Smaller and very irregular heaps are frequent amongst the hills. They do not generally embrace more than a couple of cartloads of stone, and almost invariably cover a skeleton. Occasionally the amount of stones is much greater. Rude implements are sometimes found with the skeletons. A number of such graves have been observed near Sinking Springs, Highland county, Ohio; also in Adams county in the same State, and in Greenup county, Kentucky, at a point nearly opposite the town of Portsmouth on the Ohio.
Heaps of similar character are found in the Atlantic States, where they were p185 raised by the Indians over the bodies of those who met their death by accident, or in the manner of whose death there was something unusual. Dwight, in his Travels, mentions a heap of stones of this description which was raised over the body of a warrior killed by accident, on the old Indian trail between Hartford and Farmington, the seat of the Tunxis Indians, in Connecticut. Traces of a similar heap still exist on the old trail between Schenectady and Cherry Valley in New York, with which a like tradition is connected. They were not raised at once, but were the accumulations of a long period, it being the custom for each warrior as he passed the spot to add a stone to the pile. Hence the general occurrence of these rude monuments near some frequented trail or path.
Fig. 70.—Conical mound.
- FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER IX.
- [121] The difficulty of carrying on investigations in the large mounds cannot be readily appreciated. The earth is always so compact as to require, literally, to be cut out. It has then to be raised to the surface,—a task of great labor, and only accomplished by leaving stages in the descent and throwing the earth from one to the other, and finally to the surface. Four industrious men were employed not less than ten or twelve days in making the excavations in this mound alone.
- [122] Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, vol. i. p. 409.
- [123] When Lieut. Fremont penetrated into the fastnesses of Upper California, where his appearance created great alarm among the Indians, he observed this primitive telegraphic system in operation. “Columns of smoke rose over the country at scattered intervals,—signals by which the Indians, here as elsewhere, communicate to each other that enemies are in the country. It is a signal of ancient and very universal application among barbarians.”—Fremont’s Second Expedition, p. 220.
p186
CHAPTER X. REMAINS OF ART FOUND IN THE MOUNDS.
The condition of the ordinary arts of life amongst a people capable of constructing the singular and imposing monuments which we have been contemplating, furnishes a prominent and interesting subject of inquiry. The vast amount of labor expended upon these works, and the regularity and design which they exhibit, taken in connection with the circumstances under which they are found, denote a people advanced from the nomadic or radically savage state,—in short, a numerous agricultural people, spread at one time, or slowly migrating, over a vast extent of country, and having established habits, customs, and modes of life. How far this conclusion, for the present hypothetically advanced, is sustained by the character of the minor vestiges of art, of which we shall now speak, remains to be seen.
It has already been remarked, that the mounds are the principal depositories of ancient art, and that in them we must seek for the only authentic remains of the builders. In the observance of a practice almost universal among barbarous or semi-civilized nations, the mound-builders deposited various articles of use and ornament with their dead. They also, under the prescriptions of their religion, or in accordance with customs unknown to us, and to which perhaps no direct analogy is afforded by those of any other people, placed upon their altars numerous ornaments and implements,—probably those most valued by their possessors,—which remain there to this day, attesting at once the religious zeal of the depositors, and their skill in the simpler arts. From these original sources, the illustrations which follow have been chiefly derived.
The necessity of a careful discrimination between the various remains found in the mounds, resulting from the fact that the races succeeding the builders in the occupation of the country often buried their dead in them, has probably been dwelt upon with sufficient force, in another connection. Attention to the conditions under which they are discovered, and to the simple rules which seem to have governed the mound-builders in making their deposits, can hardly fail to fix with great certainty their date and origin.