Public Ledger

The Mound-Builders.

The Records of Pre-Historic Peoples, as shown at the Centennial.

[Philadelphia Times.]

The seeker after things curious and strange will find himself rewarded by going to the departments of Ohio, Missouri and Arkansas, and also to the government building, and examining the relics of the mound-builders. These primitive Americans do not occupy much space or make a great show in the exhibition, but what they do present furnishes food for thought and reflection. The collection of remains and relics is much the same in all the departments. Earthenware vessels, used as drinking and cooking utensils, medicine bottles, necklaces of shells, bone and copper needles, arrow-heads, and spear-heads, stone axes and implements for dressing skins tell us something concerning their skill in the arts.

The earthen vessels are of various sizes and shapes. The vast majority are the counterpart of the water colors still in use in India and Siam. Others again are wrought into rude representations of different birds and animals. In many cases there has been an attempt at decoration with colors. It is very suggestive concerning the identification of the mound-builders to visit the department of Peru, and to find there the same kind of pottery ware, both as to form and color, as that found in the mounds along the Mississippi. The remains of this ancient people and their civilization are found all over the continent. In nearly every State museum can be seen some traces either of their graves or of their habitations. The relics in the centennial buildings have been obtained principally from mounds in the West. These mounds are found all through the valley of the Mississippi, from the lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence furnished by grave-yards and ruins of ancient villages shows conclusively that there must have been a population there long centuries ago, almost equaling that which now possesses the great valley. The curious visitor will not fail to observe the peculiarities of the skulls in these collections. In those taken from the mounds in Missouri and Arkansas he will find marks of the early training to which these ancient Americans subjected their children. Some of the skulls are pressed flat on one side, others are conical; some have jaws of monstrous size. The writer has seen one taken from a mound in Illinois that would easily pass over the chin of a large-sized modern American. The mounds or tumuli were to this ancient people what the pyramids were to the Egyptians. Those recently opened in Arkansas show plainly their use—within arranged inclosure are the bones of the dead. They were buried in a sitting position; at the right arm of each skeleton was a water vessel, before it a plate for food, and at its left side a smaller vessel, by some supposed to be a medicine bottle. Then the dead were equipped for their long journey. Evidently this old race hoped for immortality. In Southern and Southwest Missouri there are to be found traces of their villages; in other places, as at Marietta, Ohio, and at Davenport, Iowa, are the ruins of immense fortifications built by them.

Who were these strange people that once owned this continent, and who are now dragged from their graves, where they have been sleeping for a thousand years, to grace our centennial? Whence did they come? What discoveries did they make? What battles did they fight? Where are they gone? It is certain they were not the ancestors of the North American Indian. The Indian is a more recent comer to this continent. The old traditions of the Iroquois tell us that their ancestors on coming eastward to the Mississippi found that region occupied by people who dwelt in towns, and that they drove them southward and took possession of their lands. The most plausible theory is that which identifies this race with the Aztecs, and thus the civilization, whose early efforts are found along the Mississippi and its tributaries, has its culmination in ancient Mexico and Peru. The Montezumas and the Incas were its representatives. One curious fact is very suggestive in this connection. Lake Superior copper, wrought into various implements, has been found in the graves of the old Peruvians. Unhappily the Spaniards, in their conquest of the new world, destroyed all the records and paintings that might have given us the key to the mystery. Perhaps among the discoveries to be made in New Mexico and Yucatan an antiquarian may find something that will throw light upon the origin and history of this vanished race. But as it is, the fragments of its life placed among the wonders of the nineteenth century produce a strange impression in the beholder. A thousand years ago the mound-builders digged and planted and builded and dreamed of the future. To-day we muse upon their ashes. When another thousand years shall have rolled over this continent, will another people speculate over the ruins of the nineteenth century? Will some antiquarian, digging among the debris of George's Hill, find the huge shafts of the Corliss engine and wonder at the rude and clumsy machinery of former ages? Will he place in his museum the skull of one of those beings who wear white caps and blue coats and sit with all the dignity of field marshals at the gates of the exposition, and label it as belonging to a race of conceited barbarians who lived a thousand years ago? Or perchance there shall be in his cabinet the check-bones which his superior knowledge will identify as belonging to the restaurant-keepers who, in the Centennial grounds, amazed the hungry crowd by asking so much and giving so little. Well, time makes all things even and brings all to dust.