Fig. 73.—Lake Washington Disk.
The imitative mounds of Wisconsin hitherto described are in bold relief; but on the Indian Prairie, a few miles from the city of Milwaukee, there occur five designs, wrought—to use a term of European art,—in intaglio. Instead of the representations of animals being executed in relief, the process has been reversed, and the outline has been completed by piling the excavated earth round the edge. A few similar examples have been noted at other points; but such a process is more liable to effacement in the progress of time, unless renewed like the famous “White Horse” of Berkshire, by a periodical “scouring.” The chalk hills of southern England present peculiar facilities for effective colossal intaglio work. Another White Horse, ascribed to Saxon victors of the Danes, accompanies a group of British earthworks on Braddon Hill, Wiltshire; and the colossal human figure, armed with a club, at Cerne, in Dorsetshire, preserves a still closer counterpart to those scattered over the prairie lands beyond the western shores of Lake Michigan.
But for our present purpose the comparison of these ancient earthworks with others clearly traceable to modern Indian tribes, is more important than any analogies between the antiquities of the two hemispheres. One fact of obvious significance is the great scale on which the prehistoric races of America wrought, and the consequent evidences of numbers, and of combined labour perseveringly applied to the accomplishment of their aim. It is difficult to convey any definite conception of this by mere description, even though accompanied with minute measurements. A single cruciform mound measures four hundred and twenty feet between the extreme points of its limbs. Lizard and other animal-mounds ranging from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in length occur in extensive groups; and by their systematic arrangement, impress the mind with the idea of protracted toil carried on under the control of some supreme rule, or stimulated by motives of paramount influence. The Indian tribes that have come under observation are as diverse in habits, arts, and religious rites as in language; but none of them have manifested any capacity for the combination involved in the construction of monuments which more nearly resemble the great embankments and viaducts of modern railway engineering. The extent of such works indicates a settled condition of society, and industry far beyond that of the Iroquois Confederacy. In all this there may be nothing absolutely incompatible with the idea of the Indians being degenerate descendants of such a people, yet it is unsupported by proof. No modern tribe preserves any traces of such ancestral constructive habits; and while the animal-mounds appear to be regarded with superstitious reverence by the Indians, and are rarely disturbed except for purposes of sepulture, they lay no claim to them as the work of their fathers. The only theory of their origin is, that they are the work of the great Manitou, and were made by him to reveal to his red children the plentiful supply of game that awaits them in the world of spirits. The idea is a consoling one to tribes whose hunting-grounds have been invaded and laid desolate; and it is fully as philosophical as a theory gravely propounded to the American Scientific Association, that the cruciform and curvilinear earthworks intermingled with the animal-mounds include characters of the Phœnician alphabet, and are half-obliterated inscriptions commemorative of explorations by the great voyagers of antiquity.
What then are the inferences thus far deducible as to the races of Northern America in ante-Columbian centuries? Assuming a community of arts, and certain intimate relations in race and social condition, among the ancient people who worked the mines on Lake Superior, and constructed the varied earthworks that reach southward into Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky: there is no reason to suppose that they were united as one nation. While coincidences of a remarkable kind in the construction, and still more in the dimensions of their great earthworks, point to a common knowledge of geometrical configuration, and a standard of measurement: no two earthworks so entirely correspond as to show an absolute identity of purpose. The marked diversity between the truncated, pyramidal mounds of the states on the Gulf, the geometrical enclosures of Ohio, and the symbolic earthworks of Wisconsin, indicate varied usages of distinct communities. A dense population must have centred in certain favourite localities, still marked by evidence of the combined labours of a numerous people; and some supreme rule, like that of the Incas of Peru, must have regulated the operations requisite for the execution of works planned on so comprehensive a scale.
