G16 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 



were proof against all civilizing Influences. At length, about the year 

 1843, forty or fifry men, women, and children — the sole remnant of this 

 tribe, which twenty-one years before numbered nearly a thousand souls — 

 emigrated to Mexico, and were permitted to settle in the interior of 

 the State of Tamaulipas. At this time it is not improbable that the 

 Carancaways are almost, if not quite, extinct. I am unable to ascertain 

 whether any of the other tribes mentioned before in this paper are also verg- 

 ing on extinction, but it is well known that they have all rapidly diminished 

 in numbers since they came in contact with civilization, and the con- 

 clusion is inevitable that in a score or two of years all the smaller tribes 

 will become as extinct as the mammoth and the mastodon that preceded 

 them. 



MOUNDS, WOEKSHOPS, AND STONE-HEAPS IN JEEFEESON 

 COUNTY, ALABAMA. 



By William Gesner, of Birmingham, Alabama. 



Three mounds are to be seen in township 17, range 1 west, of Jeffer- 

 son County, about 4 miles north of Birmingham, and west of the South 

 and North Alabama Eailroad, in that portion of Jones Valley through 

 which flows Village Creek from east to west. They are on the north 

 side of the creek where it is forded, on the Birmingham and Huutsville 

 wagon road, and west of the machinery and buildings of the Birmingham 

 Water Works Company about 1 mile. The largest of them is nearest 

 to, and visible from, this road toward the west. The one, which is the 

 most southerly of the group, appears to be about 30 feet high, conical, 

 and about 100 feet in diameter at its base ; the others, distant from it 

 and from each other, about 300 yards, are not in a direct line with each 

 other. The second one north has not one-third the dimension of the 

 first, and the third is much smaller than the second. They are situated 

 on the plain of one of the most ferfcle tracts of land in Jones Valley, 

 which has been cultivated for more than fifty years. 



Five Mile Creek, also flowing from east to west, through the hills, 

 from out of this Jones anticlinal Valley, along the base of low ridges 

 of Millstone Grit, bordering the Warrior Coal Field on the southeast, 

 being crossed at Boyles Gap, on the South and North Alabama Eail- 

 road, places these mounds between two streams, abounding in fish, and 

 tributary to the Black Warrior Elver. Their immediate locality is 

 unsurpassed by any other region of the State for number, size, clear- 

 ness, and coolness of the springs, issuing from out both the ridges of 

 Silurian quartzites, and beds of limestone outcropping in the valley. 

 They have been injured to some extent by hunters and farming opera- 

 tions, particularly the smallest one, but the largest one has oaks and 

 other trees of large dimensions on it, growing without thriving. No 

 explorations having been made of any of them, their arrangement and 

 composition remain unknown. 



