ANCIENT EARTHWORKS OF OHIO. 231 



rivers, precisely in the situations where we should least expect 

 any sm-face disturbance, we are surprised by the huge basso- 

 relievos of earthwork antiquities. 



There seems to be rather a provoking disposition on the east 

 of the AUeghanies to doubt the truth of our accounts of these 

 antiquities. After I published the account of my survey of an 

 extensive earthwork on Fort Hill, in Highland county, Ohio, it 

 was very generaUy copied into the eastern newspapers. This 

 drew forth a malignant paper from an anonymous scribbler, who 

 pretended to have seen the same works, charging me with abso- 

 lute falsehood. This charge, unfounded and unauthenticated as 

 it was, appeared immediately in the same eastern papers. But 

 my refutation, in which I clearly showed, from his own account 

 of the locality, that the author of the attack had never seen the 

 works described by me, though probably he had witnessed some 

 inferior ones eight or ten miles distant^ was never noticed by those 

 papers, and I stand to this day charged, on anonymous authority, 

 with the crime of wilful falsehood. 



The very gi-eat number of those works in the West seems not 

 to be generally known. As near as I can recollect, in Butler 

 county alone, there are about twenty of them, and I should esti- 

 mate the average number to be not less than twelve to each county 

 in the State ; not mere mounds, but many of them extensive lines 

 of ditch and embankment. The beautiful plain on which Cin- 

 cinnati now stands, was, in the words of Gen. Harrison, " originally 

 literally covered with them." That they occm* in situations where 

 above all others we should expect the surface to be even and un- 

 disturbed, that they almost always occur at points commanding 

 the most extensive and beautiful prospects ; that the materials of 

 which they are composed are not stratified, but consist often of 

 diversified parcels of clay, loam, mould and gravel, in masses 

 about equal to hand-baiTOW loads, confusedly thrown together ; 

 that they are superimposed on the black mould of the original 

 surface, on which are often ashes and charcoal of ancient fires ; 

 that they contain artificial utensils, carbonated maize grains with 

 even the " cob," leaves and stalk of that plant, and human skel- 

 etons quite to their base ; that they bear evident marks of design, 



