Some Fads mid Consideraiioiu ahoxd Fort Ancient. 301 



defense, but is a link in the chain drawn across the path of an 

 invading and successful enemy, and as other links had been broken, 

 this, though intact, was abandoned as untenable. 



There can be little doubt but that the ancestors of the present In- 

 dians were the invaders who drove the peaceful and more civilized 

 Mound Builders from their seats and exterminated their race and name. 

 Ages may have elapsed before their final extinction was complete, and 

 those Indians existing within the historic period may have thus 

 lost — as it appears they had — all trace of the builders of these monu- 

 ments. 



In the protracted contest betAveen the savage hordes of Asia and the 

 Mound Builders we might naturally expect to find — in those tribes 

 which were in the van of the invading host, and therefore longest in 

 contact with the more cultivated native races — a higher civilization 

 than would be acquired by tribes in rear. Such, indeed, we find to be 

 the fiict, according to Bar tram, Du Pratz, and other early travelers, who 

 witnessed among the Creeks, Cherokees, Natchez, and other southern 

 tribes, many features of superiority to their brethren of the north in 

 the arts and amenities of civilized life. Yet, although they had im- 

 bibed something of the peculiar civilization of the Mound Builders, it 

 came to them at so remote a period that they had lost all tradition of 

 the earlier race, even while they acknowledged to Europeans that 

 these works were constructed by a people far more ancient than them- 

 selves. Such is the distinct testimony of Bartram concerning the 

 Creeks or Muscogulges, the most civilized of all the Indian nations, 

 and the Natchez, whose customs more nearly resembled the ancient 

 Mexicans. 



In this view, supposing the first invaders from the shores of Asia to 

 have been turned southward by the topographical features of the 

 westet-n coast of America, and to have penetrated Mexico and Central 

 America even before the natives of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys 

 were disturbed, we would look to those countries, which were probably 

 the fountain-head of the Mound Builders' civilization, for those greater 

 modifications of the Indian character which they presented at the 

 period of the Spanish conquest. And Avhile the period of occupation 

 by these northern tribes had been sufficiently great to impress their 

 physical characteristics upon the entire people of both North and South 

 America, and to absorb or exterminate whatever of a distinctive earlier 

 type existed, the savage intellect was not able to grasp fully the refined 

 and complicated system which they conquered. Engrafting upon a 

 nobler stock their barbarous ideas, they possessed, at the conquest by 

 Europeans, the hybrid civilization which has been characterized as 

 the most singular spectacle the world ever witnessed — a system whose 



