Wisconsin is the central region of what are known as the animal, effigy, symbolic, or emblematic mounds. Mention has been made elsewhere of the earliest notices of this kind of earthwork. The most extensive examination of them is the Antiquities of Wisconsin as surveyed and described by I. A. Lapham (Washington, 1855), with a map showing the sites.[1770] The consideration of these effigy mounds has given rise to various theories regarding their significance, whether as symbols or to totems.[1771] It is Thomas’s conclusion that the effigy mounds and the burial mounds of Wisconsin were the work of the same people (Fifth Rept., Bur. Ethnol.).
The existence of what is called an elephant or mastodon mound in Grant County has been sometimes taken to point to the age of those extinct animals as that of the erection of the mounds.[1772] Putnam, referring to the confined area in which these effigy mounds are found, says that the serpent mound, the alligator mound,[1773] and Whittlesey’s effigy mound in Ohio, and two bird mounds in Georgia,[1774] are the only other works in North America to which they are at all comparable.[1775]
When Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri River in 1804-6, they discovered mounds in different parts of its valley; but their statements were not altogether confirmed till the parties of the United States surveyors traversed the region after the civil war, as is particularly shown in Hayden’s Geological Survey, 6th Rept., in 1872. Within the present State of Missouri the mounds which have attracted most notice are those near the modern St. Louis.[1776] In Iowa (Clayton County) there is said to be the largest group of effigy mounds west of the Mississippi.[1777] The mounds of Iowa and the neighboring region are also discussed by Thomas in the Fifth Rept. Bur. Ethnol. O. H. Kelley has reported on the remains of an ancient town in Minnesota.[1778] In Kansas there is little noticeable,[1779] and there is not much to record in Dacotah,[1780] Utah,[1781] California,[1782] and Montana.[1783] We find scant accounts of the mounds in Oregon and Washington in the narrative of the Wilkes Exploring Expedition and in the earlier story of Lewis and Clark. Some of the mounds are of doubtful artificiality.[1784]
Along the lower portion of the Mississippi, but not within three hundred miles of its mouth, we find in Louisiana other mound constructions, but not of unusual significance.[1785]
The first effigy mound, a bear, which was observed south of the Ohio, is near an old earthwork in Greenup County, Kentucky.[1786] The mounds of this State early attracted notice.[1787] Bishop Madison[1788] thought them sepulchral rather than military. In the Western Review (Dec., 1819) one was described near Lexington. Rafinesque added a not very sane account of them to Marshall’s History of Kentucky, in 1824, which was also published separately, and since then all the general histories of Kentucky have given some attention to these antiquities.[1789]
In Tennessee we find in connection with the earthworks the stone graves, which the explorations of Putnam, about ten years ago, brought into prominence.[1790] The chief student of the aboriginal mounds in Georgia has been Col. C. C. Jones, Jr., who has been writing on the subject for nearly forty years.[1791] The mounds in the State of Mississippi, as including the region of the Natchez Indians, derive some added interest because of the connection sometimes supposed to exist between them and the race of the mounds.[1792] The same characteristics of the mounds extend into Alabama.[1793] The mounds in Florida attracted the early notice of John and William Bartram, and are described by them in their Travels, and have been dwelt upon by later writers.[1794] The seaboard above Georgia has not much of interest.[1795] Concerning the mounds along the Canadian belt there is hardly more to be said.[1796]
Lubbock classes the signs of successive periods in North America thus: original barbarism, mounds, garden beds, and then the relapse into barbarism of the red Indian. The agricultural age thus follows that of the mound erection, in his view, though, as Putnam says, there seems enough evidence that the constructors of the old earthworks were an agricultural race.[1797]
There is another class of relics which, outside the hieroglyphics of Central America, has as yet had little comprehensive study, though the general books on American archæology enumerate some of the inscriptions on rocks, which are so widely scattered throughout the continent.[1798]