70 Some Considerations on the Mound Builders. 



ture of its inhabitants. The aborigines of America 

 may therefore be considered, at least for the purposes of 

 history and archaeology, as an autocthoneous people; 

 and whatever civilization appeared before the discovery 

 of Columbus, was indigenous civilization. The Mound 

 Builders, therefore, were natives to the soil, and what- 

 ever advancement they made was their own invention, 

 or was imparted to them by neighboring natives. 



Indeed, while the Mound Builders may have resem- 

 bled the Aztecs and the Peruvians in their form of gov- 

 ernment ; yet in material advancement they differed 

 much more widely from them and the extinct races of 

 Central America, than from any of the Indian tribes that 

 were found east of the Mississippi. 



The Sioux and Cheyennes, the Comanches and 

 Apaches, and other wandering tribes of the West, do 

 not represent the mode of life of the Indians that lived 

 east of the Mississippi. De Soto and his companions 

 were struck with the novelty, when, in Arkansas or Mis- 

 souri, they first encountered a tribe without fixed habi- 

 tations, living in movable tents, and subsisting wholly 

 by hunting and fishing. All the tribes east of the Mis- 

 sissippi were more or less agricultural. They all raised 

 corn, beans, squashes, and melons. They pitched their 

 camps and planted their villages on the borders of a 

 stream. Many had permanent towns. When the French 

 first landed at Montreal Island, they found Hocklehaaa, 

 an Indian town, fortified with a permanent palisade. 

 The Iroquois had their villages, with corn-fields and or- 

 chards. The Cherokees and Creeks had fixed settle- 

 ments of roomy, substantial houses. The Creeks had 

 in each town an open public square, surrounded with 



