406 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



The foregoing were the only mounds I visited, but a total of fourteen were 

 reported in the county. W. H. Chiles, Esq., reported a group of five mounds 

 about eight miles south of Lexington, on Brush creek where the old Lexington 

 and Warrensburg road used to cross the stream, and that none of them had ever 

 been opened. Ethan Allen, Esq., of the Lexington Intelligencer, reported one 

 mound on Wm. T. Hays' place and two on Dr. Wilmot's place, from three to 

 four miles east of Lexington, neither of which had ever been opened. 



Mound-builder's art. — I learned of a place about a mile east of Lexington 

 city that was called " Indian Hill " by some of the " knowing boys " of the city, 

 who had often gone there to pick up flint arrow-heads. Two bright lads of this 

 class went with me to the place one day, and after a careful inspection at that 

 time and several subsequent visits, I was persuaded that it had been the site of a 

 prehistoric village. I say "prehistoric" because there is no evidence found in 

 any reports by the earliest French or Spanish prospectors in this region that the 

 Indians had any village at this point. I learned that many pocketfuls of arrow- 

 heads had been found here (within a space of five or six acres), and three or four 

 stone axes also, but no one seemed to have ever noticed the pottery or thought 0{ 

 its having any special significance. I gathered fragments of pottery from time to " 

 time until I had specimens bearing over thirty different sorts of ornamentation. In 

 addition to these I gathered three or four quarts of flint chips, broken arrow- 

 heads, and some whole ones, besides other curious specimens. But the most 

 rare and interesting "find " was the lower part of a tiny copper axe, showing the 

 whole blade of the instrument, and remarkably well shaped. It is one and three- 

 eighths of an inch across from corner to corner of the blade; then the width nar- 

 rows a little up toward the handle place, and it is a little flatter on one side than 

 the other, and three-sixteenths of an inch thick. The fragment is broken off be- 

 low the handle place, and the break is five-eighths of an inch up from the edge on 

 one side and fifteen-sixteenths up on the other side. My first impression was that 

 it had been hammered into shape from a piece of pure copper ore, such as I have 

 seen in great masses from the Lake Superior copper mines; but finally concluded 

 that it had been molded in a crude mold such as "us boys" used to whittle 

 out in pieces of shale (mistakenly called " soapstone "), and then pour in melted 

 lead. In Col. Switzler's History of Missouri there are some very excellent chap- 

 ters on "Prehistoric Man," written by A. J. Conant, of the St. Louis Academy. 

 of Sciences, and on page io8 he says : 



" It has been stated, and often repeated, that they [the mound-builder folk] 

 had no knowledge of smelting or casting metals, yet the recent discoveries in 

 Yf'isconsin oi implements of copper cast in molds, as well as the mol//s themselves, of 

 various patterns, and wrought with much skill — prove that the age of metallurgi- 

 cal arts had dawned in that region, at least." 



It is a well established fact in archaeology that the prehistoric peoples of 

 America had a very wide range of intercommunication and rude barter; and I 

 think it altogether probable that the fragment of a copper ax which I found in con- 



