ON THE STONE AGE. 77 



by what appeared to La Salle, the discoverer and first explorer of Ohio Eiver, as the 

 primeval forest. 



It throws an interesting light on the industrial processes of the ancient flint-workers 

 to learn that, even in a region where the useful chert abounded, they went far afield in 

 search of other materials specially adapted for some classes of implements. They were 

 unquestionably a settled community, in a higher stage than any of the tribes found in 

 occupation of that or any neighboiiriug region when first visited by Europeans. But 

 many tribes, both of the Northern and Southern States, habitually travelled far distances 

 to the sea coast, where still the ancient shell mounds attest their presence. The routes 

 thus annually pursued by the Indians of the interior of Pennsylvania, for example, were 

 familiar to the early surveyors, and some of their trails undoubtedly marked the foot- 

 prints of many generations. In traversing those routes, as well as in their autu.mnal 

 encampments on the coast, opportunities were afforded of selecting suitable materials for 

 their stone implements from localities remote from their homes. The lines of those old 

 trails have accordingly yielded numerous examples of the wayfarers' weapons and tools, 

 as well as of unfinished implements. We are apt to think of a people in their Stone 

 period as merely turning to account materials lying as accessible to all as the loose stones 

 employed as missiles by the vagrant school-boy. But such an idea is manifestly inap- 

 plicable, not only to the arts of communities like those by whom the earthworks of the 

 Ohio valley were constructed, but to many far older workers in flint or stone. The 

 Indian arrow-maker and the pipe-maker, it is manifest, often travelled to great distances 

 for the material best suited to their manufactures ; and the use of flint or hornstone 

 for slingstones, lance and arrow heads, as well as for knives, scrapers, axes and other 

 domestic and agricultixral tools, must have involved a constant demand for fresh supplies. 

 It might be assumed, therefore, apart from all direct evidence, that a regular system of 

 quarrying for the raw material both of the pipe and the implement-maker was pursued ; 

 and that by trade or barter the pipcstone of divers qualities, and the chert or hornstone, 

 the quartzite, jasper and other useful minerals, were thus furnished to tribes whose home- 

 steads and hunting grounds yielded no such needful supplies. But the same region 

 which abounds in such remarkable evidences of the ingenious arts of a vanished race, 

 also furnishes to us the traces of the old miners, by whose industry the flint was quarried 

 and roughly chipped into available forms for transport to distant localities, or for barter 

 among the Mound-Builders in the region traversed by the great river. At various points 

 on Flint Eidge, Ohio, and localities far beyond the limits of that state, as at Leavenworth, 

 three hundred miles south of Cincinnati, where the grey fliut abounds, evidences of 

 systematic quarrying illustrate the character and extent of this primitive commerce. 

 Funnel-shaped pits occur there, in many cases filled up with the accumulated vegetable 

 mould of centuries, or only traceable by a slight depression in the surface of the ground. 

 "When cleared out, they extend to a depth of, from foirr or five, to nearly twenty feet. On 

 removing the mould, the sloping sides of the pit are found to be covered with pieces of 

 fractured flint, intermingled with unfinished or broken implements, and with others 

 partially reduced to shap.^ The largest hoes and spades hitherto noted appear to have been 

 fashioned of quartzite, but those of most common occurrence in Ohio and Kentucky are 

 made of the grey flint or chert, which abounds in the Flint Ridge pits in blocks amply 

 suni<ing for the manufacture of tools upwards of a foot in length, such as may be assumed 



