A Botanical and Economic Study. 99 



interesting discovery. Mr. Stillman's attention was attracted 

 by ashes on the face of an exposure of a cut made for the 

 passage of the Mynster Springs road, one and a half miles 

 north of Council Bluffs, Mo. In company with Mr. Jacque- 

 min and Mr. Burke, he opened the face of the bluff, and found 

 what might be called a kitchen heap. The opening extended 

 into the hill four feet, and was five feet below the surface. 

 They found a fragment of an elk's antler, a shoulder-blade 

 fashioned into a rude agricultural implement, fragments of 

 bone, a pipe, a piece of deer's antler, flint scrapers, fragments 

 of pottery, a charred corn-cob, several large mussel shells, fish 

 bones, vertebral joints, and a stone paint-pot or mortar, of 

 rough quartzite. 



At the advent of the Europeans, the Indians were found 

 cultivating the maize. That they practiced the first prin- 

 ciples of agriculture before that is shown by the remains of 

 agricultural implements of primitive form. When the whites 

 came, they gave up their clumsy instruments and adopted the 

 better and more lasting European tools. In a burial mound 

 near Illinoistown, opposite St. Louis, was discovered a stone 

 hoe seven and a half inches long, nearly six inches wide, and 

 about half an inch thick. The fastening was facilitated by 

 two notches. A similar but smaller hoe was found in a 

 garden in the city of Belleville.' McAdams 2 says that "the 

 majority of these ancient implements of husbandry were made 

 after definite patterns, each kind to be used for special pur- 

 poses, being similar to six of the deeply notched hoes." They 

 tilled the ground with hoes made of clam shells. 3 



In the southwestern United States, numerous discoveries 

 have been made of corn in the deserted cliff -dwellings, pueblos 

 and mounds. Dr. Edward Palmer* found, in the summer of 

 1869, in a mound in the neighborhood of St. George, Utah, 

 charred ears of maize, wood ashes and pieces of maize-cob 

 mixed together. The canon of the Rio Mancos, in south- 



' Smithsonian Report, 1863. 379; 1868. 401. 

 'McAdams, Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci., 29, 718. 

 Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., VII, 193. Wood, New England Prospects, 106; Bureau of 

 Ethnology. 11 Report. 207. 



••Palmer. Monatschrift f. Gartenbaues, 1874, 163 



