~ 
THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 589 
Schoolcraft has left us of his visit to Prophetstown, on the Tippe- 
canoe, and to the sites of other Indian villages in Indiana and Llinois.* 
These facts are undoubtedly of importance in indicating the phase of 
civilization that had been reached by the builders of some—perhaps 
the smaller and more recent—of these works; but they do not enable 
us to connect even inferentially those of the larger size with any par- 
ticular tribe, owing to the fact that there was such a long interval of 
time, when Ohio, so far as we know, was virtually uninhabited. If it 
were possible to show that previous to the settlement of the Lroquois in 
western New York a Shawnee confederacy had occupied the Ohio 
Valley, as Rafinesque t so confidently asserts, our task would be much 
simplified. It would then be apparent that in returning here these 
people were but reoccupying their old homes and hunting grounds; and 
as they can be shown to have defended themselves within compara- 
tively recent times behind ditches and breast-works, + and as they must 
from the necessities of the case have erected all the mounds that were 
built within that region subsequent to the landing of the whites, there 
would certainly be nothing forced or illogical in the inference that they 
had constructed the older and larger series of works during the palmy 
days of their confederacy, some hundreds of years before the time of 
which we are now speaking. Unfortunately however Rafinesque fails to 
make good his statement; and though the evidence, drawn from other 
sources, bearing upon this point is sufficient to furnish the basis for a 
very plausible theory, yet it does not afford a satisfactory foundation 
for an inductive argument, and hence it is altogether omitted. 
For these reasons, then, we are without any historical evidence as to 
the origin of the works in the northern part of the Ohio Valley, and 
as there is no probability that any will ever be discovered, we are 
obliged to fall back upon the comparative method in order to see 
whether there are any such differences between the hill forts and forti- 
fied villages of southern Ohio and those found in western New York 
and in some of the Southern States as would authorize the inference 
that they were the work of a people in a different stage of civilization. 
Beginning with the “forts,” as Governor DeWitt Clinton§ calls them, 
of western New York, we are told that they were generally speaking 
erected upon the most commanding ground, and were surrounded, 
*Schooleraft, Travels in Central Portion of the Mississippi Valley, pp. 129, 328. 
t Refinesque, Ancient Annals of Kentucky, p, 25: Frankfort, 1824. 
t Gist, in p. 12 of the Appendix to Pownall’s Topographical Description of Parts 
of North America, London, 1776, speaks of a “ fort” of the Twightwees; and Cro- 
ghan, in 1765, found a ‘‘ breastwork” near the mouth of the Wabash, which, in one 
account, is ‘‘supposed” to have been erected by the Indians; but in anotaer the 
fact is stated positively. 
§ This account is made up from Clinton’s Discourse in Collections of the N. Y. 
Hist. Soc., vol. 11, p. 90; Squier, Aboriginal Monuments of New York; Moulton, History 
of New York, vol. 1, part 1; Clark’s Onondaga, ete., ete. 
