Indefinite Mounds.—Of this class there are many. Thousands of such indefinite mounds and squares and circles are to be seen scattered over the various States of the Union. Their structure, composition and contents, give us no clue by which they may be assigned a place. It is believed that many of the strange works that abound in Butler county, Ohio, and which cannot be classified, are among the incomplete works, that is, works left unfinished by the builders.
Implements.—The people of Ohio have appropriated the implements of the Mound-builders to a large extent. Almost every homestead in Ohio is ornamented with some of those ancient implements and relics, yet tons have been taken away to grace private and public museums in all parts of this country, and even the museums of Europe and Asia. Among the implements are to be found spear heads, arrow heads; rimmers, knives, axes, hatchets, hammers, chisels, pestles, mortars, pottery, pipes, sculpture, gorgets, tubes, and articles of bone and clothing. Fragments of coarse, but uniformly spun and woven cloth have been found, of course not in preservation, but charred and in folds. One piece, near Middletown, Ohio, was found connected with tassels or ornaments, and may be seen at the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. In Anderson township, Ohio, native gold has been found for the first time. Several small ornaments of copper have been found covered with thin sheets of gold. Earrings also, made of meteoric iron, have been found, and a serpent cut out of mica. Some terra-cotta figures also, which give us an idea of the way the hair was dressed in the days of the Mound-builders. I cannot here name all the implements and ornaments that have been discovered. Though most of them are of hard stone, yet many have been found made of copper.
Mining, etc.—That these people were miners, is evident from the prevalence of various mineral fragments and implements. At Mound City, near Chillicothe, has been found galena, none of which can be found in Ohio. Obsidian also is found in the shape of instruments, which they must have transported from the Rocky Mountains. Ancient mining shafts are found in Minnesota, where the solid rock had been excavated to the depth of 60 feet. On Isle Royal there are pits 60 feet deep, worked through nine feet of solid rock, at the bottom of which is a rich vein of copper, and in the two miles of excavations in the same straight line have been found the mining implements in great numbers. Such advancement in mining, sagacity in warfare, industrial pursuits, and geometric skill, as their works display, prove their great superiority of race over the modern Indian. Their implements, some of them most elaborately made, their brick-making and various other ingenious works, enable us to place them high as an industrial people, while their sacred enclosures, and altars, and tablets, together with the numerous evidences of their being an agricultural nation, enable us to place them far above the modern Indian in the scale of civilization.
The people of the United States, though much to be commended because of their prudence and forethought in laying out their modern towns and cities along the various water courses, which serve as the different highways of commerce, have by no means shown a superior sagacity in that respect to the Mound-builders, whose great centres of population are now mostly occupied, or are encroached upon by the modern cities.
We may with safety assert that the population about Newark, and Xenia, and Mound City, was far above what it is now. The country about Dayton, Miamisburg, Oxford, Hamilton and Marietta was, undoubtedly, in the days of the Mound-builders moving with a greater mass of human beings than it can boast of to-day.
And if those peaceable and industrious inhabitants were as numerous as their remains indicate, what must have been the strength of those invading hordes who caused their downfall and perhaps wiped out forever every living representative of that ancient race, who could leave no more lasting memorial of their existence and struggles than those mysterious mounds which have given them their name.
Antiquity of the Mound-Builders.—Upon this point there are many theories, some regarding them as the earliest of the Indian tribes. Others give them a very great age and claim them to belong to preadamite man. By far the greater number of archæologists, however, place their existence at about 2,000 years ago.
In favor of the latter view we may call as evidence the present forest trees, which, though of great age, still flourish on some of the ancient remains. On one of the mounds at Marietta, Ohio, there stood a gigantic tree, which, when cut down, displayed 800 rings of annual growth. In many other places, trees of the age of 750 years have been cut, and underneath them evidences of previous forests found. One tree 750 years old was found to have underneath it, on the walls of one of the forts in Ohio, the cast of another tree of equal size, which would carry us back at least 1,500 years since those trees began to grow on those deserted walls of that ancient fortification.
We have some data in the vegetable accumulations in the ancient mining shafts near Lake Superior, as well as in the vegetable and other matter deposited in the numerous pits and trenches found among the works. Though these evidences cannot give the exact time of their accumulation, yet they give it approximately, by comparison with similar recent deposits.
There is another still stronger argument in favor of their antiquity, viz., the decayed condition of the skeletons. The skeletons of the oldest Indian tribes are comparatively sound while those of the Mound-builders are much decayed. If they are sound when brought out, they at once begin to disintegrate in the atmosphere, which is a sure sign of their antiquity. We know that some skeletons in Europe have lately been exhumed, which, though buried more than 1,000 years, are comparatively firm and well-preserved. We are, I think, bound to ascribe a greater antiquity to the Mound-builders' skeletons than to those found in the ancient barrows of Europe. Other considerations, such as stream encroachment, and river-terrace formation, might also be brought in as presumptive arguments in favor of their great antiquity.