390 PROCEEDINGS OF THE OHIO ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



Union. From the earliest settlement of the State these mounds 

 and earthworks have attracted the attention not only of anti- 

 quarians but of the people in general. The first considerable 

 description of them was given by Caleb Atwater in The Journal 

 of the American Antiquarian Society in 1820, a work which it 

 is still important to consult. In 1839 General William Henry 

 Harrison gave in the Transactions of the Historical and Philo- 

 sophical Society of Ohio the results of a careful survey of "The 

 Miami Fort," situated a little south of North Bend, on the 

 promontory just above the junction of the Ohio and the Great 

 Miami rivers. In this he made the first attempt to estimate the 

 antiquity of the Ohio earthworks, relying chiefly upon the fact 

 that the forest trees covering the site included a great variety. 

 To attain this variety would in his opinion have required a long 

 lapse of time, but he did not undertake to estimate it in years. 

 Similar evidence of great antiquity of the mounds was adduced 

 by him from the condition of the earthworks when he first ob- 

 served them on the terrace upon which Cincinnati stands. This 

 he says was literally covered with low lines of embankments 

 which had evidently been reduced in size and often nearly ob- 

 literated by the cultivation of people that occupied the region 

 subsequent to the mound builders ; for, he reasons, "the people 

 who erected them would not themselves destroy works which 

 had cost them so much labor * '^ * and the probability is 

 that that people were the conquerors of the original possessors." 



More definite attempts to determine the age of various 

 mounds were made by Locke, Squier and Davis, Newberry and 

 others from the measurement of trees growing upon the prehis- 

 toric earthworks. On Fort Hill in Highland County the stump 

 of a tree was found which was estimated to he 400 years old, 

 while in some places trees of corresponding age were found to 

 be standing over and growing from the decomposed remains of 

 predecessors of equal size and longevity. 



A curious estimate of the age of the mound builders was 

 made by the late Professor W. N. Shafer. (American Naturalist, 

 iv. 3), who attributes the decay of the mound builders to the 

 appearance of the buffalo in this part of the country, which he 



