Ohio History Journal

HOMES OF THE MOUND BUILDERS.

 

 

WILLIAM JACKSON ARMSTRONG.

[Col. W. J. Armstrong was inspector of the United States consulates

under the administrations of President Grant. He is the author of "Siberia

and the Nihilists," "The Heroes of Defeat," etc. - EDITOR.]

The Mound Builder is still a mystery. His story has not been

told. He is not yet intelligibly tangent to any known race. He

is not only prehistoric, but unconnected. His clues are shy and

evasive, lacking the thread of either written speech or hiero-

glyphic memorials. His silence is impressive. He is the Pelas-

gian of the Western World, without articulate voice to reach his

successors. On the Latin theory, omne ignotum pro magnifico,

he tends in popular fancy to enlargement and idealization. Some-

thing, however, is being concretely, if slowly, learned of him.

For a century or more he has been studied empirically and super-

ficially in these western valleys along the great Mississippi basin.

Generations of the early modern settlers here, the pioneers of the

woods, and their successors, the cultivators of the soil, looked

with inquiring wonder on his huge traces, his burial tumuli, his

gigantic earth-works, his implements of flint and diorite. Then

they gave him up as an unresolved and impossible problem. They

had dimly heard, however, that he was an "Aztec," or "Toltec,"

or possibly a Tartar. And learned investigation has not pro-

ceeded much further. The scholar is still a fumbling sciolist,

dealing with the now mute inhabitant, who, in the twilight cen-

turies, settled down here amid the mysterious forests. Or, who

knows, he may have been, like the forest themselves, autochthon-

ous-the Adam and Eve of the occident?

But, as has been intimated, some progress has been made in

the knowledge of this misty and elusive denizen of the early

wilds. The unearthing and inspection of his remains in recent

years having thrown new light upon his habits and customs, pos-

sibly, his grade in civilization. As is fitting, in the region where

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Homes of the Mound Builders.              29

 

the evidences most abound, Ohio has taken the lead in this more

minute and scientific search; the work being undertaken here, as

in other sections of the country, under the direction of the Ohio

State Archaeological and Historical Society, whose field examina-

tions have been latterly conducted by Professor W. C. Mills,

curator of the Society and to the Museum of the State University.

I accepted, in a recent year, the invitation of the Ohio

Archaeological and Historical Society to accompany its annual

field party in search of the relics of the mysterious race. The

site of explorations was fixed near the village of Bourneville, in

Ross County, central in the tier of counties crossing the southern

regions of the State, this site having already yielded in one or

two previous years valuable osteological results to the pick

and shovel.

For, to-day, the inquisition for these early settlers, the "first

families" of Ohio, so to speak, is largely a matter of bones.

Though his origin and scheme of empire be elusive, the primitive

citizen did not fail to manufacture abundant testimony of his

occupation here. The colossal mounds still rear their heads along

the lowlands of the river courses, and their builders, whitherso-

ever their race may have finally departed, have left their skeletons

in and around these monumental earth-heaps, where they remain

to-day as startlingly distinct effigies of humanity as at the hour

of their deposit. The Mound Builder lies by the side of his

mound. He is neither speculative nor a myth. Whatever may

have been his aspirations in the flesh, or whether his intentions

may have been more or less honorable in his furtive residence

here, he is as obvious and clear in his osteology as the Anglo-

Saxon who has succeeded him. His physical proportions and

cranial architecture are in substantial evidence.

The scene selected for his exhumation under review was a

magnificent valley two miles in breadth, winding along Paint

Creek, or river, a stream of irregular turbulence, watering the

fertile Ohio lowlands and emptying into the Scioto. Along its

sides stretches to-day, for twenty miles, an expanse of rank, opu-

lent grain fields, the soil now tame under four generations of the

civilized plough and harrow. The county of Ross prides itself

on its fecund fields and its antiquity among Ohio communities.

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30        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

Chillicothe, its county seat, from the tower of whose ancient

Court House Daniel Webster, on a passage through the State,

three quarters of a century ago, praised the unrivaled prospect of

springing crops, was the early capital of the commonwealth. The

opening years of the late century mark, on the headstones in the

local graveyards, the dates of demise of the early pioneers from

the trans-Alleghany settlements. But over the smooth, culti-

vated fields, along the water of Paint River, the landmarks of

nature are still unchanged, wild and rugged, as in the days when

the Mound Builders, with an unerring eye to succulence, pitched

on the valley for an enduring habitat. The straight line of hills

lifted almost to grandeur on one side of the stream, and clad as

then with primeval forests, is the same in aspect as when it looked

down on his encampment on the opposite shore of the river; while

rearward of his ancient abode, the heights, similarly clad in their

aboriginal green, swing into superb amphitheater, rising in suc-

cessive terraces to miniature mountain cones against the sky line.

