Harper's Young People, August 2, 1881 / An Illustrated Weekly

by Various

All the early nations and savage tribes have had much to do with war and hunting, and in the old graves we find many remains of their weapons. The very swords and spears used by Agamemnon, King of men, that some of you no doubt are reading about now in the Iliad, were found by Dr. Schliemann in the tombs at Mycenæ; and in France not long since a great tomb was opened, where long ago some fierce fighter had been buried with his armor on, his sword by his side, and with him his noble war-horse that had carried him through many a fierce battle.

You have many of you read of the Northmen, who a good many hundred years ago were the cause of so much trouble to the people of England and France, coming down from Scandinavia, and burning and stealing, and laying waste all the coasts. We know what kind of vessels these people sailed in; but it is a great deal better to actually see one for ourselves, as we can now, for it was only last year that one of these queer ships was dug out of a mound, which was the tomb of some great viking or chief. I think that Rollo and William the Conqueror and the human life of that age would seem more real to us if we could sit on one of the seats of that old vessel.

And so it is in this country. All the boys and girls have read about the Indians, and heard many stories of the life they led all over this broad land when our forefathers first came here, and many have seen the stone arrow-heads and other implements that the Indians used, and have themselves picked up these things that are scattered over the fields so abundantly in some places; but I doubt if there are any of you who have opened an old grave, and been astonished at the strange and curious treasures it contained. It is always hard to find these places in this country, where for the most part there are no monuments of any kind to mark the spot where the Indians buried their dead. If we could find them all, it would be an easy matter to fill a large museum at once, for the most finished and best preserved of these things are always found in the graves. I have found a few of these places, and they always contain relics of great interest. I once took from a single grave 189 arrow-heads, which seemed to indicate that the man was a great warrior, or perhaps one of the ancient arrow-makers.

But what I particularly want to tell you about now is the opening of some graves containing not only articles of Indian make, but also many other things that had been brought in by the white people when they first began to trade with the Indians.

This grave-yard was upon a side-hill that looked down upon the winding Mohawk and the rich intervales that line its banks. It was known to the boys of several generations as a place where they could pick up curious beads after the spring rains; and on a wet day in November I started off on a buckboard wagon, with a hoe and a spade, to see what I could dig up. As there were so many beads on the surface, I wanted to see what there was below. There was a hop-yard covering the whole hill, so I commenced by opening a trench between two rows of hops, and had dug but a few inches when I found a dozen or more red and white glass tubes about as large and long as a common slate-pencil. At a depth of three feet I came to the first grave.

Now at first thought it may not seem a proper thing to do, to disturb the bones of a man, even though he be a savage, and has lain in the earth hundreds of years; but we may want very much to know what manner of men they were, these early inhabitants of our country, and may perhaps be able to find this out, more or less, from their skulls and bones, and the things we find buried with them. So I carefully removed the earth with a knife, and found a great variety of glass beads. There had evidently been a grand necklace made of them; they were round and oval and octagonal, and of various colors—red and amber-colored and blue and green. They had no doubt been brought to America by some Dutch trader, as beads of this kind have been made at Venice for several hundred years, and are still made for trading with the savages of Africa and our Western Indians. Before the white traders came, the savages made their beads of bone and stone and sea-shells, for they were very fond of ornaments, and took great pains to secure jewels of some kind.

I took out a hundred or more of these beads, and also an oval tube of catlinite, or red pipe-stone, which is a peculiar stone much used by the natives for pipes and beads, and is only found in Minnesota. But this was only the beginning of the finds I made. To the Indian all things animate and inanimate were endowed with a spirit, and the idea seemed to be that the spirit of the ornament, or utensil, or weapon went with the spirit of the man on the long journey to the happy hunting grounds.

The next thing I found was a white clay pipe with the letters R. T. stamped on the bowl, and this was one of the things that enabled me to determine the age of the place; for as R. T. probably stood for Richard Tyler, a celebrated maker of pipes about 1650, I could pretty safely conclude that some time during the latter half of the seventeenth century these things had been brought to America. Continuing to throw out the earth toward the foot of the grave (for the man had been buried with the beads around his neck, and the pipe in his hand), I found one triangular copper arrow-head—all that remained of the bow and arrows that were buried with him. A rude iron axe and a hoe next came to light. Axes of this kind are quite common on the sites of the more recent Indian villages; they have a peculiar mark, and were probably made at Utrecht.

At the foot of the grave I found a small copper kettle, and a rude iron hook to suspend it over the fire, and also what was by far the most interesting and valuable of the relics, a salt-glazed earthen jug of the kind known to collectors of ceramics as Grès de Flanders. It was without crack or flaw, and is an interesting specimen of this early pottery. Upon it are various devices stamped in the clay, the most prominent of which are two remarkably slim lions with enormous heads; the outlines of the designs and the lines encircling the jug are bright blue.

The kettle and jug were upside down, and in the former was the hollow shell of a small pumpkin or gourd. This, I think, is by far the oldest pumpkin to be found anywhere; it must be as old as the one that Peter, Peter, the pumpkin-eater, imprisoned his wife in.