In any one of perhaps two or three hundred places where prehistoric villages occurred, an observer may find great quantities of chips, spawls, broken implements, broken pottery, etc. The needs of ancient man were few, his implements simple and confined to the types illustrated in this work. Therefore, the presence of the unnumbered evidences of human residence indicates either a great length of occupation, or large numbers of Indians for a short period of time.
I never believed that the population in America exceeded one million (north of Mexico) at any time, assuming that the field evidence is against the statement so often made that there are as many Indians in America to-day as at the time of the discovery.
If the Ohio Valley had been occupied by mound-building people when La Salle and Hennepin made their voyages of discovery, these worthy and zealous explorers would have made reference to it in their reports. But La Salle and Hennepin heard of the great Illinois towns on the river of the same name in that state and journeyed from Quebec to visit those towns. There were thousands of Indians living in the Illinois country, but Ohio appears to have had little population—that is of Indians, and none whatsoever of mound-building people.
Between Aurora and Lawrenceburg, Indiana, if the Ohio River has not during a recent flood covered the bottoms with silt, there may be seen a village-site nearly three miles in extent. I visited it in 1898 and collected upwards of three thousand specimens from the surface in a week’s time.
The Indian population was most numerous on that great artery, the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Perhaps we have not fully recognized the importance played by this “Father of Waters” in prehistoric times. Throughout the Mississippi Valley are several climates varying from extreme cold in northern Minnesota to the semi-tropical of Louisiana; from the aridity of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to the salubrious climate of Tennessee; from the cold of the extreme Northwest to that of Pennsylvania. The Mississippi Valley comprises altitude and sea level, mountains and plains, every kind of soil and every specimen of plant and animal life found in North America above the City of Mexico.
It would appear that man had penetrated to the heads of every stream tributary to the Mississippi. Through the Colorado basin, throughout the length and breadth of all the Southern rivers; to the rivers of New England, the great St. Lawrence basin, and the Red River of the North, and even far Yukon in Alaska,—these primitive stone-age people carried their simple arts and established their villages. In the Cumberland and Tennessee valleys such multitudes of them lived that even after a hundred years of ruthless destruction of the stone grave cemeteries, there still remain thousands of unopened sepulchres.
Apropos of these stone graves, General Gates P. Thruston, of Nashville, who has studied ancient man in Tennessee more than forty years, reports by letter to me as follows: “I think that there must have been forty thousand graves within twenty-five miles of Nashville. I should think there were probably at one time as many as one hundred thousand prehistoric inhabitants in the two valleys. The village-sites and cemeteries cannot be numbered.”
The officials at Washington have underestimated, it seems to me, the number of Indians in the United States, because they have recorded the Indian of the historic period rather than the Indian of the past. De Soto and Coronado both reported continuous population throughout the regions traversed by them. Yet shortly after the year 1700 small-pox, measles, cholera, and other diseases destroyed entire tribes. Untold thousands of our Indians perished during these epidemics. The case of the Mandans is well known. The early colonists made frequent reference to the spread of these plagues throughout the country.
Fig. 722. (S. 1–2.) Views of an unknown object of stone, found in 1885 on a ranch on the Columbia River, Oregon. W. F. Parker’s collection, Omaha.