Fowle's New Hampshire Gazette And General Advertiser

BOSTON, September 5.

Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Connecticut, to his friend here, dated 12th August, 1786.

"General Parsons, who some time since went to treat with the Indians, has lately returned, and informed me, that from what discoveries he has made near the Ohio, he is confident America some ages past must have been inhabited by some civilized nation, who were acquainted with the arts, for in digging the trenches of a new fort, constructed on the Ohio, 600 miles west of Fort Pitt, which is on the back part of Pennsylvania, they came on brick work regularly laid, and found many sound bricks ;---they found also the ruins of a regular built fort, and traced the ditch, gateway, and an aqueduct.--They also found the ruins of a town, and of a prodigious pyramid formed by art, designed, as he supposed, either for a place of worship, or for the burial of their dead, which has lain in ruins so long that he could perceive there had been three growths of wood on it successively ; and judges by every appearance that the latest works, that appear, were done at least six hundred years ago.-- He there dug up part of the jaw-bone of an animal with three teeth in it, which three teeth, as they lay in the jaw, took the space of two feet; these he brought home with him; the draught of one of them you have enclosed ; it weighed five pounds. He measured a thigh bone, which he also found, which was 4 feet 9 inches long. The oldest Indian has no knowledge of any such animal ; but they have a tradition, that once a great beast was there, who devoured all the deer and bears, and that the Great Being killed him with lightning, in compassion to them, as nothing else could do it."