2i6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



shelter afforded by the timber, the forests yield food more easily cap- 

 tured, aj3 well as material for his habitation and for his implements of 

 war and the household; while the annual devastation by fire rendered 

 the prairie not only uninhabitable, but actually dangerous. It is cer- 

 tain, therefore, that the occupancy of the prairies has been, in general, 

 the latest step in the establishment of the dominion of the aboriginal 

 tribes. In other words, it is only a late migration which has brought 

 the Siouan tribes into the plains of the Missouri and of the upper 

 Mississippi, and with this fact agrees all the evidence that can be found 

 that bears on it, whether from a study of the people themselves, of the 

 mounds, or of their traditions. 



It will be anticipated, from what has been said thus far, that the 

 original mound-builder dynasty in the Ohio Valley was destroyed by 

 an incursion of hostile people belonging to the Algonquian stock. It 

 will be the burden of the rest of this paper to establish that great pre- 

 historic event, and to show what effect it had on Minnesota. 



Dr. Cyrus Thomas is to be accredited with the most thorough in- 

 vestigation of the aboriginal earthworks of the country. Under the 

 direction of the Bureau of Ethnology he has established some important 

 generalizations and has traced out some of the movements of the tribes 

 that were concerned in the war which resulted in the expulsion of the 

 original mound-builders from Ohio and the contiguous regions. Suffice 

 it to say here that he considers that the evidence shows a movement, at 

 least an extension, of the earliest mound-builders from the region of 

 eastern Iowa, southeastern Minnesota, and southwestern Wisconsin, 

 across Illinois and Indiana into Ohio. He shows that these people were 

 driven out toward the east and southeast. He traces this retreat, which 

 may have required several hundred years for its completion, with the 

 most patient and convincing research, and arrives at the conclusion that 

 when the whites came upon the scene the defeated and expelled people 

 were known as Cherokee, living in western North Carolina and eastern 

 Tennessee, and were still building mounds. The last statement is 

 abundantly verified, even by historic documents. De Soto met them in 

 his trip across the cis-Mississippi region, and his chroniclers describe 

 the mounds which they saw. Some of the mounds built by the Cherokee 

 in their new home contain articles of European manufacture. 



But this line of persistent aggression from the northwest to the 

 southeast, resulting in the expulsion of the Cherokee from the upper 

 part of the Ohio Valley, was not the whole of the great war, though 

 it is the only part that has been established by evidence like that ad- 

 duced by Dr. Thomas. It can hardly be questioned that such an in- 

 cursion would have had a disastrous effect on the mound-builders of 

 the whole Ohio Valley, and that they were all driven out at the same 

 time and by the same hostile force. 



