564 THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
broadest terms possible, and includes all the members of the tribe of 
every age, size, sex, and condition. Obviously his assertion is not 
warranted by the facts, nor is it borne out by the testimony of conecur- 
rent writers. So far from being without any tradition on this subject, 
this people can be shown to have had several, or at all events they so 
reported. Thus, about the year 1782, Oconostoto, who had been for 
sixty years one of their chiefs, being asked by Governor Sevier,* of 
Tennessee, who built the earth-works in their country, and particu- 
Jarly “the remarkable fortification,” as it is called, on the Hiawassee 
River, answered that ‘it was handed down by their forefathers, that 
these works were made by the white people who had formerly inhabited 
the country.” Gen. Geo. Rogers Clark,t who probably knew as much 
of Indian character as any one who has ever written on the subject, 
says positively that there was a tradition among the Cherokees to the 
effect that the works in their country were built by their ancestors; 
and this statement is borne out by the chroniclers of De Soto’s expedi- 
tion, { as well as by the testimony of Adair,§ who seems to have had no 
doubt by whom these mounds were built, or for what purpose, though 
he admits that some of them were beyond the reach of tradition. 
Here then in this one tribe, we have several accounts of these 
works. They can not all be true, and it is possible that neither one 
of them may be; and yet either one of them is a sufficient answer to 
*See letter of Gov. Sevier in Stoddard’s Sketches of Louisiana, p. 483: Phila- 
delphia, 1812. Being questioned as to who these white people were, the old chief 
replied: ‘‘That he had heard his grandfather and other old people say that they were 
a people called the Welsh,” etc. For asummary of what has been written about a 
Welsh Nation in America, consult chapter xvii of the above work, and also Priest’s 
American Antiquities, pp. 229 et seg.: Albany, 1838; and Burder’s Welch Colony, a 
pamphlet published in London in 1797. 
tI think the world is to blame to express such great anxiety to know who it was 
that built these numerous and formidable works, and what hath become of that peo- 
ple. They will find them in the Kaskaskias, Peorias, Kahokias (now extinct), 
Piankeshaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and such old nations, who say they grew out 
of the ground where they now live, and that they were formerly as numerous as the 
trees in the woods; but affronting the Great Spirit, he made war among the nations, 
and they destroyed each other. This is their tradition, and I can see no good reason 
why it should not be received as good history—at least as good as a great part of 
ours:” MSS. of Gen. Geo. R. Clark, in vol. iv, Schooleraft, Indian Tribes of the 
United States, p. 135. 
tIn the Tenth Annual Report of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, pp. 75 et seq., I 
have given some of the reasons for believing that the Cherokees built mounds and 
earth-works. 
§ ‘We frequently meet with great mounds of earth, either of a circular or oblong 
form, having a strong breastwork at a distance around them, made of the clay which 
had been dug up in forming the ditch on the inner side of the inclosed ground, and 
these were their forts of security against an enemy. Three or four of them are, in 
some places, raised so near to each other as evidently for the garrison to take any 
enemy that passed between them. They were mostly built in low lands; and some 
are overspread with large trees, beyond the reach of Indian tradition:” History of 
the American Indians, p. 8377: London, 1775. 
