In Trigg was found a walled town with a circumference of seven thousand five hundred feet.
A mound more than twenty feet high with a diameter of over one hundred feet was located in Montgomery.
In Estill was located one fifteen feet high, one hundred and ninety-two feet in diameter, and surrounded by a moat ten feet deep and thirty-five feet wide.
A horseshoe-shaped fort of about ten acres in area was found in Caldwell. Its curve was bordered by a perpendicular bluff of sixty feet, and the two points of the shoe were connected by a stone wall ten feet high and six hundred feet long, with a gateway eight feet wide.
In Hickman, O'Bryan's fort; in Madison, a stone fort containing four or five hundred acres; and in Greenup, an effigy mound representing a bear, "leaning forward, measuring fifty-three feet from the top of the back to the end of the fore leg and one hundred five and one half feet from the tip of the nose to the rear of the hind foot," with those already mentioned, give a faint idea of the variety of mounds in shape, size, and structure. Yet these are only a few of the many ancient remains in Kentucky of the Mound Builders who have left their imprint throughout our great central valley and whose wide range has left in the same mound "the mica of the Alleghenies, the obsidian of Mexico, the copper of the Great Lakes, and shells from the Gulf of the Southland."
Since the location of these remains the plowshare has leveled many mounds, but several can yet be traced.
THE DISCOVERY OF KENTUCKY
Do you ever feel, when reading of the deeds of the early European navigators, who braved the perils of the trackless deep only to find on this shore a tangled "forest primeval," that our own beloved Kentucky is in every way far removed historically from them?
Since it is so interesting and edifying to find ourselves related to some noted personage, let us see if we can connect the "Dark and Bloody Ground" with the discoveries that opened up a new world.
We must go back many, many years, yes, even to the Middle Ages, if we would see how and why we are at least a small link in the great chain of events that gradually gave to the western world one of its proudest commonwealths. Some one has said, "Westward the course of empire takes its way," but for centuries the people of Europe concerned themselves not with what lay to the west of them but with the people and problems of the East. This is easy to understand when we learn that the copper, lead, tin, and manufactures of Europe were carried by traders, partly by sea and partly by land, to Constantinople or to Egypt, where they were exchanged for the luxuries that Asia had sent by vessels or camels. India and the Spice Islands sent cloves, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, mace, nutmeg, camphor, musk, aloes, and sandalwood, also diamonds and pearls. Cathay (China) sent silks, while Cipango, the island of mystery, in the great ocean east of Cathay that no one had seen, was believed to be the richest of all.