12 BULLETIN 18 3, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSiEUM 



hunting and camping rights, besides trading at the posts therein sit- 

 uated. The attractive and fertile lands were too much for the nearby 

 Missourians to resist, and by 1831 squatters were encroaching in 

 what is now Platte County. This led to endless bickering and some 

 bloodshed between Indians and whites, and the latter raised an in- 

 creasingly insistent clamor for annexation of the disputed territory. 

 In 1836-37, by purchase and treaty, the strip passed out of the hands 

 of the tribes and as the Platte Purchase (Neuhoff, 1924, pp. 307 seq.) 

 was added to the northwestern corner of the State of Missouri. Its 

 southern tip became Platte County, which, with Clay County on the 

 east, contains a majority of the sites considered in this paper. 



PREVIOUS ARCHEOLOGICAL WORK 



It may be supposed that the accelerating growth of modern com- 

 munities about the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, with 

 their transformation of the original land surface into streets, rail- 

 roads, farms, and building sites, must have revealed occasional traces 

 of prehistoric man even in the early years of white settlement. So 

 far as published records are any indication, however, no interest 

 seems to have been manifested in such remains prior to 1876. In 

 that year. Judge E. P. "West read a paper before the Kansas City 

 Academy of Science in which he called attention to several finds of 

 chert implements, pottery fragments, and other vestiges of pre-white 

 industry at several points now within the limits of greater Kansas 

 City (West, 1877a, pp. 198-199). One of these locations was in an 

 excavation made "in the widening of Twelfth Street near its junction 

 with Woodland Avenue" where "large quantities of flint chippings, 

 arrowheads, stone axes and broken pottery were found at a depth 

 varying from six inches to eighteen inches beneath the surface." 

 This, and "one place near the fairground in Wyandotte County, 

 Kansas," were the only spots where "prehistoric pottery" had come 

 to light. Two types of pottery, neither very fully defined, are men- 

 tioned as coming from "a gradual slope of land, with little eleva- 

 tion, reaching back from Jersey Creek northwest, in Wyandotte 

 County, and on a slope equally, but slightly, elevated, reaching back 

 northwest from a branch of McGee Creek, in this [Jackson] County." 

 In view of the marked activity of the next few years, it is of some 

 interest to note West's statement that up to this time "artificial 

 mounds have not been found in this vicinity . . ." 



By the following spring, 1877, the existence of numerous mounds had 

 become known, and Judge West had begun their examination through 

 excavation. Interest was focused almost exclusively upon a group 

 of mounds situated north of the Missouri River on the Platte-Clay 

 County line, with incidental mention of others up and down stream and 



