This classification has been generally followed in describing these ancient structures, although the whole subject is obscure and difficult, from our ignorance of the purposes and conditions of their formation. In many of the mounds of the first two classes especially, not only have pearls been found, but quantities of interesting and remarkable objects, many of which have been brought from distant points, and prove clearly the existence of an extensive intertribal commerce at a remote period. Galena from Illinois and Wisconsin, mica from North Carolina, obsidian from beyond the Rocky Mountains, and sea-shells from the Gulf coast, are among these objects, and particularly native copper from Lake Superior, from which many articles were fashioned by hammering. Pearls are extremely abundant, and were at first supposed to have been brought from the coast, and may have been the pearls of the common clam and the common oyster, the pearls being found in opening the mollusks for food; but the recent development of pearl hunting in the western rivers, where the fresh-water mussels (Unios) are so abundant and produce such beautiful pearls, shows that these treasures were undoubtedly gathered, partly, if not wholly, in the region where the mounds exist. The enormous numbers found are, indeed, no source of surprise, as such quantities of pearls have been obtained, for over twenty years past, from the same regions. The mollusks are still abundant in all the streams of the Mississippi Valley, except where they have been reduced or exterminated by the reckless methods of pearl hunting employed where the “pearl fever” has prevailed.
It is quite possible that the fresh-water Unios were not sought for their pearls alone, but were also used as food, and perhaps as bait for fishing. They were evidently gathered in great quantities, as is shown by the old heaps of shells found along the banks of streams at many points; and doubtless there are multitudes of such heaps that have never been observed. They are known as far north as Idaho, as communicated by Dr. Robert N. Bell, State mineralogist, and they extend still farther north, as noted by Dr. Harlan I. Smith, in his “Preliminary Notes on the Archæology of the Yakima Valley.”[[541]] He says: “Small heaps of fresh-water clam-shells were examined, but these being only about five feet in diameter and as many inches in depth, are hardly to be compared to the immense shell-heaps of the coast.”
These Unio shell-heaps are frequent in the South, and some of the Spanish chroniclers of De Soto’s expedition in 1540–1541, describe the gathering and cooking of the mussels, and the finding of occasional pearls therein. The same writers also give glowing accounts of the pearls possessed by the natives. Some of these accounts may be exaggerated, but they cannot be wholly so. It would seem that some of the pearls may have come from marine shells, and others from those of the rivers and streams; but there are few pearl-producing shells on our own coasts, and it is not very likely that there was any trade or intercourse with the West Indian Islands, where marine pearls occur freely.
Albert H. Pickett, in his “History of Alabama,” refers to the accounts of De Soto’s historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, and holds that the pearls which he noted were evidently from the Unios of Alabama. “Heaps of mussel shells,” he says, “are now to be seen on our river banks wherever Indians used to live. They were much used by the ancient Indians for some purpose, and old warriors have informed me that their ancestors once used the shells to temper the clay with which they made their vessels. But as thousands of the shells lie banked up, some deep in the ground, we may also suppose that the Indians in De Soto’s time, everywhere in Alabama, obtained pearls from them. There can be no doubt about the quantity of pearls found in this State and Georgia in 1540, but they were of a coarser and more valueless kind than the Spaniards supposed. The Indians used to perforate them and string them around their necks and arms like beads.”[[542]]
The use of fragments of these shells in tempering the clay for pottery, alluded to in the preceding paragraph, is well known. Prof. Daniel S. Martin describes an old village site in South Carolina, near the Congaree River, a few miles south of the city of Columbia, where the ground had been plowed, and along the furrows the soil was gleaming with brilliant pearly fragments of Unio shells, intermingled with bits of pottery.
Mr. Clarence B. Moore discovered pearls pierced for stringing in several of the mounds at Moundville, Alabama. He also found a sheet-copper pendant, elongated oval in outline, with an excised repoussé decoration, embracing a swastika within a circle, and a triangle. This pendant, which lay near the skull of burial No. 132, bears a perforated pearl nearly seven millimeters in diameter and weighing about nine grains; it is fastened to the pendant by a piece of vegetable fiber that passes through the pearl. With another burial (No. 162), the skeleton of an adult, was an elliptical gorget of sheet-copper decorated with a pearl.[[543]] In a personal communication Mr. Moore states that all the pearls found by him in the mounds were very much disintegrated by the lapse of time; he also writes that he has never found any shells immediately with the pearls, although masses of Unio shells were often met with in the mounds. He believes the shell-fish had been used for food.
Unio shell-heaps exist likewise on the shores of the inland lakes of Florida, and in middle Georgia and Alabama; and several of them on the banks of the Savannah River, above Augusta, are fully described by Colonel Charles C. Jones.[[544]] He says: “In these relic-beds no two parts of the same shell are, as a general rule, found in juxtaposition. The hinge is broken, and the valves of the shell, after having been artificially torn asunder, seem to have been carelessly cast aside and allowed to accumulate.”
Thus, in addition to the historical evidence, physical proof is abundant of the pearl fisheries of the aboriginal tribes of the South. In order to ascertain the precise varieties of shells from which the southern Indians obtained their pearls, Colonel Jones invited an expression of opinion from a number of scientists whose studies rendered them familiar with the conchology of the United States. Their responses throw considerable light upon this inquiry, though with some curious variation.
Prof. William S. Jones, of the University of Georgia, says that he has seen small pearls in many of the Unios found in that State.
Prof. Jeffries Wyman, on the other hand, after a careful and extensive series of excavations in the shell-heaps of Florida, failed to find a single pearl. “It is hardly probable,” he remarks, “that the Spaniards could have been mistaken as to the fact of the ornaments of the Indians being pearls, but in view of their frequent exaggerations, I am almost compelled to the belief that there was some mistake; and possibly they may not have distinguished between the pearls and the shell beads, some of which would correspond with the size and shape of the pearls mentioned by the Spaniards.”