For imposingly picturesque effect the hills of the Rhine and lower

Hudson are hardly their superior. The crescent arena under-

neath, two miles in breadth, forming the hoar camp of the

departed race, on which we pitched our modern tents, looked on

every side toward this frowning circlet of heights. The prospect

was magnificent, with a touch of gloom; the shadow of this lofty

environment, even through the sunny days, falling upon us in

the level of the sombre cornfields with suggestions of the gray

primeval time. Without much effort of the imagination, the

olden scene could be nearly perfectly recalled-the pre-historic

squatters from their valley settlement looking to these green-

robed hills. It was to become yet more real through our subse-

quent diggings here. But the antique settler on this site, as else-

where in his selection of locality, gave evidence of an eye for

natural beauty as well as of a solicitude for venison and corn.

For the Mound Builder, though singularly carnivorous, was a

cultivator of the maize.

The immediate spot chosen for our summer exploitation was

in an open field of newly-mown wheat stubble, over an ancient

village site extending from the base of a lofty mound-one of

several tumuli dotted along the twenty miles of this fertile valley

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nes of the Mound Builders.              31

 

plain. From the center and slope of the mound itself had been

taken, in a previous year, bones and relics of the mysterious archi-

tects, not less than seventy of their skeletons having been

unearthed from the level of the cornfield neighboring its base.

Over this whole lowland, or river-bottom plain, indeed, to the

distance of a quarter of a mile in superficial extent, and possibly

in yet uninspected territory far beyond, are the profuse relics of

the ancient occupation; arrow point, wrought spear-heads in

flint, and obsidian, fragments of pottery, carved shells and imple-

ments of diorite, lying so thickly strewn over the alluvial soil that

the plowboy, for a century back, has only needed to stoop and

select at pleasure from these mementoes of the forgotten epoch;

though, in fact, they are so thickly and visibly cast that they have

gone for generations virtually unheeded by the residents here.

The listless curiosity, however, even of these practical sons of

agriculture would have been stirred had they realized over what

they stepped. It was a city of the dead that, within a few inches

of the disturbing plowshare, lay with its grinning skeletons

upturned to their feet!

It is to these previously unnoted village sites, rather than to

the imposing and more sensational tumuli, that the recent quest

for the secret of the Mound Builder has been chiefly attracted.

His true vestiges and inwardness are to be uncovered here -his

home, his habits, his tastes, his relations to his dead.

In this new and curious archlaeologic quest, the Ohio Society,

so liberally sustained by the State representative assembly, is

taking, as has been said, a marked prominence; the fact being due

to its enlightened board of officers, aided by the vigorous and

intelligent labors of its distinguished secretary.

To me, a neophyte in necrologic search, the accounts of these

mysterious village habitations, with their domestic graveyards

and refuse-heaped ash pits yielding testimony of the daily life of

the outworn folk, sounded strange and unreal. The Mound

Builder found in his alleged identical skeleton was a probable

myth, or, at best, a galvanized Indian of the later and tangible

epoch - whose tribe could have deposited him at will, by way

of conspicuous sepulture, in or near the barrows of the more

ancient people. But on the first day of our operations on this

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32        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

Bourneville site, under the first thrust of the spade, there, yellow

and shining in the July sun, lay the clean, indubitable skull of

the pre-historic man! At its side was a pot of coarse, heavy

earthenware, with crudely ornamented rim. The spot was only

a few hundred feet distant from the central mound, around whose

base nearly a hundred other skeletons had been previously

unearthed. The Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley did not build

mounds nor fashion clay pots. To them, as to their pale modern

successors, these monumental earth-heaps were a mystery beyond

the call of tradition.

The skull at our feet, then, was not the cranial relic of an

Indian, but that of an architect of the giant barrow under whose

shadow it reposed. Here was reality and history! The burial

plat was the rounding bank of the ancient river bed, the soil

worn thin and close to the features of the olden dead by the

modern plow.

