MISSOURI ARCHEOLOGY. ' 107 



and appear to have served as the models of some of their vessels. In many of 

 their pots there is an imitative resemblance to gourd forms, and occasionally so 

 exact that one would imagine the clay had been dexterously built up around the 

 fruit and the latter subsequently removed by the burning process. But this 

 could scarcely have been, as the plastic material would have cracked in drying, 

 had its contraction been resisted by a rigid substance within. 



Fenton is an old place. Long before the Fenton of to-day, the locality was 

 a rendezvous of the Indian and before him the site of a town, probably coeval 

 with the Mound-Builders, whose population disappeared centuries ago. The 

 locality early attracted attention from the fact of its being a vast graveyard, and 

 the river just there affording the first convenient ford above its junction with the 

 Mississippi. Lieut. Long describes it in 1819, and Beck's Gazetteer'm 1823 speaks 

 of ruins supposed to be of a prehistoric fort. In 1818 people began to open the 

 graves. They found to be twenty-five to fifty inches in length. Mr. Roessel in- 

 formed me that not long ago (within three years) he had discovered a cyst at 

 Fenton not over sixteen inches long. It was imagined by many that they were 

 the tombs of a race of pigmies, and a spirited contest arose, conducted in the 

 columns of the Missouri Gazette. It need not be said that the notion of a race 

 of dwarfs was unfounded. None of those receptacles of the dead are now in ex- 

 istence; they were destroyed by degrees by curiosity-hunters, in the building of 

 the town and cultivating the adjoining fields. The ruins of the fort, or of what- 

 ever it may have been, have also disappeared. All that remain of the ancient 

 necropolis and the people who dwelt thereabouts are three mounds on the river's 

 bank, innumerable potsherds and fragments of flint littering the earth. Some 

 whole vessels, many flint implements, a few axes and perhaps other objects of 

 stone found in times past, have been taken away and are now scattered over the 

 country. I, myself, have collected some specimens on the spot, and from time 

 to time obtained others which had been found there, though few that are note- 

 worthy by reason of their form or workmanship. 



On the top of the hill at which the upper end of the village abuts, there are 

 several stone heaps which may be artificial, and at short distance below Fenton, 

 on a hill also, as I am informed, there is a shell heap. 



Southeastwardly, about three miles distant from the village, is Glamorgan's 

 salt spring, the site of the first salt works erected west of the Mississippi. There 

 is of record a document which gives us an authentic account of this primitive es- 

 tabhshment. The factory, situated within fifty paces of the spring, was forty feet 

 long, twenty feet wide and built of posts planted upright in the ground, after the 

 manner of all the wooden houses of the time. The furnace, which was con- 

 structed of stone, was as long as the building, and its equipments consisted of 

 forty-four square cast-iron cauldrons two feet two inches by two feet two inches, 

 weighing 200 pounds each, and eight lead cauldrons two feet nine inches by two 

 feet three inches and eleven inches deep. In September, 1792, the estabhsh- 

 ment, brand new, and unused, was rented to Thomas Tyler, together with the 

 following implements, slaves and outhouses : A new ox-cart and two yoke of 



