330] so the natives of Florida, in pursuance of the same custom, either erected such tumuli for this purpose, or more probably, only took advantage of those burial mounds that the vicissitudes of war had thrown in their hands, or a long period of time deprived of sacred associations. In the town of Ucita, where De Soto landed, “The Lordes house stoode neere the shore upon a very hie mounte made by hande for strength,”[331] and La Vega gives in detail their construction.
While this examination of their sepulchral rites, taken in connection with the discovery of glass beads in situ, leaves no doubt but that such remains were the work of the people who inhabited the peninsula at its discovery by Europeans, it is not probable that the custom was retained much after this period. The Lower Creeks and Seminoles, so far from treating their dead thus, took pains to conceal the graves, and never erected mounds save in one emergency. This was in the event of a victorious battle, when they collected the dead into one vast pile, and covered them with earth,[332] simply because it was the most convenient way to pay those last and mournful duties that humanity demands at our hands.
Another class of burial mounds, tallying very nearly with those said by the French to have been raised over their dead by the early Indians of the St. Johns, are not unusual in the hammocks along this river. They are only a few feet in height, resembling in appearance the hillocks of humus left by the roots of uprooted trees, from which they can be distinguished by their general range, (N., S.,) by the hollows on each side whence the earth was obtained, and by their construction. They are sometimes distinctly stratified, presenting layers of sand, ashes and charcoal, and clay. Bones, arrow-heads, axes, and pottery are found in them, but as far as my own observations extended, and those of a Norwegian settler bearing the classic name of Ivon Ericson, who assured me he had examined them frequently on the Upper St. Johns, in no case were beads or other articles indicating a familiarity with European productions discovered.
The utensils, the implements of war and the chase exhumed from the mounds, and found in their vicinity, do not differ from those in general use among the Indians of all parts at their first discovery,[333] and go to corroborate the opinion that all these earthworks—and I am inclined to assert the same of the whole of those in the other Atlantic States, and the majority in the Mississippi valley—were the production, not of some mythical tribe of high civilization in remote antiquity, but of the identical nations found by the whites residing in these regions.