We first struck the Ohio canal at Dover. It is in every respect a well constructed work, with substantial locks, culverts and viaducts. It is fifty feet wide at the top, and is more than adequate for all present purposes. It pursues the valley of the Tuscarawas up to the summit, by which it is connected with the Cuyahuga, whose outlet is at Cleveland. Towns and villages have sprung up along its banks, where before there was a wilderness. Nothing among them impressed me more than the town of Zoar, which is exclusively settled by Germans. There seems something of the principles of association—one of the fallacies of the age—in its large and single town store, hotel, &c., but I do not know how far they may extend. Individual property is held. The evidences of thrift and skill, in cultivation and mechanical and mill work, are most striking. Every dwelling here is surrounded with fruit and fruit trees. The botanical garden and hot-house are on a large scale, and exhibit a favorable specimen of the present state of horticulture. One of the assistants very kindly plucked for me some fine fruit, and voluntarily offered it. Zoar is quite a place of resort as a ride for the neighboring towns. I may remark, en passant, that there is a large proportion of German population throughout Ohio. They are orderly, thrifty and industrious, and fall readily into our political system and habits. Numbers of them are well educated in the German. They embrace Lutherans as well as Roman Catholics, the latter predominating.
Among the towns which have recently sprung up on the line of the canal, not the least is the one from which I date this letter. The name of the noted French divine (Massillon) was affixed to an uncultivated spot, by some Boston gentlemen, some twelve or fourteen years ago. It is now one of the most thriving, city-looking, business places in the interior of Ohio. In the style of its stores, mills and architecture, it reminds the visitor of that extraordinary growth and spirit which marked the early years of the building of Rochester. It numbers churches for Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, and also Lutherans and Romanists. About three hundred barrels of flour can be turned out per diem, by its mills. It is in the greatest wheat-growing county in Ohio (Stark), but is not the county-seat, which is at Canton.
V.
Detroit, Sept. 15th, 1843.
In passing from the interior of Ohio toward Lake Erie, the face of the country exhibits, in the increased size and number of its boulder stones, evidences of the approach of the traveller toward those localities of sienites and other crystalline rocks, from which these erratic blocks and water-worn masses appear to have been, in a remote age of our planet, removed. The soil in this section has a freer mixture of the broken down slates, of which portions are still in place on the shores of Lake Erie. The result is a clayey soil, less favorable to wheat and Indian corn. We came down the cultivated valley of the Cuyahoga, and reached the banks of the lake at the fine town of Cleveland, which is elevated a hundred feet, or more, above it, and commands a very extensive view of the lake, the harbor and its ever-busy shipping. A day was employed, by stage, in this section of my tour, and the next carried me, by steamboat, to this ancient French capital. Detroit has many interesting historical associations, and appears destined, when its railroad is finished, to be the chief thoroughfare for travellers to Chicago and the Mississippi valley. As my attention has, however, been more taken up, on my way, with the past than the present and future condition of the West, the chief interest which the route has excited must necessarily arise from the same source.
Michigan connects itself in its antiquarian features with that character of pseudo-civilisation, or modified barbarianism, of which the works and mounds and circumvallations at Grave Creek Flats, at Marietta, at Circleville and other well known points, are evidences. That this improved condition of the hunter state had an ancient but partial connection with the early civilisation of Europe, appears now to be a fair inference, from the inscribed stone of Grave Creek, and other traces of European arts, discovered of late. It is also evident that the central American type of the civilisation, or rather advance to civilisation, of the red race, reached this length, and finally went down, with its gross idolatry and horrid rites, and was merged in the better known and still existing form of the hunter state which was found, respectively, by Cabot, Cartier, Verrezani, Hudson, and others, who first dropped anchor on our coasts.
There is strong evidence furnished by a survey of the western country that the teocalli type of the Indian civilisation, so to call it, developed itself from the banks of the Ohio, in Tennessee and Virginia, west and north-westwardly across the sources of the Wabash, the Muskingum and other streams, toward Lake Michigan and the borders of Wisconsin territory. The chief evidences of it, in Michigan and Indiana, consist of a remarkable series of curious garden beds, or accurately furrowed fields, the perfect outlines of which have been preserved by the grass of the oak openings and prairies, and even among the heaviest forests. These remains of an ancient cultivation have attracted much attention from observing settlers on the Elkhart, the St. Joseph's, the Kalamazoo and Grand river of Michigan. I possess some drawings of these anomalous remains of by-gone industry in the hunter race, taken in former years, which are quite remarkable. It is worthy of remark, too, that no large tumuli, or teocalli, exist in this particular portion of the West, the ancient population of which may therefore be supposed to have been borderers, or frontier bands, who resorted to the Ohio valley as their capital, or place of annual visitation. All the mounds scattered through Northern Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, are mere barrows, or repositories of the dead, and would seem to have been erected posterior to the fall or decay of the gross idol worship and the offer of human sacrifice. I have, within a day or two, received a singular implement or ornament of stone, of a crescent shape, from Oakland, in this State, which connects the scattered and out-lying remains of the smaller mounds, and traces of ancient agricultural labor, with the antiquities of Grave Creek Flats.
Detroit, Sept. 16th, 1843.
The antiquities of Western America are to be judged of by isolated and disjointed discoveries, which are often made at widely distant points and spread over a very extensive area. The labor of comparison and discrimination of the several eras which the objects of these discoveries establish, is increased by this diffusion and disconnection of the times and places of their occurrence, and is, more than all, perhaps, hindered and put back by the eventual carelessness of the discoverers, and the final loss or mutilation of the articles disclosed. To remedy this evil, every discovery made, however apparently unimportant, should in this era of the diurnal and periodical press be put on record, and the objects themselves be either carefully kept, or given to some public scientific institution.