Reduced from an early engraving in T. M. Harris’s Journal of a Tour into the territory northwest of the Alleghany, 1803 (Boston, 1805). Harris’s plan in relation to the new town of Marietta is given in Vol. VII. p. 540. To follow down the plans chronologically, we find that of Winthrop Sargent, communicated to the Amer. Academy in 1787, reproduced in their Memoirs, new ser. v. part i. The Columbian Mag., May, 1787, vol. i. 425, and the N. Y. Mag. (1791) had plans. One was in Schultz’s Travels (1807), 146. Atwater, of course, gave one in 1820. A survey by S. Dewitt, 1822, is in Josiah Priest’s Amer. Antiquities, 3d ed., Albany, 1833. Others are in the Amer. Pioneer, Oct., 1842, June 1843, and in S. P. Hildreth’s Pioneer History, 212 (Jan., 1843). Whittlesey made the survey in Squier and Davis (who also give a colored view), and it is reduced in Foster. Cf. also Amer. Antiquarian, Jan., 1880; Mag. Amer. Hist., 1885, p. 547; Henry A. Shepard’s Antiquities of Ohio (Cinn., 1887); Nadaillac’s L’Amérique préhistorique, 105, and Les prem. Hommes, ii. 33.
It was, however, in Ohio that the interest in these mounds was first incited, and that the more thorough exploration has been made.[1754] The earliest pioneers reported upon them. Cutler described them in 1789 in a letter to Jeremy Belknap.[1755] Benj. S. Barton described a mound at Cincinnati in 1799.[1756] Dr. Harris in 1805 was seemingly the earliest traveller to note them in Journal of a Tour, where he gives one of the earliest engravings. A plan of those at Circleville, with description by J. Kilbourne, is given in the Ohio Gazetteer (Columbus, 1817). Caleb Atwater, in 1820, was more familiar with them than with others of his broader field. Warden in his Recherches noted the early describers. Gen. Harrison discussed the mounds in his Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio (Cincinnati, 1838). Squier and Davis, of course, brought them within their range,[1757] and Col. Whittlesey supplemented their work in the third volume of the Smithsonian Contributions. Whittlesey and Matthew C. Read contributed the Report on the Archæology of Ohio, which forms the second portion of the Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (Columbus, 1877), and in it is a list of the ancient enclosures, which is not, as Short says (p. 82), as complete as it should be. A survey of the mounds was made by E. B. Andrews, and published in the Peabody Mus. Repts. (no. x.), 1877. The Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society started in June, 1887, the Ohio archæological and historical Quarterly, which has vigorously entered the field, and in it (March, 1888) G. F. Wright has reported on the present condition of the mounds. M. C. Read’s Archæology of Ohio (Cleveland, 1888) was published by the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose series of Tracts is of importance for the study of the mounds.[1758] Henry A. Shepard’s Antiquities of the State of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1887) summarizes the discoveries to date.[1759] Thomas (Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol.) claims that the Ohio mounds were built by Indians, but not by the Indians, nor by the ancestors of them, who inhabited this region at the coming of the whites; but by an Indian race driven south, of whom he finds the modern representatives in the Cherokees.
From E. G. Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (N. Y., 1847), taken from Amer. Ethnol. Soc. Trans., ii. The letters A, B, C, etc. mark the ancient works. Enclosures are shown by broken lines. The mounds are designated by small dots. Some of the best maps which we have showing the geographical positions of groups of mounds accompany Thomas’s paper in the Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.
The works at Marietta, on the Muskingum River, were the earliest observed. Taking the southern and southeastern counties, there are no very conspicuous examples elsewhere, though the region is well dotted with earthworks.[1760] Those at Cincinnati were, after those at Marietta, the earliest to be noticed.[1761] The adjacent Little Miami Valley is the region which Professor Putnam and Dr. Metz have been of late so successfully working.[1762]
THE WORKS AT NEWARK, OHIO.
After a cut in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 269, made from surveys “executed while the chief earthworks could still be traced in all their integrity;” and they “illustrate rites and customs of an ancient American people, without a parallel among the monumental memorials of the old world.” Cf. Atwater, Warden, Squier and Davis, and MacLean.
Of all the works in the central portions of Ohio, and indeed of all in any region, those at Newark, in Licking County, are the most extensive, and have been often described.[1763] In the east[1764] and west[1765] there are other of these earthworks; but those in the north have been particularly examined by Col. Whittlesey and others.[1766] The enclosure called Fort Azatlan, at Merom on the Wabash River, is the most noticeable in Indiana.[1767] In Illinois, the great Cahokia truncated pyramid, 700 feet long by 500 wide and 90 high, is the most important.[1768]
Henry Gillman, of Detroit, has been the leading writer on the mounds of Michigan.[1769] The supposed connection of their builders with the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior is considered in another place. Thomas (Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.) contends that much of the copper found in the mounds was of European make, and had no relation to any aboriginal mining.