Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Along the broad levels drained by the Mississippi and its numerous tributaries traces of America’s allophylian population abound; and the Ohio valley is pre-eminently remarkable for the number and magnitude of such works. The Ohio and its tributary streams flow through a fine undulating, fertile country, which now forms one of the great centres of population; and the evidence of modern enterprise and skill which abounds there gives additional interest to traces which disclose to us proof that this vast area is not now rescued for the first time from the primeval forest, with its wild fauna, and still wilder savage man.

In a region such as this, attracting population to the broad alluvial terraces overlooking its smoothly-flowiug rivers, it was natural that the building instinct of man should first employ itself on earthworks; and that the monuments should assume a pyramidal form. The great mound of Miamisburg, Ohio, is sixty-eight feet high, and eight hundred and fifty-two feet in circumference at its base. The more famous Grave Creek Mound of Virginia rises to a height of seventy feet, and measures at its base one thousand feet in circumference. Other and still larger earthworks have been noted, such as the truncated pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois, which, while it remained intact, occupied an area upwards of two thousand feet in circumference, and reared its level summit, of several acres in extent, to a height of ninety feet. But this last belongs to a different class from the sepulchral mounds which appear to be unsurpassed by any known works of their kind. “We have seen mounds,” remarks Flint, an American topographer, with a just appreciation of the relation of these earthworks to the features of the surrounding landscape, “which would require the labour of a thousand men employed on our canals, with all their mechanical aids, and the improved implements of their labour, for months. We have more than once hesitated in view of one of those prodigious mounds, whether it were not really a natural hill. But they are uniformly so placed, in reference to the adjacent country, and their conformation is so unique and similar, that no eye hesitates long in referring them to the class of artificial erections.” The exploration of these huge earth pyramids has set at rest any doubts as to their artificial origin; and has, moreover, established the fact that they are structures erected to perpetuate the memory of the honoured dead in ages utterly forgotten, and by a race of which they preserve almost the sole remaining vestiges.

The works of the Mound-Builders extend over a wide area, and include many other structures besides those of a sepulchral character. The people by whom they were executed must have been in a condition very different from the forest tribes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, though congregated at many favourite points in large communities, they may have been isolated by extensive tracts of forest from the regions beyond the river-systems on which they were settled. The country lying remote from the larger tributaries of the Mississippi was probably in the era of the Mound-Builders, as in later times, covered with forest; while perchance on outlying regions, or beyond the great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, the progenitors of modern Indian tribes lurked: like the barbarians of ante-Christian Europe, beyond the Rhine and the Baltic.

The fertile valley of the Scioto appears to have been one of the seats of densest population, as indicated by the numerous works which diversify its surface. Corresponding evidence preserves the traces of an equally numerous population in the Miami Valley; and the mounds and earthworks of various kinds throughout the state of Ohio are estimated at between eleven and twelve thousand. They are stated to be scarcely less numerous on the Kenhawas in Virginia than on the Scioto and Miamis, and are abundant on the White River and Wabash, as also upon the Kentucky, Cumberland, Tennessee, and numerous other tributaries of the Ohio and Mississippi. Works accumulated in such numbers, and, including many of great magnitude and elaborateness of design, executed by the combined labour of large bodies of workmen, afford indisputable evidence of a settled and industrious population. Beyond those carefully explored regions, traces of other ancient structures have been observed at widely separated points; though caution must be exercised in generalising from data furnished by casual and inexperienced observers. All primitive earthworks, whether for defence, sepulchral memorials, or religious rites, have certain features in common; and the tendency of the popular mind is rather to exaggerate chance resemblances into forced analogies and parallels, than to exercise any critical discrimination. Including, however, all large earthworks essentially dissimilar from the slight structures of the modern Indian, they appear to stretch from the upper waters of the Ohio to the westward of Lake Erie, and thence along Lake Michigan, nearly to the Copper Regions of Lake Superior. Examples of a like character have been traced through Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Nebraska Territory; while in the south their area is bounded by the shores of the Gulf of Florida and the Mexican territory, where they seem gradually to lose their distinctive character, and pass into the great teocallis of a higher developed Mexican architecture. Their affinities are indeed more southern than northern. They are scarcely, if at all, to be found to the eastward of the water-shed between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, in the States of Pennsylvania, New York, or Virginia; and they have been rightly designated, from their chief site, the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, including those of its tributaries, and especially of the valley of the Ohio. There their localities fully accord with those which, in the primitive history of the Old World, reveal the most abundant traces of an aboriginal population, in their occupation of the broad alluvial terraces, or “river bottoms,” as they are styled. To the north the memorials of an ancient population are of a different character; and the earthworks in the vicinity of the Great Lakes must be classed by themselves, as indicating distinct customs and rites.

