158 ARCHEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



do not differ from the character of Indian structures. Further south, where such 

 remains occur, they are comprehended in the class to which the accounts of early 

 adventurers apply. The same may be said of those in the entire region south of 

 Tennessee. In fact the Natchez, according to Du Pratz, maintained that their 

 nation once extended as far north as the Ohio. 1 



Within the boundaries thus described lies a region from which no voice has 

 come to tell when, why, and by whom, its structures were reared. They differ 

 less in kind than in degree from other remains respecting which history has not 

 been entirely silent. They are more numerous, more concentrated, and, in some 

 particulars, on a larger scale of labor, than the works which approach them on their 

 several borders, and with whose various characters they are blended. Their num- 

 bers may be the result of frequent changes of residence by a comparatively limited 

 population, in accordance with a superstitious trait of the Indian nature, leading 

 to the abandonment of places where any great calamity has been suffered; but they 

 appear rather to indicate a country thickly inhabited for a period long enough to 

 admit of the progressive enlargement and extension of its monuments. 



What mighty cause of destruction anticipated by a few centuries the mission of 

 the whites it is not easy to conjecture. That the people perished by plague or war 

 is not more improbable than that they transferred themselves and their institu- 

 tions to some yet undiscovered locality. The terrible appellation of " The Dark 

 and Bloody Ground" applied to Kentucky, may relate to these distant events ; and 

 the fact stated by President Harrison, that the attractive banks of the Ohio, on 

 either side, were without permanent occupants at the advent of European settlers, 

 may have been owing to a lingering instinct of apprehension on the part of the 

 native race. 2 



There are two other classes of remains whose origin is involved in equal obscurity 

 — the emblematic earthworks of Wisconsin, and the so called " Garden Beds," 

 found in the same State, and also in Michigan and Indiana. The last have hitherto 

 been but incidentally noticed in this paper. 



It is known that the culture of maize, tobacco, and a few kinds of vegeta- 

 bles, was practised by the aborigines throughout the United States, wherever the 

 climate and soil were propitious, though in a careless and irregular manner ; but 

 the garden beds referred to are laid out with all the neatness and symmetry of 

 modern husbandry. They cover large surfaces of prairie land, and as they some- 

 times cross the low mounds and pictorial embankments, they are supposed to have 

 been formed after these had ceased to be objects of reverence. Mr. Schoolcraft and 

 Mr. Lapham have fully described them. 



We desire to stop where evidence ceases; and offer no speculations as to the 

 direction from which the authors of the vestiges of antiquity in the United States 

 entered the country, or from whence their arts were derived. The deductions from 

 scientific investigations, philological and physiological, tend to prove that the 



1 London ed., 1774, p. 313. 



- The region in which Kentucky is embraced was known to the Indians by the name of the Dark 

 and Bloody Ground. (Filson's Disc, and Settl. of Ky., p. 4.) 