The Scioto and the Ohio valleys, it may be presumed, were the seats of separate states, with frontier populations living in part on the produce of the chase; but depending largely on agricultural industry for the sustenance of the communities crowded on the flats and river-valleys where their monuments abound, and for the supply of the workmen by whose combined labour they were constructed. The religious character and uses ascribed to one important class of their earthworks, in which scientific skill is most clearly manifested, points to the probable existence of a sacerdotal order, such as played an important part in the polity both of Mexico and Peru. There is indeed so great a discrepancy between the remarkable combination of science and skill in the execution of the Ohio earthworks, and the crude state of the arts otherwise associated with them, as to suggest the idea of a sacerdotal caste, like the Brahmins of India, distinct in race, and superior in intellectual acquirements to the great mass of the people.
Of the physical characteristics of the Mound-Builders, notwithstanding the ransacking of many sepulchral mounds, we possess as yet very partial evidence. This department of the subject will come under review in a subsequent chapter; and it will then be seen that while the accepted Mound-Builders’ type of head has been largely based on the very specimen selected by Dr. Morton, as “the perfect type of Indian conformation,” with its undoubted traces of compression, and of the use of the cradle-board, so characteristic of the Indian hunter: it seems not improbable that a systematic exploration of the mounds may disclose evidence of a ruling class differing physically as well as intellectually from the mass of the community by whose toil the enduring monuments of their singular rites and customs have been perpetuated.
But, while the Mound-Builders are essentially prehistoric, according to all New World chronology, there is nothing in the disclosures hitherto made calculated to suggest for them an extremely remote era. The marvellous traces of geometrical skill in their great earthworks, more than anything else, separate them from every known race north of Mexico. The indications of antiquity in the mines of Lake Superior, and the mounds of Ohio, suggest no such enormous intervals of time as perplex us in attempting to deal with the relics of the caves and river-valleys of Europe. The refilled trenches on the barren rocks of Isle Royale manifestly demand centuries for the slow accumulation of sufficient soil and vegetable matter to refill the excavations. Dr. Hildreth ascribes eight hundred years of growth to a tree felled on one of the mounds at Marietta; and other trustworthy authorities, including Messrs. Squier and Davis, furnish similar evidence for lesser periods of four, five, and six centuries. The longest term thus indicated would be little enough for the filling up of the deserted trenches of Isle Royal. But however far back we carry the era of the Mound-Builders, the chief change which the regions occupied by them have since undergone, is the clothing of their valleys, and the earthworks erected there, with the forests which help us to some partial guess at the intervening centuries since their disappearance. The animal remains hitherto found in their mounds are those of the existing species of deer, bears, wolves, and other fauna, not even now wholly extirpated from Ohio; and while their ingenious sculptures prove that they were familiar with a more southern, and even a South-American tropical fauna: nothing has yet been discovered to connect them with an extinct, much less a fossil mammalia, such as the mastodon. The probability rather is that the ruins of Clark’s Work, or Fort Ancient, may match in antiquity with those of England’s Norman keeps, and even that their builders may have lingered on into centuries nearer the age of Columbus.
The Zuñi, Moquis, Pimos, and other tribes of New Mexico, have left curious evidences of a people of gentle skill in agriculture, in ceramic art, and above all, in architecture, beyond anything pertaining to the northern Indians, or even in some respects to the Mound-Builders. But there still remains the distinct and perplexing element of a people so partially civilised, and comparatively rude; yet able to construct squares, circles, ellipses, and other geometrical figures on a seale which would tax the skill of many a well-trained civil engineer of the present day.
Other characteristic traits of the Mound-Builders, especially as shown in their ingenious sculptures, and illustrated by their mimetic art, have yet to be considered. But this at least is apparent, that the most advanced among the Indian tribes of North America within its historical period represent a phase of life essentially inferior to that which had preceded it. Before the great river-valleys were overshadowed with their ancient forests, nations dwelt there practising arts and rites which involved many germs of civilisation. Their defensive military skill, their agricultural industry, and even their ideas of the relations of man to some supreme spiritual power, are suggested by evidence, which, though inadequate for any detailed chronicle, discloses glimpses of an unwritten history full of interest even in this tantalising form. We have still to consider other characteristics of the ancient race, including their geographical and ethnical relations. But before doing so, it is desirable to review the history of other ancient American races among whom civilisation attained a higher development, and of whom we have historical evidence, as well as the chronicles which archæology supplies.