THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 573 
struction are concerned, may be brought under oue or the other of these 
heads, though it is not intended thereby to assert anything as to the 
object or purpose for which they were erected, except in so far as it is 
made known to us by the authorities to whom a reference may be 
necessary. 
First. Beginning with the stone heaps or cairns, we are informed 
that they were either intended to commemorate some notable event, as 
a treaty of peace,* a victory, the settlement of a village, the passage of 
a war party,t or else they were thrown up as landmarks, or as me- 
morials over the dead. They seem to have been very widely distrib- 
uted throughout the area of the United States, as they are to be 
found as far to the eastward as New England; § they are more or less 
of our knowledge. The only statement that I find in any of the early chroniclers 
which can possibly be construed into a reference to these mounds is in Charlevoix 
(Travels, vol, 1, p. 48), and even in this case it can only be so construed by supposing 
that by ‘the great beaver” is meant the ‘‘ beaver” gens of some tribe. Charlevoix 
there speaks of a mountain, near Lake Nipissing, in the shape of a beaver, and says: 
“The Indians maintain that it was the great beaver who gave this form to the 
mountain after he had made choice of it for his burial place. They never pass 
- - - without offering him the smoke of their tobacco.” 
“Beverly, Virginia, book 11, p. 27: ‘‘They use formal embassies for treating, and 
very ceremonious ways in concluding of peace, or else some other memorable action, 
such as burying a tomahawk and raising an heap of stones thereon.” Brinton, in 
Amer. Antiquarian for October, 1881, quoting Blomes, says of the tribes south of the 
Savannah river, ‘that they erected piles or pyramids of stones on the occasion of a 
successful conflict, or when they founded a new village.” 
t‘*We observed a pile of stones, - - - which I was informed had been thrown 
up as a monument by the Osages when they were going to war, each warrior casting 
a stone upon the pile:” Nuttall, drkansa Territory, p. 149: Philadelphia, 1821. 
This may have been merely a “Jandmark:” Our Wild Indians, by Col. Dodge, p. 
557: Hartford, 1882. 
t‘*To perpetuate the memory of any remarkable warriors killed in the woods, I 
must here observe, that every Indian traveller as he passes that way throws a stone 
on the place, according as he likes or dislikes the occasion or manner of the death 
of the deceased: ” Adair, p. 184. 
§ Mountain Monument, in Berkshire County, Mass., is so called from the fact that 
at its southern extremity is, or was a few years since, a pile of small stones, erected, 
according to tradition, in memory of a woman of the Stockbridge tribe, who killed 
herself by leaping from the precipice:” W.C. Bryant, Notes to Poems: Philadel- 
phia, 1849. According to the Amer. Journal of Science, vol. vu, p. 159, mention is 
made in Dr. Dwight’s Travels in Connecticut, etc., “of two of these stone tumuli, 
which appear to have been erected over offenders against the law.” See also Abo- 
riginal Mon. of New York, p. 160, for an account taken from Hopkins’s Memoir of the 
Housatonic Indians, of the erection of “a large heap of stones, - - - probably 
LO cart loads, in the way to Wanhtukook, which the Indians have thrown together as 
they passed by the place; for it used to be their custom, every time one passed by, 
to throw a stone upon it,” etc. I must confess that I don’t know where this cairn 
was situated or when it was built, and it does not much matter, as from the name 
of the tribe it is evident they were of New England origin. See also Dorman, 
Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 185: Philadelphia, 1881, and Haven, in vol. 
vil of Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, pp. 31, et seq. 
