CHAPTER IV. 



The aborigines of our country at the period of the Discovery, or their ancestors, 

 were all more or less engaged in building for defence or worship. The elaborate 

 works of Squier, Davis, Whittlesey, and Lapham, published by the Smithsonian 

 Institution, have described, perhaps everything of value among the Indian remains 

 within our territory. 1 



These aboriginal relics — chiefly earthworks — may be comprised in two classes : 

 simple Mounds, and Enclosures bounded by parapets and circumvallations or walls. 

 The mounds are asserted to have been places of sepulture, sacrifice, and worship, 

 or sometimes devoted to various mixed uses ; while the enclosures were intended 

 either for defence, or for sacred or superstitious purposes. The rude pyramidal 

 mounds were frequently of great and massive dimensions, while the bird and beast 

 shapes of their ground plans, in Wisconsin, as described in the work of Mr. Lapham., 

 are as singular as they are inexplicable. 2 



The mound, or heap-s7iape — derived, perhaps originally, from the earth that was 

 piled over a body in burial — seems to have been the most common throughout our 

 entire territory as far as the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico and the Eio 

 Grande. It indicates the early condition of art or the unprogressive character of 

 the builders, who either disappeared from the land, degenerated into the modern 

 Indian, or passed southward to become the progenitors of semi-civilization in more 

 genial regions. 



In the mounds have been found ornaments, carvings, pipes, skeletons, shells, 

 spear and arrow-heads, hornstone knives, axes, copper chisels and gravers, silver, 

 galena, and various utensils of pottery ; but all the forms of these implements, and 

 especially those of the domestic vessels and images, indicate a rude state of art, 

 taste, invention, and wants. No discoveries have yet been made to show that the 

 mound-builders communicated or preserved facts by permanent records or monu- 

 ments ; and their nearest approach to printing is a figured stamp, found, some years 

 since, in a mound at Cincinnati, which resembles the stamps I have seen in Mexico, 

 used by the ancient people of that region, either to impress marks upon paper or 

 patterns on their stuffs. 3 



1 See Squier's Paper in the 2d Vol. Trans. Am. Eth. Soc, pp. 136, 13Y, 138, and his Ancient Mon. 

 Tail. Miss., and of N. York, &c. &c; Whittlesey's Descrip. of Ancient Works in Ohio; Lapham's 

 Antiq. of Wisconsin. 



a See Lapham's Antiquities of Wisconsin in the Smithsonian Contributions. 



8 This stamp, of which I possess a cast, is very accurately represented in Squier and Davis's Ancient 

 Mon. Val. Mississippi, p. 275. The inscribed stones and rocks that have been found are very apocryphal 

 as to period and purpose ; nor are they numerous enough to indicate an ancient system. 



