ARCH^OLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF THE MISSOURI RIVER. 529 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 



ARCH^OLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF THE MISSOURI RIVER. 



In the early part of October, of the present year, the Kansas City Tvfies in- 

 augurated an archaeological expedition down the Missouri River, the results of 

 which have been published in nine articles contributed by Judge E. P. West to 

 that paper, during the investigation. The Judge made the descent of the river 

 from Kansas City to St. Louis in a skiff, examining the country adjacent to the 

 stream on both sides. No research in this important field of investigation, here- 

 tofore undertaken in the State, has been so extended or so important in result as 

 this one, if Judge West is correct in the facts detailed and the conclusions he 

 draws from them. A brief summary of his work would not perhaps be uninter- 

 esting to the many readers of the Review or an unimportant addition to the 

 many interesting articles it has heretofore published on the subject. The Judge 

 seems to have formed the opinion, pending the voyage, that different races which 

 were hostile to each other occupied the different banks of the river and that their 

 respective empires were widely extended. But the facts and the conclusions he 

 draws from them will appear as detailed in this summary of them. 



In considering the mounds and other antiquities on the south side of the 

 river, Judge West says: " On a point at the intersection of the Missouri River 

 and Blue River valleys, and overlooking them, stands a lone mound five miles 

 east of Kansas City, This mound keeps vigil as a solitary and silent sentinel at 

 the western empire which struggled through its part in human evolution and 

 passed out of existence long before the European intruded his restless energy up- 

 on this continent. 



" All the way down the Missouri River from this point to as far as I have yet 

 examined (Miami, in Saline County), mounds precisely similar prevail. Rock 

 Creek, Blue Mills, Sibley, Napoleon, Wellington, Lexington, Burlin, Dover, 

 Waverly and Miami can all lay claim to mounds in their environments. They 

 number by the hundreds, and stand on almost every high point on the south side 

 of the river, or those at least commanding the finest views — silent witnesses of 

 past empire and a lost race. They are very symmetrical in structure and vary in 

 size from forty to sixty feet in diameter at the base and from six to ten feet in 

 perpendicular height. No stone appears upon the surface, as in the chambered 

 mounds on the north side of the river, and it is probable that no stone chamber is 

 built in any of them; certainly there is none in those that have been opened. In 

 fields where the mounds have been plowed over, fragments of pottery, flint chip- 

 pings, and sometimes small burnt stones are thrown out by the plows. 



