THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 581 
like that of those at Fort Orange; who however are a braver and a 
more martial nation of Indians—by name, the Maquas—as_ before 
mentioned, and who hold most of the others along the river to Fort 
Amsterdam under tribute.” 
Of the bone mounds, or those which mark the site of one or more com- 
munal interments, our accounts, though somewhat meager, are not less 
explicit. According to La Fort, the Onondaga chief, different forms ot 
burial existed among the Iroquois at different times, and he might also 
have added at the same time, when the conditions were different. Thus, 
in addition to the mode of interment already noticed, we are told that 
when numbers were slain in battle they ‘were gathered and laid in 
tiers one above another, and a high mound raised over them.”* In par- 
tial confirmation of this, we have the statement of the Modern Seneeas 
that the mound on Tonawanda Island was the burial place of the Neu- 
ters,t a kindred tribe, who were destroyed by the Iroquois about the 
middle of the seventeenth century; and there is also the mound visited 
by the Rey. Mr. Kirkland in 1788, and though the condition of ‘the 
bones upon its surface, and sticking out in many places on its sides,” 
is totally incompatible with any such antiquity as is claimed for it, yet 
there can be no reason why the account given by the Seneeas of the 
circumstances under which it was built may not be literaily true. Es- 
specially is this so, in view of the fact that we have undoubted evidence 
that at a council, held in 1745, between the Onondagas and the Anti- 
coque Indians, the latter “ gave broad belts of wampum, 3 arm belts 
and 5 strings; one was to wipe clean all the blood they had spilt of the 
Five Nations, another to raise a tumulus over their graves, and to pick 
out the sticks, roots, or stones, and make it smooth onthe top.”¢ This 
is believed to be decisive of the matter, for construe the statement as 
we may, there can be no doubt that the Lroquois, or the people with 
whom they fought, were in the habit of building mounds over their 
dead; and, so far as my argument is concerned, it is perfectly imma- 
terial which of them did so, as the question is not what particular tribe 
constructed these mounds, but were they built by the red Indians of 
historic times? 
South of the Ohio, in the States along the Atlantic coast, certain 
tribes are said to have had the same custom. Lawson, describing the 
manner of interment among the Santees, one of the Carolina tribes, 
says: “A mole or pyramid of earth is rais’d, the mould thereof being 
work’d very smooth and even, sometimes higher or lower according to 
the dignity of the person whose monument it is. On the top thereof is 
an umbrella, made ridge-ways, like the roof of an house; this is sup- 
ported by nine stakes, or small posts, the grave being about six or 
*J.V. iH. Clark, Onondaga, vol. 1, p. 51. 
t Marshall, Historical Sketches of the Niagara Frontier, p. 8. 
¢ John Bartram, Observations, ete., p. 62: London, 1751. 
