Primitive Architecture in America. 301 



the country itself was favorable to the hunting life. There are 

 also a few such works found along the Ohio river and in the 

 southern states, but they seem to have been intruded among other 

 works and probably were later in their origin and more transitory 

 in being occupied. The habitats of the stockade-builder, how- 

 ever, seem to have been New York State, and the regions east of 

 the Alleghany mountains. Vast numbers of their defenses and 

 villages are now discovered upon the hill-tops of this region. 

 S. Gr. Squier has described no less than three hundred of them 

 in the State of New York alone. The works of the Mound- 

 Builders are distinguished from these not only by being in a dif- 

 ferent geographic locality, but by belonging to a different grade 

 of architecture. If the Mound-Builders were Indians, they 

 were Indians in a higher stage of culture, for their works 

 show much more skill and a different state of society. 

 The warlike Indians would naturally erect stockades and 

 then make their predatory excursions and pursue their warlike 

 life, in such regions as would furnish the best defenses. No 

 place was more favorable to this than that very state where the 

 Six Nations, the Iroquois, made their home. Surrounded on all 

 sides by mountain barriers or great bodies of water, they were 

 safe in their retreat, yet they were so closely connected with other 

 parts of the interior, both by the lines of the Ohio river and its 

 branches, by the great chain of lakes, and by the Ottawa river 

 in Canada, that it was with great ease that they could attack the 

 inhabitants to the west of them. They overran the whole inte- 

 rior, and subdued the wild tribes existing there. 



We have only to imagine a similar history connected with 

 other races at a previous date. The evidences of history are that 

 the tribes situated throughout this valley of the Ohio river, and 

 the upper Mississippi were, when first known to the white man, 

 in the same warlike state. The Eries, Wyandots and Shawnees, 

 the Miarais and Illinois, the Cherokees, and, perhaps, the Choc- 

 taws, were all in a migratory condition where it was impossible 

 for them to have attained any settled state, or to the agricultural 

 condition. They were hunters, and seemed to have been so for 

 very many years. It is probable that the remains of stockades 



