104 Ohio Arch. and
His. Society Publications.
New England and all the colonies. Her
uniqueness, historically speak-
ing, lies in the fact that hers was the
first soil settled by the United States.
New England was peopled by the Puritans
and others from Old England;
New York by Dutch and English;
Pennsylvania by Quakers and Ger-
mans and Scotch-Irish; Virginia again by
the English but quite differ-
ent from those of Massachusetts and
Connecticut; Maryland by still
another element; and so on. Of the
states not included among the
original thirteen, but admitted to the
Union before Ohio: Vermont was
settled by Massachusetts and New York;
Kentucky by Virginia; and Ten-
nessee by North Carolina; but Ohio was
settled by all of these-by
elements from each and every state in
the confederacy; in other words,
Ohio was settled by the people of the
United States. Ohio was the first
territory to be representative of the
entire people, colonists of English
Puritans and Cavaliers and Quakers, of
Scotch-Irish and Germans. And
thus in a certain senese were not the
Ohioans truly the first Americans?"
THE ACOLHUANS.
This is the age of the historical novel.
It is being produced from the
press ad infinitum if not indeed ad
nauseum but it has remained for
General John Beatty, a life and honored
member of the Ohio State
Archaeological and Historical Society,
to be the author of a prehistoric
novel. General Beatty's book is
therefore unique as a literary feature
of the day. This volume, as confessed in
the apology, purports to be
a free translation from the Norraena of
the story of a man living in the
tenth century. It is the self-told
narrative of the hero Ivarr Bartholds-
son, a grandson of a former king of
Norway, which king spent many
years of his early life in the court of
Athelstan of England. Ivarr with
his father had drifted to Greenland,
whence Ivarr with an adventurous
party travels to the land of the
Acolhuans who occupied the Ohio val-
ley, and were none other than the Mound
Builders of that territory.
The book is thenceforth an account of
the lengthy sojourn of Ivarr among
its prehistoric people, whose customs,
life, habitations, government, and
social system so far as it went, are
ingeniously and in imagination de-
scribed. The author takes this form to
tell what is supposed to be known
about these people who left no written
records. Ivarr in his wanderings
strikes the northern boundary of the
present Ohio at the mouth of the
Sandusky river where was a chief
settlement of the Acolhuans. The
hero and his friends assist these people
in one of their campaigns against
a rival race known as the Skraelings.
There is a naval encounter on the
lake in their rude boats, and a hand to
hand contest with clubs and bows
and arrows on the land. Ivarr visits the
various chief settlements such
as those at Chillicothe, Newark and
Marietta. These Mound Building
settlements are graphically portrayed,
the business and domestic life of