THE MOUNDS NOT GENERAL BURIAL-PLACE H ; GREAT INDIAN 

 CEMETERIES OF THE WEST. 



Allusion has been made, in the body of this work, to the large cemeteries 

 which have been discovered at various places in the Mississippi valley, and the 

 suggestion ventured that they owe their origin to practices similar to those which 

 prevailed among the Indians of New York and Canada, of collecting, at stated 

 intervals, the bones of the dead, and depositing them in pits or trenches. There 

 are many interesting facts connected with these cemeteries, which merit attention, 

 and justify a recurrence to the subject. 



Nothing is more common in the accounts given of Western mounds, than the 

 loose and very vague remark, that certain ones or all of them " contain vast 

 quantities of human bones." To this circumstance seems attributable, in a great 

 degree, the prevaihng and very erroneous impression, that the mounds are simple 

 tombs, or rather grand cemeteries, containing the remains of an entire race. The 

 Grave Creek mound is spoken of by Atwater, Doddridge, and other writers, as a 

 grand mausoleum " undoubtedly containing many thousand human skeletons." An 

 investigation has shown it to contain but a very few skeletons ; and examinations 

 of several other tumuli, characterized in similar extravagant terms, have been 

 attended with like results. The mounds of the West can he regarded only to a very 

 limited extent as the burial-places of the people who built them. But little more than 

 one-half of their number are clearly sepulchral in their character; and these, except 

 in extraordinary cases, contain but a single skeleton each.* 



* The authority of Mr. Samuel R. Brown, author of the "Western Gazetteer, or Emigrant's Directory," 

 pubhshed in 181 7, has been quoted by various writers on American antiquities, and has been supposed 

 to sustain the conclusion that the mounds were vast receptacles of the dead, slain in battle. It will be 

 seen, however, from Mr. Brown's account of his explorations, that the mounds which he examined contained 

 deposites of different dates, one of which was clearly of the modern Indians, though the fact does not appeal" 

 to have suggested itself to the mind of the explorer, or to have occurred to the writers who have followed 

 him. The material portions of Mr. Brown's account are subjoined: 



" We examined from fifteen to twenty of these mounds. In some, whose height was from fifteen to 

 twenty feet, we could not find more than four or five skeletons. In one, not the least appearance of a 

 human bone was to be found. Others were so full of bones as to warrant the belief that they orio-inally 

 contained at least one hundred bodies ; children of different ages and the full grown seemed to have been 

 piled together promiscuously. * * * In the progress of our researches, we obtained ample testimony 

 that these masses of earth were the work of a savage people. We discovered a piece of glass resembling 

 the bottom of a tumbler, but concave ; several stone axes, etc. * * * There was no appearance of 

 iron ; one of the skulls was found pierced by an arrow, which was still sticking in it, driven about half way 



