AMERICAN ABORIGINAL PIPES AND SMOKINa CUSTOMS. 511 



Ohio, where there have been discovered aboriginal remains of the most 

 interesting character. The controversy as to the origin of these mounds 

 and of the jjeople who built them and of their age is one most difficult 

 of satisfactory solution. They are by no means confined to the United 

 States, and as to whether the people who constructed them continued 

 to do so up to a comparatively modern date or whether they are all of 

 great antiquity is and has long been a matter of dispute. among archiie- 

 ologists. The remains found in the mounds consequently have been 

 by many attributed to a people of great antiquity, antedating the present 

 Indian race, and many scientific papers have been written in support 

 of this theory. Yet there are those living who have witnessed the 

 building of mounds, and the extensive studies of Prof. Cyrus Thomas, 

 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, induce him to believe that the 

 Cherokees were mound-builders up to and since the arrival of the 

 whites on the continent. Many articles of modern make, undoubtedly 

 the handiwork of the white people, have been found buried in the 

 mounds. Such things are declared by some to be intrusive or second- 

 ary burials. They are alleged by others to have been deposited therein 

 at the time of the construction of the tumuli. With hardly an excep- 

 tion all earthworks of every description found in the interior of the 

 country are attributed to this wonderful ancient race of aboriginees. 

 Though the very country where mounds ^re most abundant was the 

 battleground of French, English, and Indians for many decades in the 

 struggles waged between the English and French for the possession of 

 the Indian trade, some of these supposed aboriginal earthworks may 

 well have been the fortified camps of one or other of the white invaders. 

 The mounds are found almost invariabl}^ along the lines of the great 

 rivers of the interior, due, presumably, to the fact that these rivers 

 were the lines ot least resistance to the free communication from one 

 point to the other, and consequently were the trade routes of the inte- 

 rior, whether of white man or Indian. It has been said of the mound- 

 builders that they were very numerous throughout the Mississippi 

 Valley. "They were a people entirely distinct from the North Ameri- 

 can Indian. The pipes are often elaborately and beautifully carved of 

 a great variety of stones, generally of rather a soft character, and were 

 apparently held in very high estimation, perhaps almost sacred. In 

 the Upper Mississippi Valley they are of the same general type, having 

 the flat curved base, which is perforated to serve as a stem. They 

 represent a variety of forms, among them two said to distinctly repre- 

 sent the elephant." ^ 



The best known work on the mound-builders' pipes is that of Messrs. 

 E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis in the Ancient Monuments of the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley, contained in the first volume of the Smithsonian Con- 

 tributions to Knowledge, which described explorations of these remains 



' Extract from President Pratt's Report, Daveuport Academy of Natural Sciences, 

 American Naturalist, XIII, p. 684. 



I 