The remarkable works thus traceable over so large an extent of the North American continent admit of being primarily arranged into the two subdivisions of Enclosures and Mounds, and those again embrace a variety of works evidently designed for very different uses. Under the first of these heads are included the fortifications or strongholds; the sacred enclosures, destined, as is assumed, for religious rites; and numerous miscellaneous works of the same class, generally symmetrical in structure, but the probable use of which it is difficult to determine. The second subdivision embraces the true mound-buildings, including what have been specially designated sacrificial, sepulchral, temple, and animal-mounds. All partake of characteristics pertaining to a broad level country; but this is nowhere so strikingly apparent as where mounds seem to have been purposely erected as observatories or points of sight from whence to survey the works elaborated on a gigantic scale on the level plain. In addition to the striking features which their external aspect exhibits: wherever they have been excavated interesting relics of the ancient builders have been disclosed, adding many graphic illustrations of their social condition, and of the artistic and industrial arts of the period to which they pertain.

The British hill-forts, the remarkable vitrified forts of Scotland, and the larger strongholds of the British aborigines, such as the ingenious circumvallations of the White Caterthun overlooking the valley of Strathmore, all derive their peculiar character from the mountainous features of the country; while on the low ground, under the shadow of the Ochils, the elaborate earthworks of the Camp of Ardoch show the strikingly contrasting castrametation of the Roman invaders. The ancient raths of Ireland, which abound in the level districts of that country, as well as on heights where stone is not readily accessible, also furnish highly interesting illustrations of earthworks with a special character derived from the features of their localities. An earthen dune or rath, as in the celebrated Rath Keltair at Downpatrick, occupies a commanding site, where it is strongly entrenched, with a considerable space of ground enclosed within its outworks. The celebrated Hill of Tara, in the county of Meath, ceased, according to tradition, to be the chief seat of the Irish kings, since its desertion in the latter part of the sixth century, shortly after the death of Dermot, the son of Fergus. It appears to have been a fortified city; and now, after the devastations of thirteen centuries, its dunes, circumvallations and trenches, present many interesting points of comparison with the more extensive earthworks of the Mississippi valley. But neither the Scottish White Caterthun, nor the Irish Bath Keltair, or even the Rath Righ of Tara Hill, can compare with the remarkable American stronghold of Fort Hill, Ohio, or Fort Ancient on the Little Miami River, in the same State.

The valley of the Mississippi is a vast sedimentary basin extending from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains. Through this the great river and its numerous tributaries have made their way for countless ages, working out shallow depressions in the plain, on which are recorded successive epochs of change in the terraces that mark the deserted levels of ancient channels. The edges of these table-lands bordering on the valleys are indented by numerous ravines; and the junctions of many lesser streams with the rivers have formed nearly detached peninsulas, or in some cases tracts of considerable elevation insulated from the original table-land. Many of those bluff headlands, peninsulas, and isolated hills presented all the requisite adaptations for native strongholds. They have, accordingly, been fortified with great labour and skill. Embankments and ditches enclose the whole space, varying in strength according to the natural resources of the ground. The approaches are guarded by trenches and overlapping walls, more or less numerous in different forts; and have occasionally a mound alongside of the other defences of the approach, but rising above the rest of the works, as if designed both for out-look and additional defence. In some few cases the walls of these enclosures are of stone, but if they were ever characterised by any attempt at regular masonry all traces of it have disappeared, and there seems little reason for supposing that such walls differed in essential character from the earthworks. No cement was used, and in all probability we have in them only the substitution of stone-heaps instead of earth-banks, owing to special local facilities.

