MASTODON REMAINS IN MISSOURI. 615 
ing over it, just after a severe wind-storm, and was surprised to see a portion of 
a stone wall exposed to view. His curiosity was excited and he immediately set 
to work investigating it, and he has found the wall, on the side where he has been 
at work, extending two hundred feet, built of stone, laid up with lime mortar, three 
feet thick and very solid. He has cleared five rooms, one of them twenty five 
feet long and twelve feet wide, with the interior corners rounded. The other 
rooms are small. The large room was evidently used for some special purpose. 
The building was two stories in height. It appears to be a quadrangular structure 
with a placita in the centre. In the rooms he found a number of stone hammers 
and axes, with a depression cut around them to fasten them to a handle with a 
withe — corn-cobs and the hard, woody stubs of squashes, pottery, turquoise beads 
and beads of red coral, which must have come from some distant country, also 
some black" ornaments, apparently of ebony set with turquoise, and a perfect 
skeleton of a woman with fine, light chesmut hair. 
He found all the doors walled up from the outside so neatly that only from 
the inside could he tell where the di.ors had been. 
Mr. Chaves is a pleasant, intelligent gentleman, an enthusiastic educational 
worker, and well informed in the prehistoric history of that section of our country, 
and he says that the character of the workmanship of these building is different 
from any that he knows of or has heard of. The timbers that supported the roof 
have been burned, but the walls are in a good state of preservation. 
In the spring Mr. Chaves designs to try and trace out the whole structure, 
and he will put roofs on some of the best rooms and utilize them. He thinks 
this was unquestionably a town inhabited by subjects of Montezuma. When 
that monarch found himself hard pressed by the Spaniards and their allies, 
he called all his children together. They being loyal and obedient subjects, at 
once started for Old Mexico, leaving their houses well closed, hoping to return as 
soon as they had destroyed the Spaniards, — but fate decreed otherwise and they 
never returned. Afterwards the Apaches came, took possession of the country 
and burned the town. In course of time the winds have eddied the dust and 
sands of the plains about it and buried it completely. 
I regret that I had only a few minutes to talk with Mr. Chaves about his 
wonderful find, but I hope to have an opportunity to visit the locality and get 
fuller particulars about it. 
MASTODON REMAINS IN MISSOURI. A 
A. M. STALNAKER. 
On the 1 8th of October, 1883, there were found at Springfield, Mo., in dig- 
ging a well, two pieces of a tusk of a m istodon, the two pieces making about four 
feet, one of them being the point and the other a section from the middle ; but 
they did not fit together, showing that there was a piece gone from between 
