664 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



words, the beginning of America's history, is accepted as "recent" compared to 

 the vast antiquity claimed for the rise, grandeur and final extinction of the 

 mound-builder's " Vanished Empire." With this "qualification" I will briefly 

 cite, in corroboration of my statement, a few well-authenticated instances of com- 

 paratively recent mounds, or such as are known to have been erected subsequent 

 to the intrusion of civilization and its arts. 



Mr, Squier, in the second volume of " Contributions to Knowledge," of 

 the Smi^^hsonian Institution, describes mounds and earthworks extending from 

 Canada to the Susquehanna, which were found to contain ornamented pottery, pipes^ 

 stone axes, hammers and discs and other stone-age implements identical in shape 

 and material with similar specimens found by him in the Ohio mounds ; and bone 

 awls and needles together with iron axes, glass beads, cast copper hatchets, ket- 

 tles of iron, brass and copper, and other articles of European manufacture. The 

 building of these mounds he was forced to assign to the Iroquois within "com- 

 paratively recent dates;" though in every essential character they were exactly 

 like the older mounds in central Ohio. In this (Cass) county, a few years ago, 

 a mound, eight feet high by twenty-five feet in diameter, situated on a point of 

 the Sangamon bluffs, was opened and found to contain the remains of one human 

 skeleton walled around with rough stones, over which the earth had been heaped. 

 With this skeleton were found a small earthenware cup, a few flint implements 

 and an iron gun barrel. In another low mound six miles from this city, removed 

 some years ago in opening a new road, the remains of several individuals were 

 thrown out, together with stone axes, flint arrow-points, broken pottery, glass 

 beads and brass rings. In the skeleton hand of one of the dead was a beautiful 

 pipe, of polished serpentine, cut in the exact image of a frog. Col. C. C. Jones,. 

 Jr., found in a mound, not far from Savannah, with the bones of a skeleton ^it 

 its base, an earthen pot, a itw arrow-heads of flint, a stone celt, and the oak 

 handle, with part of the blade of an old-fashioned sword. Bartram, as late as 

 1729, saw the Choctaws take from their tribal bone-house a large number of the 

 remains of their dead in rude coffins, and after piling them up in a pyramid, heap 

 over them a great mound of earth. Dr. Sternberg, -of the U. S. Army, in a 

 paper read in 1875, before the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, describes his explorations of certain mounds near Pensacola, Florida, m^ 

 which were found pottery, hematite paint rocks, flint weapons, perforated shell 

 ornaments, blue-glass beads and pieces of iron. The old Winnebago chief, Win- 

 neshiek, said the mounds at Lanesboro, Minnesota, were erected by the Sioux, 

 many generations before, in commemoration of a great victory the latter had 

 achieved over his people. Tomochichi pointed out to Gov. Oglethorpe a large 

 mound near Savannah, Georgia, which he said had been raised over the remains 

 of the Yamicraw Chief who had, many years before, entertained a red-bearded 

 white man, who had sailed up the Savannah River, in a large vessel, to the Yam- 

 icraw Bluffs. 



The Natchez Indians when expelled from Louisiana, by the French, in 172S, 

 retired to the neighborhood of Natchitoches and there built a mound of consider- 



