There are few descriptions[1698] of the antiquities of this country previous to the military examination of it which was made during the Mexican War. Such is recorded in W. H. Emory’s Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth in Missouri to San Diego in California,[1699] which gives us some of the earliest representations of these antiquities, including the ruins of Pecos.[1700] In 1849, Col. Washington, the governor of New Mexico, organized an expedition against the Navajos, and Lieut. James H. Simpson gives us the first detailed account of the Chaco cañon in his Journal of a Military Reconnoissance (Philad., 1852).[1701] He also covered (p. 90), among the other ruins of this region, the old and present habitations of the Zuñi, but these received in some respects more detailed examination in Capt. L. Sitgreave’s Report of an Expedition down the Zuñi and Colorado rivers (Washington, 1853),[1702] accompanied by a map and other illustrations.[1703] New channels of information were opened when the United States government undertook to make surveys (1853) for a trans-continental line of railways; and a great deal of material is embodied in Whipple’s report on the Indian tribes in the Pacific R. R. Reports, vol. iii. The running of the boundary line between the United States and Mexico also contributed to our knowledge. The commissioner during 1850-53 was John Russell Bartlett, who, on the failure of the government promptly to publish his report, printed his Personal narrative of explorations and incidents (N. Y., 1854), and made in some parts of it an important contribution to our knowledge of the antiquities of this region.[1704]
No considerable advance was now made in this study for about a score of years. Major Powell first published his account of his adventurous exploration (1869) of the Colorado cañon in Scribner’s Monthly (Jan., Feb., Mar.) in 1875, and it was followed by his official Exploration of the Colorado River (Washington, 1875), making known the existence of ruins in the cañon’s gloomy depths. The Reports of the U. S. Geological Survey, including the accounts by W. H. Jackson and W. H. Holmes, give much valuable and original information; and a good deal of what has been included in the Reports of the Chief of Engineers (U. S. Army) for 1875 and 1876 will also be found in the seventh volume, edited by F. W. Putnam, of Wheeler’s Survey,[1705] including the pueblos of Acoma, Taos, San Juan, and the ruin[1706] on the Animas River.
The latest examinations of these Pueblo remains, of which we have published accounts, are those made by A. F. Bandelier for the Archæological Institute of America. He has given his results in his “Historical introduction to studies among the sedentary Indians of New Mexico,” and in his “Report on the ruins of Pecos,” which constitutes the initial volume of Papers, American series, of the Institute (Boston, 1881).[1707] He believes Pecos to be Cicuye, visited by Alvarado in 1541,—a huge pile with 585 compartments, finally abandoned in 1840. In October, 1880, he examined the region west of Santa Fé (Second Rept. Archæol. Inst.). His explorations also determined the eastern limits of the sedentary occupation of New Mexico (Fifth Report). He renewed his studies in 1882 (First Bull. Archæol. Inst., Jan., 1883), and thought the ruins showed successive occupiers, and divides them into cave dwellings, cliff houses, one-story buildings, and those of more than one, with each higher one retreating from the front of the next lower.
PUEBLO REGION.
A reduction of the map accompanying Bandelier’s report on his investigations in New Mexico, in the Fifth Rept. of the Archæological Institute of America (Cambridge, 1884).
The most essential sources of information have thus been enumerated, but there is not a little fugitive and comprehensive treatment of the subject worth the student’s attention who follows a course of investigation.[1708]
The literature of the moundbuilders, and of the controversies arising out of the mysterious relics of their life, is commensurate with the very wide extent of territory covered by their traces.[1709] It was long before any intelligent notice was taken of the mounds by those who traversed the wilderness. De Soto, in 1540, could get no traditions concerning them beyond the assurances that the peoples he encountered had built them, or some of them. We read of them also in Garcilasso de la Vega, Biedma and the Knight of Elvas, on the Spanish side; but on the French at a later day we learn little or nothing from Joutel, Tonti, and Hennepin, though something from Du Pratz, La Harpe and some of the missionaries. Kalm,[1710] the Swede, in 1749, was about the first to make any note of them. Carver found them near Lake Pepin in 1768. In 1772 the missionary David Jones[1711] made observations upon those in Ohio. Adair did not wholly overlook them in his American Indians in 1775. Prof. James Dunbar, of Aberdeen, in his Essays on the history of mankind in rude and uncultivated ages (Lond., 1780), uses what little Kalm and Carver afforded. Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia (1782) speaks of them as barrows “all over the country,” and “obvious repositories of the dead.”[1712] Arthur Lee makes reference to them in 1784. A map of the Northwest Territory, published by John Fitch about 1785, places in the territory which is now Wisconsin the following legend: “This country has once been settled by a people more expert in the art of war than the present inhabitants. Regular fortifications, and some of these incredibly large, are frequently to be found. Also many graves and towers like pyramids of earth.” In 1786 Franklin thought the works at Marietta might have been built by De Soto; and Noah Webster, in a paper in Roberts’ Florida, assented.[1713] B. S. Barton, in his Observations in some parts of Natural History (London, 1787), credited the Toltecs with building them, whom he considered the descendants of the Danes.
As the century draws to a close, we find occasional and rather bewildered expression of interest in the Observations on the Ancient Mounds by Major Jonathan Heart;[1714] in the Missions of Loskiel; in the New Views of Dr. Smith Barton; in the Carolina of William Bartram; and in the travels of Volney. In 1794 Winthrop Sargent reported in the Amer. Philos. Soc. Trans., iv., on the exploration of the mounds at Cincinnati. The present century soon elicited a variety of observations, but there was little of practical exploration. A New England minister, Thaddeus Mason Harris, passed judgment upon those in Ohio, when he journeyed thither in 1803.[1715] The commissioner of the United States to run the Florida boundary, Andrew Ellicott, describes some near Natchez in his Journal (1803). Bishop Madison communicated through Professor Barton some opinions about those in Western Virginia, which appear in the Transaction of the American Philosophical Society, taking different grounds from Dr. Harris, who had thought them works of defence. The explorations of Lewis and Clark (1804-6) up the Missouri, and of Pike (1805-7) up the Mississippi, produced little. Robin, the French naturalist, in 1805,[1716] Major Stoddard[1717] and Breckenridge[1718] later, saw some in Louisiana, Missouri, and Illinois. A leading periodical, The Portfolio, contributed something to the common stock in 1810 and 1814, giving plans of some of the mounds. Those in Ohio were again the subject of inquiry by F. Cuming in his Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country (Pittsburg, 1810), and by Dr. Daniel Drake in his Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Valley (Cinn., 1815). John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary, accounted for the ancient fortifications through the traditions of the Delawares, who professed once to have inhabited this country, but it has been suspected that the worthy missionary was imposed upon.[1719] DeWitt Clinton, in 1811, before the New York Historical Society, and again in 1817, before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York, had given some theories in which the Scandinavians figured as builders of the mounds in that State.
It was thus at a time when there was much speculation and not much real experimental knowledge respecting these remains that, under the auspices of the then newly founded American Antiquarian Society, Mr. Caleb Atwater, of Ohio, was employed to explore and survey a considerable number of these works. He embodied his results in the initial volume of the publication of that society, the Archæologia Americana.[1720] After pointing out scattered evidences of the traces of European peoples, found in coins and other relics throughout the country, Atwater proceeds to his description of the earthworks, mainly of Ohio; and beside giving many plans,[1721] he enters into the question of their origin, and expresses a belief in the Asiatic origin of their builders, and in their subsequent migration south to lay, as he thinks, the foundations of the Mexican and Peruvian civilizations.