Who Built the Mounds? 95 



Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters from 

 Koshkonong were of secondary interment, notwithstanding 

 I was assured they were taken below the center of the 

 mounds, under a stratum of cement, composed of burnt- 

 fresh water shells. In order to prove or disprove Mr. Clark's 

 investigation, a party of scientific men went from Milwau- 

 kee and opened one of these Koshkonong mounds. They ran 

 a wide excavation through the center of the mound, starting 

 two feet below the surface of the ground. They were re- 

 warded and fully confirmed Clark's statement, and proved 

 that these mounds are of no great age. 



Dr. Sternberger, of the U. S. Army, critically examined 

 certain mounds near Pensacola, Florida. These mounds 

 proved to have been constructed by Indians, as blue glass 

 beads were found in several of them. 



Catlin observed a conical mound ten feet in height, erected 

 over the body of a young chief of the Sioux tribe who had 

 been accidentally killed on that spot. (N. A. Indians, vol. 2^ 

 p. 107.) James Mathew, a brother of Rev. Father Mathew, of 

 Racine, settled on Zumbro River, in Olmstead county, Minne- 

 sota, in 1860. When he first, plowed the land there was a 

 mound six feet high and twenty feet in breadth, and so sit-^ 

 uated that it was in the way of properly cultivating the 

 land, so he made the attempt to plow it down. He sank the 

 plow to the beam repeatedly, but succeeded in reducing 

 the height about two feet. The next year he procured a 

 scraper, and went to work systematically to remove the en- 

 tire mound. After scraping down the eminence to within 

 about two feet of the base he came to some rotten wood. 

 On carefully removing the top he discovered a kind of cage 

 built of large stakes driven into the ground, as close together 

 as possible, and covered with a split log, finished by plaster- 

 ing the outside thickly with clay, thus forming a rude lodge 

 which was about three feet long and a little less in breadth. 

 In this pen he found one skeleton of an adult in a good 

 state of preservation and Avith the bones were found two- 

 iron hatchets, a dozen flint arrow heads, a copper ring two 

 inches in diameter, a lot of shell beads and a red stone pipe 

 of rather large size and ingeniously ornamented with lead. 