As from the initial spade stroke we proceeded into this shal-

low shore, the skeletons came everywhere thickly into sight; the

burials in places seemingly having been imposed upon one

another, as if occurring at widely separated intervals. The work

grew interesting almost to excitement. We were face to face

with the representatives of the vanished race! Under the heads

of a few were polished stones for head-rests, while, near others,

were broken or entire pots of varying size, containing flint arrow-

heads, ornamental trinkets in bone, minute fragments of copper

and deposits of food for the dead; this latter persisting in the

form of kernels of Indian corn and the shriveled seeds of fruits,

distinct in their identity as on the day of interment.

How long had these human remnants laid here thus, integral

and intact? One hundred, two hundred, four hundred years?

Longer than that. The Indian tribes that met our fathers on this

soil knew nothing of these burials. Probably six hundred, ten

hundred, two thousand years, then--from the days when the

Montagus warred with the Capulets or the skin-clad ancestors

of the civilized Saxon, now exhuming them, fell under the sword

of the Celtic Dagobert in the forests by the Rhine--or from

still beyond in the pagan mists. How long will the frame of

man last, anyhow? That depends: three thousand years, as

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Homes of the Mound Builders.              33

 

exampled in the cairns of western France, or by the experience

of Schliemann with his Mycenaean kings--five thousand, ten

thousand, as instanced by the remains of upper Egypt. Here, at

least, grinning and pertinent before us, lay the bony relics of

departed tribes of men, infract and substantial as in their days

under the sunlight, shocking the senses almost with their mock-

ery of contrast with man's brief day in the flesh. The soil in this

Bourneville burial camp is alluvial over a porous clay, itself

imposed on a drainage stratum of loose river gravel--offering

the Mound Builder unusual conditions for posthumous endur-

ance. He thus remains to-day in conspicuous evidence.

Before the end of a week, we had exposed not less than

twenty of these amazingly distinct human forms, lying in the

veritable attitudes in which they had been laid away in the long-

ago epochs. Method of direction as to the points of the com-

pass had been ignored in these burials, as there was also lacking

evidence of religious or superstitious rites of interment. Scru-

pulous care, however, had in many instances been taken as to the

decorous composure of the bodies and limbs of the dead.

The process of uncovering these remains was exceedingly

careful; for, although perfectly natural in appearance, the bones

of these age-worn deposits were, for the most part, soft and

brittle. After throwing off, therefore, by the aid of mattock

and shovel, the superficial layers of soil, it was necessary to com-

plete the exposure with minute trowels or even with the blades

of penknives; the delicate, painstaking care of the proceeding

being equal to that of the anatomical expert with his specimens

for a museum.

Sometimes a group of not less than seven or eight skeletons

would be thus prepared for the photographer's camera; the

human shapes, with their deliberate meaning attitudes and grin-

ning skulls, so outlined in relief against the earth, having, at

times, a sinister and even menacing distinctness, as if in sardonic

rebuke of our intrusion on their ancient rest. Faced to the liv-

ing, the mysterious dead - our unmistakable kindred - seemed

to speak in irony out of the ages. There was no answering back;

though, at times, the prolonged, almost intelligent stare of these

reproachful relics produced an effect so nearly appalling that the

Vol. XIV--3.

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34        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

tension of nerves found its natural physiological relief in bursts

of hilarious counter-mockery. We addressed the outraged vic-

tims of our spades as "John," "Jonathan," the "first citizens,"

the "late lamented," etc. But the limit of gruesome humor was

reached when our artist, taking conventional stand, admonished

his helpless subject, with professional courtesy, to "lie still" and

"look pleasant!"

In our preliminary diggings during the first ten days, more

than thirty skeletons, lying over an area of scarcely more than

as many square feet, were thus uncovered and photographed; the

place seeming in sections, a veritable teeming charnel pit of the

mound-building  tribe.  The  forms ranged  from  untoothed

infancy, to toothless old age, more than one-half of the

burials, however, being those of infants and children from a few

weeks to a few months or years of age. The early inhabitants

here were clearly not economical of babies. Scarlet rash, teeth-

ing and a diet of imperfectly boiled green corn had inferentially

done their perfect work.

