[1733] Major Powell says, that years ago he reached the conclusion that the modern Indians must have raised at least some of the mounds in the Mississippi Valley (Bur. of Ethnol. Rept., iv. p. xxx). Cf. also Powell’s paper in Science, x. 267. In the second of these reports (p. 117) Henry W. Henshaw sets forth the views, which the Bureau maintained; and he defended these views in the Amer. Antiquarian, viii. 102. The leading member, however, of the Bureau staff, who is working in this field, is Cyrus Thomas. In the Nat. Mus. Report (1887) he defined the aim and character of the Work in Mound Exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology, also issued separately. In this it was stated that over 2,000 mounds had been opened, and 38,000 relics gathered from them; but nothing to afford any clue to the language which the moundbuilders spoke. The conclusions reached were:—
First, the mounds are as diversified as the Indian tribes are.
Second, they yield no signs of a superior race.
Third, their builders and the Indians are the same.
Fourth, the accounts of the early European visitors of the Indians found here correspond to the disclosures of the mounds.
Fifth, certain kinds of mounds in certain localities are the work of tribes now known; and there are no signs about the mounds to connect them with the Pueblo Indians or those farther south.
Thomas, in the Fifth Report (1888) described the “Burial Mounds of the northern sections of the U. S.” He says that the character of the mounds and their contents indicate the possibility of dividing the territory they occupy roughly into eight districts, each with some prominent characteristic, and he roughly distinguishes these sections as of Wisconsin; the Upper Mississippi; Ohio; New York; Appalachian; the Middle Mississippi; the Lower Mississippi and the Gulf. He holds that the moundbuilding people existed from about the fifth or sixth century down to historic times.
Taking for his texts the mounds of the Appalachian districts, he has presented anew his grounds for believing this region at least to have had the red Indian race for the constructors of its mounds, and that the Cherokees were that race. Carr had already (1876), from investigating a truncated oval mound in Virginia, and comparing it with Bartram’s (Travels, 365) description of a Cherokee council-house (Peabody Mus. Rept., x. 75), reached the conclusion that that particular mound was built by the Cherokees. Thomas further undertakes to prove that the Cherokees once occupied the Appalachian region, and that implements of the white men are found in some of the mounds, bringing them down to a period since the contact with Europeans. The habits of the builders of these mounds are, as he affirms, known to correspond to what we know from historic evidence were the habits of the Cherokees.
Thomas has also communicated the views of the Bureau in other ways, as in the Amer. Antiquarian, vi. 90; vii. 65; Mag. Amer. Hist., May, 1884, p. 396; 1887, p. 193; July and Sept., 1888. In these papers, among other points, he maintains that the defensive enclosures of northern Ohio are due to the Iroquois-Huron tribes, and he accepts the view of Peet and Latham, that the animal mounds are more ancient than the simpler forms. Other investigators have adopted, in some degree, this view. Horatio Hale thinks the Cherokees of Iroquois origin, and that they may have mingled with the moundbuilders. C. C. Baldwin holds the Allegheni, Cherokees, and the moundbuilders to be the same.
Prominent among those who have adopted this red-Indian theory are Judge M. F. Force and Lucien Carr. In 1874 Force published at Cincinnati a paper, which he read before the literary club of that city; and in 1877 he prepared a paper on the race of the moundbuilders, which appears in French in the Compte Rendu, Congrès des Américanistes (1877, i. p. 121), and in English, To what Race did the Moundbuilders belong (Cincinnati, 1875). He maintains that the race, which shows no differences from the modern Indians, flourished till about 1,000 years ago, and that some of them still survived in the Gulf States in the sixteenth century, and that their development was about on the plane of the Pueblos, higher than the Algonquins and lower than the Aztecs.