PIONEER OBSERVERS. 25 



not have been kept together in such numerous bodies, and been made to contribute 

 to the execution of such stupendous works. 



It is evident that, with the aid of persons so competent and so well disposed to 

 pursue such investigations as Captain Heart and General Parsons, a rational develop- 

 ment of the nature, extent, and probable origin of our aboriginal antiquities, need 

 not have been postponed for thirty years, which actually elapsed from this period 

 before any detailed and connected view of them was given to the public. Unhap- 

 pily both met with a premature and violent end. General Parsons was drowned 

 in the Ohio, in December, 1789; and Heart, then a major, was slain at the disas- 

 trous defeat of St. Clair, in November, 1791, when the flower of the western army 

 were involved in the same destruction. 



In reply to the inquiry of President Stiles, Franklin would undertake to give no 

 explanation of the works described, but suggested that they might possibly have 

 been constructed by Ferdinand De Soto as a defence against the savages. Upon 

 this hint, Noah Webster addressed a series of letters to Dr. Stiles, in which he 

 attempted to trace the route of the Spanish adventurer, and to show that the em- 

 bankments at Marietta might have been erected by his followers. These were 

 written in 1787, and first published in the "American Magazine," of which Mr. 

 Webster was editor, and reprinted two years later in the " American Museum." 



Col. Winthrop Sargent, who afterwards occupied high official positions at the 

 West, was among the earliest to collect information on matters of antiquarian and 

 scientific interest there. In March, 1787, he wrote to Governor Bowdoin, President 

 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, inclosing a plan and description 

 of the remains at Marietta, discovered (he says) by the garrison at Fort Harmar 

 the year previous. For some reason this communication was not published at the 

 time ; but, having been brought to the notice of the Academy by Dr. Bowditch, 

 the librarian, so recently as 1850, was first printed in 1853. 1 The sketch is a more 



1 Memoirs of Am. Acad., Vol. V, Part I. Dr. Bowditch remarks that the plan bears a date four 

 years earlier than any documents mentioned by Messrs. Squier and Davis. He also refers to the plan 

 alluded to in the letter of Gen. Parsons to President Willard, of which he says he has no knowledge ; 

 and, supposing the latter to be lost, would be right in considering that of Col. Sargent as the earliest 

 now extant. In Part IV. of Mr. Schoolcraft's history of the condition and prospects of the Indian 

 tribes, under the head of "Epoch of the Discovery of the Western Tumuli," it is said, "Accounts of 

 these antiquities at Marietta were first published by Dr. Manasseh Cutler and the Rev. Thaddeus M. 

 Harris, with diagrams of the antique works drawn by Gen. Rufus Putnam, made immediately after the 

 settlement of the town." This statement is evidently taken from Mr. Atwater's treatise in the first 

 volume of the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society. The facts are, that Dr. Cutler's 

 very brief account is in a note to his charge at the ordination of Rev. Joseph Story, at Marietta, August 

 15, 1798, which was printed the same year; while Dr. Harris's "Tour" was not published till 1805. 

 The error has so often been repeated that a specific correction is desirable. 



In this connection it may be well to refer to another misapprehension in the same volume of the work 

 of Mr. Schoolcraft, viz : that " assertions of a Celtic element in the Indian languages first originated in 

 America in 1782, in certain accounts given by Isaac Stuart, of South Carolina, an early Western trader." 

 The letter of Morgan Jones, " Chaplain to the Plantations of South Carolina," dated New York, March 

 10, 16S5-6, and published in March, 1740, in the "Gentleman's Magazine," London, X, 104, is pro- 

 bably the most remarkable "assertion" that has appeared. The letter affirms that, being taken prisoner 

 by the Tuscaroras in 1660, the writer found himself able to converse with them in the British (Welsh) 

 language, and actually preached to them several months in the same tongue. 

 4 



