Miscellaneous Papers. 227 



this theory is the fact mentioned in the beginning of the ar- 

 ticle, that the stone outlines remaining could never have been 

 foundations to houses, much less remnants of walls of struc- 

 tures; the amount of stone present is not sufficient for this, 

 and there is no reason to believe any has ever been removed. 

 The supposition that the Spanish explorers left these remains 

 is as unfounded as the former theory. As far as v^^e know 

 from historical accounts, Coronado in his march from Mexico 

 up into the region now comprising Kansas, passed nearer to 

 this place than any other of these Spaniards. Cabeza de Vaca, 

 in 1528, marched from the present site of Galveston northwest 

 to the Rio Grande, and from thence toward the Pacific coast. 

 But this region, far from the path of either, is too remote 

 from the Spanish settlements to admit of its being an outpost, 

 even if the remains indicated the site of a town, while the 

 exposed position they occupy would preclude the possibility 

 of their having been built for fortifications. 



That the Plains Indians were the builders of these mounds 

 there can be no doubt. The pottery and flints found here are 

 the culture of these tribes and can be found all over the plains 

 region northward and eastward from this section. The Wolf 

 creek valley was for years the trail over which the migration 

 to and fro of these tribes from the Indian Territory and ad- 

 jacent country to Mexico and Arizona took place. Their re- 

 mains are scattered along the entire way; but these remains 

 of recent times are not to be confounded with those of the 

 "buried city," which certainly antedated them by many years 

 and form a distinct subject for ethnological research. 



The use for which these mounds were intended was, we be- 

 lieve, solely for burial purposes. Every one of them that has 

 been excavated has yielded human bones, but not in greater 

 quantity than to indicate that each one was the grave of a 

 single person. In more than one place in the Iowa reservation 

 in northeastern Kansas we have seen the graveyards of the 

 Indians of recent times laid out in a crude way, and each 

 grave edged with wooden pickets in much the same way that 

 these mounds are set with stone. 



There are certain peculiarities in the remains of the "buried 

 city" that deserve careful attention and are worthy of future 

 research. The size of the enclosures, the marked regularity 

 of the walls in respect to dimensions, directions and openings 



