PREHISTORIC ABORIGINES OF MINNESOTA 215 



linguistic affinity, are sufficient to point to an early common origin. 

 If the Algonquian stock in any of its tribes is found to have con- 

 structed mounds, such as those characteristic of the Ohio mound-build- 

 ers, it seems to have been only exceptional or sporadic, or may be 

 attributed to adoption from their neighbors belonging either to the 

 Iroquois or the Siouan stock. I know that Dr. Thomas has shown the 

 great probability that the Shawnees, an Algonquian tribe, were the 

 authors of certain mounds in western Tennessee and contiguous 

 territory farther southeast, and specially of those that cover the char- 

 acteristic stone-box graves. Admitting that, it is still true that the 

 Shawnees have not been shown to have been mound builders in a wide 

 sense, and that, carrying the habit of subsurface burial with them when 

 they left their kindred and migrated into southern Illinois and western 

 Tennessee, they might easily have adopted the custom of their mound- 

 building new neighbors and covered their box graves with earth mounds. 

 But, without admitting at present that the Shawnees constructed the 

 mounds that cover the stone-box graves, it seems to be reasonable to 

 refer those mounds to the predecessors of the Shawnees, viz. : the Osage 

 and perhaps the Omaha, who belong to the Dakotan stock, and who have 

 a tradition, which is confirmed by other traditions, that they once lived 

 east of the Mississippi in that very region. With this understanding, 

 it is, I repeat, a remarkable fact that, aside from the Muskogean earth- 

 works of the gulf coast, which have distinctive characters, only the 

 Dakotan and Iroquois stocks can be shown either by history or tradi- 

 tion to have been characteristic mound-builders. 



It is due to the research of the late J. V. Brower that the Dakota 

 tribes of Minnesota have been proved to belong to the so-called mound- 

 builder dynasty. But the mound-builder domain was, par excellence, 

 in the Ohio Valley and southward into Kentucky, Tennessee and 

 northern Georgia and eastward into West Virginia. There is also a 

 remarkable series of effigy mounds in central and southern Wisconsin 

 which extended across the Mississippi into Minnesota and Iowa. With 

 slight exceptions the typical mound-builder area was occupied, as shown 

 by Powell's map, at the coming of the whites, by non-mound-building 

 people ; while the great body of the mound-builders, represented by the 

 Siouan stock, were on the west side of the Mississippi, in a region which 

 had been passed by, or ignored, by the early migrating stocks. 



As between a prairie and a forested country it is plain that the 

 forested area would be chosen first by the aborigines. Aside from the 



that the Sioux at different periods occupied the greater part of what is now 

 Wisconsin. Mounds have been described by John T. Short ( " North Americans 

 of Antiquity," p. 30) in the valley of the Columbia River, south from Olympia, 

 but these have since been ascribed to natural causes by Messrs. Rogers and 

 Upham (Am. Geol., Vol. XI., p. 293 and Vol. XXXIV., p. 203). 



