ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF THE MISSOURI RIVER. 



upon it, visited that place and spent several years there before revealing his mis- 

 sion. The strangeness of his conduct excited general notice and induced him, 

 when he gave up the search, to impart the secret of his mission to one man. 

 The remarkable feature about his conduct was that he made it his sole business 

 to hunt out every Indian trader and trapper who visited St. Louis, and especially 

 those from the Missouri River, and inquire of them for a certain country describ- 

 ed by him and which, it is said, corresponds exactly with the Pinnacles and the 

 mysterious "Old Fort." And in further confirmation of this tradition a vast 

 amount of digging has been done at different times to find the buried treasure. 

 But, so far, all efforts in this direction have been failures and until the treasure 

 is found it would not be safe to attribute the work to this little band of heroes 

 and martyrs to Spanish cupidity. 



'* By whom, then, was the work constructed? Evidently, by those who oc- 

 cupied its immediate environment when the work was done, the people who 

 erected the mounds now standing in its vicinity. Everywhere around the in 

 trenchment is evidence of a former dense population and a long continued occu- 

 pancy of the country by a people capable of doing the work. No one who has 

 studied the work and its immediate surroundings can doubt for a moment that it 

 was the achievement of this people. The trees growing in the intrenchments, 

 and which- have sprung up since it was made, are evidently older than any known 

 European expedition on the Missouri River, and perhaps were growing, some of 

 them at least, when Columbus first rejoiced in the success of his discovery of a 

 new continent. 



"It will be remembered, too, that I stated there was an area of country 

 more than two miles in extent each way, extending to near one end of the ter- 

 race and approaching to within a short distance of the " Old Fort," which is lit- 

 erally covered with low mounds. This district may very aptly be termed a city in 

 ruins. The ground for a depth of from three to five feet, or more, is filled 

 with the bones and domestic implements of a departed race, and for miles around 

 their broken implements lie scattered everywhere. They were undoubtedly a 

 people who had a fixed and permanent abode, and an agricultural people, to a 

 limited extent at least, for some of their stone implements must have been made 

 for the cultivation of the soil. They must have used their pottery vessels for 

 cooking their food, and the low mounds represent their kitchens, in which wagon 

 loads of broken vessels might be gathered up — broken at the domestic hearth. 



"The intrenchment seems as old as some, at least, of the vestiges of this 

 lost race, living around it ; and all may be relegated to the same people, and to a 

 time since, and not very remote from the close of the loess deposit, or to a time, 

 at least, when but little if any vegetable mold was formed upon it, for their im- 

 plements now found certainly rest upon the loess and underneath the black soil. 

 A people with a fixed abode and who had made the advance toward civilization 

 of those who erected the mounds and manufactured the pottery found in the en- 

 vironments of the "Old Fort" were capable of constructing such a work, and 

 every thing points to them as the authors of it. And as it is manifestly older than. 