One of the simplest, but most extensive of those primitive strongholds, is Fort Hill, Ohio. The defences occupy the summit of a height, elevated about five hundred feet above the bed of Bush Creek, which flows round two sides of the hill, close to their precipitous slope. Along the edge of this hill a deep ditch has been cut, and the materials taken from it have been piled up into an embankment, rising from six to fifteen feet above the bottom of the ditch. In its whole extent the wall measures eight thousand two hundred and twenty-four feet, or upwards of a mile and a half in length; and encloses an area of forty-eight acres, now covered with gigantic forest-trees. One of them, a chestnut, measured twenty-one feet, and an oak, though greatly decayed, twenty-three feet in circumference, while the trunks of immense trees lay around in every stage of decay. Such was the aspect of Fort Hill, Ohio, a few years ago, and it is probably in no way changed now. Dr. Hildreth counted eight hundred rings of annual growth in a tree which grew on one of the mounds at Marietta, Ohio; and Messrs. Squier and Davis, from the age and condition of the forest, ascribed an antiquity to its deserted site of considerably more than a thousand years. In their present condition, therefore, the walls of “Fort Hill” are ruins of an older date than the most venerable stronghold of the Normans of England; and we see as little of their original completeness, as in the crumbling Norman keep we are able to trace all the complex system of bastions, curtains, baileys, buttress-towers, and posterns, of the military architecture of the twelfth century. Openings occur in the walls, in some places on the steepest points of the hill, where access is impossible; and where, therefore, we must rather suppose that platforms may have been projected to defend more accessible points. The ditch has in many places been cut through sandstone rock as well as soil; and at one point the rock is quarried out so as to leave a mural front about twenty feet high. Large ponds or artificial reservoirs for water have been made within the enclosure; and at the southern point, where the natural area of this stronghold contracts into a narrow and nearly insulated projection terminating in a bold bluff, it rises to a height of thirty feet above the bottom of the ditch, and has its own special reservoirs, as if here were the keep and citadel of the fortress: doubtless originally strengthened with palisades and military works, of which every trace had disappeared before the ancient forest asserted its claim to the deserted fortalice. Here then, it is obvious we look on no temporary retreat of some nomadic horde, but on a military work of great magnitude; which, even with all the appliances of modern engineering skill, would involve the protracted operations of a numerous body of labourers, and when completed must have required a no less numerous garrison for its defence. The contrast is very striking between such elaborate works and the most extensive of those still traceable in Western New York the origin of which appears to be correctly assigned to Iroquois and other tribes known to have been in occupation of their sites in comparatively recent times.

Among the native Indian tribes who have come under direct observation of Europeans, none played a more prominent part than the Iroquois. At the period of Dutch discovery in the beginning of the seventeenth century, they occupied the territory between the Hudson and the Genesee rivers, of which they continued to maintain possession for nearly two centuries, in defiance of warlike native foes, and the more formidable aggression of the French invaders. Their numbers, at the period of their greatest prosperity, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have been variously estimated from 70,000, which La Hontan assigned to them, to the more probable estimate of 25,000 given by the historian of their League. Very exaggerated pictures have been drawn by some modern writers of the Iroquois confederacy. It was a union of tribes of savage hunters, among whom only the germs of incipient civilisation are traceable. They had indeed acquired settled habits, and devoted themselves to some extent to agriculture. But with all the matured arts resulting from combined action in the maintenance of their territory for successive generations against fierce hostile tribes, and the defence of an extensive frontier constantly exposed to invasion, the traces of the Iroquois strongholds are of so slight a description that many of them have already been obliterated by the plough.

From the facts thus presented to our consideration, it is obvious that the highest estimate we can entertain of the powers of combination indicated by the famous League of the Iroquois, furnishes no evidence of a capacity for the construction and maintenance of works akin to the strongholds of the Mound-Builders in the Ohio valley. Striking as is the contrast which the Iroquois present to more ephemeral savage tribes, the remains of their earthworks present in some respects a greater contrast to those of the Mound-Builders than the latter do to the elaborate architecture of Mexico and Yucatan. There are indeed points of resemblance between the strongholds of the two, as there are between them and the British hill-forts, or any other earthworks erected on similar sites; but beyond such general elements of comparison,—equally interesting, but as little indicative of any community of origin as the correspondence traceable between the flint and stone weapons in use by the builders of both,—there is nothing in such resemblances calculated to throw any light on the origin of those remarkable monuments of the New World. It is rather from the contrast between the two that we may turn the remains of Iroquois defences to account, as suggestive of a greatly more advanced condition of social life and the arts of a settled population among the Mound-Builders of the Mississippi and its tributaries.