Others, in the form of rabbits, badgers, bears, and birds; others, of unknown monstrous animals.
We examined in all thirty-nine mounds; and in one, at the very base, on the floor of the natural earth upon which the mound was built (the soil of the mound being, as I said, always of a different character to the surrounding soil) we discovered and carried away with us the perfect skeleton of a man, with a few arrow heads made of flint, and a tobacco pipe, made also of stone, with a very small and narrow bowl, having a device on it like some of the hieroglyphic monsters of Egypt or old India.
In twelve we found skeletons, male and female, of the present race of Indians, with their bows and arrows, or, as was the case in four instances, their rifles and knives and tobacco pipes; some of these last elaborately carved in red stone. In Iowa we dug into a large mound, and discovered fragments of an ancient pottery, with the colors burned into the material, and various bones and skulls, arrow heads, and a flint knife, and saw.
We saw the painted rocks, also, on the Mississippi shores, near Prairie du Chien—said to be of an immemorial age—and the questions, Who was this old mound builder—whence did he come—when did he vanish from this continent? have haunted me ever since. That he was the primitive man of this planet, I think there is good reason to believe. Go where we will, to what portion soever of the earth, we shall find these mound evidences of his existence. In Asia, Europe, Africa, and all along the backbone of the American continent, he has established his record. Yet no one knows anything about him: all tradition even of him and of his works is lost. When Watkinson started from the middle of Asia to visit the newly acquired country of Russia—the beautiful, fruitful, invaluable country of the Amoor—he was confronted at the very outset by a cluster of seven of these very mounds, and his book, from that time forth, extending over thousands of miles, is full of descriptions of these unknown earthworks. I have no doubt they mark the progressive geographical movements of a race of men who came from Asia. From Behring's Strait to the Gulf they can easily be traced.
But I have said enough, and will stop here.
THE MOUND BUILDER.
Who art thou? old Mound Builder!
Where dost thou come from?
Womb of what country,
Womb of what woman
Gave birth to thee?
Who was thy sire?
Who thy sire's sire?
And who were his forbears?
Cam'st thou from Asia?
Where the race swarms like fireflies,
Where many races mark.
As with colored belts, its tropics!
What pigment stained thy skin?
Was it a red, or wert thou
Olive-dyed, or brassy?
Handsome thou couldst hardly have been,
With those high cheek-bones,
That mighty jaw, and its grim chops,
That long skull, so broad at the back parts,
That low, retreating forehead!
Doubtless thine eyes were dark,
Like fire-moons set in their sockets;
Doubtless thine hair was black,
Coarse, matted, long, and electric;
Thy skeleton that of a giant!
Well fleshed, well lashed with muscles,
As with an armor of iron;
And doubtless thou wert a brave fellow,
On the old earth, in thy time.
I think I know thee, old Mole!
Earth delver, mound builder, mine worker!
I think I have met thee before,
In times long since, and forgotten;
Many thousands of years, it may be,
Or ever old Noah, the bargeman,
Or he, the mighty Deucalion,
Wroth with the world as he found it,
Uprose in a passion of storm
And smote with his fist the sluices,
The water sluices of Cloudland—
Locked in the infinite azure—
Drowning the plains and mountains,
The shaggy beasts and hybrids,
The nameless birds—and the reptiles,
Monstrous in bulk and feature,
Which alone were thy grim contemporaries.
Here, in the State of Wisconsin,
In newly discovered America,
I, curious to know what secrets
Were hid in the mounds of thy building,
Have gone down into their chambers,
Into their innermost grave-crypts,
Unurning dry bones and skulls,
Fragments of thy mortality!
Oftentimes near to the surface
Of these thy conical earth-runes,
—For who shall tell their secret?—
Meeting with strange interlopers,
Bodies of red Winnebagoes,
Each with its bow and its arrows,
Each with its knife and its war gear,
Its porphyry-carved tobacco pipe,
Modern, I know by the fashioning.
Often, I asked of them,
As they lay there so silently,
So stiff and stark in their bones,
What right they had in these old places,
Sacred to dead men of a race they knew not?
And oh! the white laughters,
The wicked malice of the white laughters
Which they laughed at me,
With their ghastly teeth, in answer!
Was never mockery half so dismal!
As if it were none of my business.
Nor was it; save that I liked grimly to plague them,
To taunt them with their barbarity,
That they could not so much as dig their own graves,
But must needs go break those of the dead race,
Their far superiors, and masters in craft and lore!
And bury themselves there, just out of sight,
Where the vulture's beak could peck them,
Were he so obscenely minded,
And the wolf could scrape them up with his foot.
Curious for consideration
All this with its dumb recordings!
Very suggestive also,
The meeting of him, the first-born,
Who lived before the rainbow
Burst from the womb of the suncloud,
In the Bible days of the Deluge—
The meeting very suggestive
Of him, with the red Winnebago,
Such immemorial ages,
Cartooned with mighty empires,
Lying outstretched between them.
He, the forerunner of cities