At the head or by the side of an occasional adult lay the

carved pipe of stone, the model, in size and form, of the conven-

tional pipe, savage or civilized, in all the centuries since. A thou-

sand years, mayhap, earlier than Raleigh and his pampered North

Carolina aristocrats knew the luxury of the weed, the primeval

American in the enjoyment of its curling fragrance sat here

before his hut door, on the river bank, watching the failing sun

over the wooded magnificence of these hills. From all evidences

the Mound Builder was an ardent lover of tobacco.

Here and there, also, near the skeletons, lay the spearhead,

the stone hatchet or other implements, in bone or flint, of the

primitive warrior or hunter-notably among these being the

shapely, carved bone awl, for the piercing of skins, or similar

domestic use.

The physical proportions of the Mound Builder have not yet

been adequately studied by the methods of ethnological compari-

son. The adult skeletons found by us here, and generally over

this Bourneville site, have a size not much varying from that of

average modern civilized humanity, but tending to inferior rather

than to larger dimensions. Many of the male specimens, meas-

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Homes of the Mound Builders.              35

ured by us, did not exceed the length of five feet three or four

inches. One almost gigantic figure, however, atoned for the

brevity of his neighbors; his huge, naked skeleton, as it lay

grimly composed with head resting on a polished stone slab,

stretching, from crown to heel, the full six feet of manly propor-

tions. In life he must have exceeded that stature by several

inches, while in girth of ribs and massiveness of bone he was truly

colossal - evidently from his size and distinction in burial a tow-

ering Saul among his race.

The skull of the Mound Builder, as it came under our inspec-

tion, if subjected to minute examination, would furnish a curious

study and one far more fruitful in inference than has yet been

made. The specimens upturned by us were apparently not of the

Indian type with which we are familiar, there being both greater

regularity and delicacy than mark that type. They were still

further removed from the type of the yet lower savage races,

distinguished by the prognathous jaw and heaviness in the occip-

ital region. On the contrary, while the jaw of the Mound archi-

tect as here found is regular and massive, as became his carniv-

orous habit, there is a distinct tendency to elevation and sym-

metry in the cerebral parts, ranking him rather with the best of

the Turanian types of men. Much, however, must be awaited

to reduce speculation to scientific inference on this point.

Exhausting after a few days the limits of the some thirty-

feet square graveyard, we proceeded in our excavations into the

immediately adjacent dwelling sites.

The Mound Builder deposited his dead under two feet of

earth, at his doorway; his habitation and sepulchre--possibly

from lazy convenience sake -knowing little distinction. Life or

death had for him little of the civilized panorama. The necessi-

ties of both were pressing and imperative. Sentiment and imag-

ination, or even considerations of health, were not his masters.

Unquestionably, in spite of his mounds and his pots and his

somewhat equivocal military fortifications, he was not greatly

superior in habits to the Indian who succeeded him. His burials,

his stone tools, his crude art and his reckless care of his babies

attest this. But he was clever in the ways of the semi-barbarian.

His dwelling sites, which we now entered, revealed something

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36       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

of his methods and status. To us delving and creeping amid

these day after day the atmosphere of the primitive life and time

stole with curious effect over the imagination, the impression

verging at times on the weird and uncanny. Here were the

penetralia, the Lares and Penates, the home and current life, of

the ancient race. The Mound Builder, outside of his mound,

was not an architect. Beyond his primitive implements, he

wrought neither in wood nor in stone. His home was probably

a wigwam of skins and twisted boughs. There are no remains

or evidences to the contrary - only here and there a still existing

earth hole or socket, into which he thrust the stake or pole that

propped his dwelling. The inference, subject to correction, may

do him vast injustice; but the Mound Builder, barring his zealous

proclivity for heaping his huge barrows, was a lazy son of the

soil. The testimony is against him. He carried his dead only

beyond his door lintels; and here, around and underneath his

immediate habitation, he dug circular holes, from three to six

feet in depth, into which to empty his ash pots and toss the rem-

nants of his broken food and other refuse from domestic uses.

In vulgar parlance, they have "given him  away." Through

them, like the Indians in the comic opera of "Columbus," he has

been "discovered" - in his habits, his tastes and his indolence.

His reputation for industry, so laboriously wrought up in his

stupendous monuments over the surface of the earth, has disap-

peared in these discreditable apertures beneath it. As to his deal-

ings with the soil, the Mound Builder, prudent for his fame,

should have limited his efforts to the superior direction. But

history has been served. As has been intimated, within these

circular pits, clearly defined by the softness of their soil against

the hard wall of the untouched neighboring clay, are to be found

the true vestigia of the home life of the early American. As

with the minute trowels we painfully disemboweled these cavities

of their contents, the fruits of our labors became intently curious.

