ETHNOLOGY. 373 



First. I baveliad conversatious with very old settlers — persous whose 

 recoUectious extend back fifty aud eveu sixty years, and they report that 

 no Indian village existed in that locality or anywhere near Clarksville ; 

 aud not only so, bat they speak of conversations with the Indians, who, 

 in their childhood, frequently came here on hunting-expeditions, aud 

 that none of them knew of any tribe or had any tradition of any who 

 ever had any permanent residence either near this burial-place or in the 

 region at all ; it was never within their knowledge anything but a hunt- 

 ing-ground. 



Secondly. In his first visit to Kentucky, Daniel Boone spent a whole 

 winter encamped near the mouth of Red River, (a small aflluent of 

 the Cumberland ;) in other words, on what is now the site of Clarks- 

 ville ; and that during that winter he did not see a single Indian, the 

 country being only visited for hunting-purposes in summer-time. 



This last statement I have on the authority of my friend. Professor 

 Stewart, well known to your Institution. I have no means of verifying 

 it by documents, though in Washington you have, I suppose, the means 

 of doing so in the National Library. 



Supposing, then, that I have rightly interpreted the facts so far before 

 us, we are thrown back on all prehistoric times for the period of our vil- 

 lage's existence, and have no means of determining whether it dates 

 before or after the discovery of the American continents by the Euro- 

 pean races. 



The small package, ]SIo. 8, contains an invaluable relic in reference 

 to our chronological difficulty. On examination you will find it to be 

 a leaden bullet, completely covered with a bony accretion. This was 

 found in close contact with the scapula of one of the exhumed skeletons. 

 The manner in which it is enveloped with bony matters convinces me that 

 it was lodged in the shoulder long before the Indian's death, and carried 

 there for years. This proves that the Indians in question had relations, 

 hostile at least, if not more intimate, with persous possessing tire-arms, 

 aud so brings down the antiquity of our village to a date subsequent to 

 the appearance of the European races in the valley of the Mississippi. 



The closest estimate, then, we can make of the period when the vil- 

 lage existed from which these relics are derived, is that it was prior 

 to the permanent settlement of this portion of the basin of the Cumber- 

 land, aud subsequent to the first visit of European races, which still 

 leaves us a range open to conjecture extending from the middle of the 

 seventeenth ceutury to, say, the time of the revolutionary war— a rauge 

 of from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty years. 



This much premised, I would call your attention to some matters of 

 detail iu the relics to which this paper refers. 



Opening the packages Nos. 4 and 5, 1 think you will be struck by a great 

 diversity in the workmanship of the diftereut articles. Thus, most of 

 them are as roughly chipped out of the original flint as anything we 

 know of in the rudest paleolithic times, and others are shaped with 



