504 THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
the ground that those who have written upon this subject, and who 
have, to a certain extent, molded public opinion, have approached it 
from one side only. They have usually belonged to the class of prac- 
tical explorers, and have brought to the investigation a certain number 
of facts, chiefly cumulative in character; but they have not, as a rule, 
been possessed of that measure of historical information which is nee- 
essary to a correct interpretation of these facts. Being thus, as it were, 
but half prepared for the work, they have, not unfrequently, given too 
much play to the imagination, and carried their theories much farther 
than the facts would warrant. Impressed with the size and character 
of these remains, or led astray by certain resemblances, fancied or real, 
to similar objects elsewhere, they have used them as a basis for recon- 
structing a phase of civilization to which, in point of religious, artistic, 
and political development, they declare the Indian to have been un- 
equal. From these extreme views there has always been more or less 
dissent.* Even Mr. Squier, who, in his famous work “ The Ancient 
Monuments of the Mississippi Valley,” makes no distinction in these 
remains, but speaks of the Mound-builders as an “ extinet race,” t and 
contrasts their progress in the arts with the low condition of the mod- 
ern Indians,{ is obliged, in a subsequent publication, to modify his 
views and draw a line of demarkation between the earth-works ot 
western New York and those found in southern Ohio, especially those 
« « They” (the earthworks) ‘“differ less in kind than in de gree from other remains 
respecting which history has not been entirely silent:”’ Haven in vol. vit of the 
Smithcnian Contributions, p. 158. ‘There is nothing, indeed, in the magnitude 
and structure of our Western mounds which a semihunter and semiagricultural 
population, like that which may be ascribed to the ancestors or Indian predecessors 
of the existing race, could not have executed:” Schoolcroft’s Indian Tribes of the 
United States, vol.1, p.62. ‘All these earthworks—and I am inclined to assert the 
same of the whole of those in the Atlantic States and the majority in the Mississippi 
Valley—were the production not of some mythical tribe of high civilization in re- 
mote antiquity, but of the identical nations found by the whites residing in these 
regions:” Brinton, Floridian Peninsula, p. 176: Philadelphia, 1859. ‘‘No doubt that 
they were erected by the forefathers of the present Indians, as places of refuge 
against the incursions of their enemies, and of security for their women and children 
when they were compelled to leave them for the duties of the chase:” Gen. Lewis 
Cass, in North American Review for January, 1826. ‘Nothing in them which may 
not have been performed by a savage people:” Gallatin, in Archwologia Americana 
vol. 11, p.149. “The old idea that the Mound-builders were peoples distinct from 
and other than the Indians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their pro- 
genitors, appears unfounded in fact, and fanciful:” C. C, Jones, in North American 
Review for January, 1874, p.80. ‘‘Mound-builders were tribes of American Indians 
of the same race with the tribes now living:” M. F. Forceat the Congres Interna- 
tional des Americanistes: Luxembourg, 1877. ‘‘The progress of discovery seems 
constantly to diminish the distinction between the ancient and modern races; and 
it may not be very wide of the truth to assert that they were the same people:” 
Lapham, in Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. v1, p. 29. 
t Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. 1, p. 306: Washington, 1848. 
t Ul. c., pp. 188 and 242. 