Remnants of food, broken and entire implements of stone or bone

for household use, shells of the native river mussel and land tor-

toise, flint quirts, fish hooks and arrowheads-all flung with

careless hand into these convenient domestic abysses--were

found in plethoric abundance. Ashes, in layers or heaps, most

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Homes of the Mound Builders.               37

 

frequently intervened between these more significant finds of

family debris. The Mound Builder cooked his victual.

The mode of clearing these waste pits was grotesquely

and, at times, comically uncomfortable; their limited circular area

requiring the delver, with his tiny spade, to squeeze himself into

cross-legged sitting posture and sink gradually, in the process of

the evacuation, from the sight of his fellows. The slowly-vanish-

ing vision of one bald-headed member of our party, as he thus

disappeared from the surface, was the unfailing signal for

merriment.

These cavities were uniformly prolific in their yield of the

customary finds in flint and stone, such as hammers, hatchets,

knives, chisels, wedges and similar instruments. But addition-

ally significant of the industries of the mystic people were the

implements and utensils in bone and shell. Notable among these

were needles fashioned from the delicate bones of birds and the

so-called "scrapers," sharply and curiously carved from the bones

of the elk and deer and, inferentially, used in the cleaning and

preparation of the skins of these and other animals. The articles

in shell, quite commonly from the favorite and ornamental land

tortoise, were the more than inferential cups and ladles and

spoons employed in the distribution of the family soup. Still

added to these were the constantly abundant fragments of the

earthen pot, indicating a varying size of the vessel from two

inches to nearly as many feet in diameter. Indeed, from the

everywhere profuse remains of this family receptacle over and

underneath the soil hereabouts, it must have been nearly as plen-

tiful with the tribes as modern crockery with their civilized

successors.

The taste and supply in ornament of these strange folk was

evinced in our frequent discoveries of bone beads and diminutive

specimens of copper, together with other articles of decorative

gear, not infrequently fashioned from material transported from

remote sections of the country.

But most significantly characteristic of all in the contents

of these pits were the varied and literally massive remains of

animal life, the relicts of food of the human inhabitants here.

The shells of the river mussel were found in literal heaps, while

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38        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

every thrust of trowel or shovel threw to light the bones of deer,

elk or bear; the accumulation of these being sufficient to make a

respectably impressive mound by the side of each pit. The

remains, indeed, of not less than twenty species of animals, mostly

native to the region, were found not sparingly in these excava-

tions, including the elk, deer, bear, panther, wolf, wildcat, squir-

rel, rabbit, coon, wild turkey, opossum, polecat, dog, and many

others, most of which had been apparently utilized in the way of

subsistence. The succulent marrow of the bones of the deer and

kindred animals had been cleanly extracted or carved, in every

instance, from its investment. With every hour and step of the

investigation there grew the overmastering impression of the

carnivorous voracity of these ancient denizens of the soil. In

whatever else the primal American may have been lacking, he

had in our modern vernacular his "appetite always with him."

He evidently lived close to nature in his struggle with her here.

He was a tickler, if not a rude cultivator, of the earth and a hun-

ter among men.                His weapons for the largest game were

obviously ample.            His pots were capacious, and he filled his

stomach.  But beyond his specialty of the towering mound,

neither his art nor his ornament was high or elaborate.

From the contents of these curious earth cavities adjacent to

his hearthstone, it may not be quite fair, indeed, to conclusively

judge of the ancient inhabitant of the soil--to construct the

imaginary temple of his civilization from the fragments of his

domesticity, by himself rejected. Even civilized man would not

elect to be so deduced by his successors.

His gigantic barrows and crude fortifications in the ultimate

verdict make for the Mound Builder measureable amendment.

His cranium is not unpromising; the discovery of an occa-

sional grotesquely-carved pipe or copper ornament may elevate

him toward the rank of the Zuni or Aztec; but it stands to reason

that these tell-tale cavities, fecund with the broken paraphernalia

of his daily existence, are the true memorabilia and evidence of

his half-barbarous, evanished race. Taking the case as it stands,

at least, it is disconcerting to acknowledge how barely he is res-

cued by his mound and his pot from the status of the familiar

Indian, of whose arts and habits he so abundantly partook.

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