Nov. 5, 1904.] 
FOREST AND STREAM, 
3B8 
The Moundsville Mound, 
The great mound at Moundsville, W. Va., belongs 
on our list of sportsmen's finds, since it was discovered 
by- a hunter while out deer hunting. It was at least 
as a sportsman's find that we came to know anything 
of it, and it .is as a sportsman's find that it now comes 
to the attention of him who may read the facts and 
speculations herinunder set out. 
The Pittsburg Despatch recalls the story and describes 
the great monument of past races: 
In the year 1770 Joseph Tomlinson pushed his way 
through the wilderness until he came to. the Ohio River, 
and, finding a valley four miles long and two miles 
wide at one place, he laid a land warrant on all the 
northern portion of the valley and built a cabin at a 
spring 400 yards north of the mound. But it was 
not until two years later that he discovered that so 
near his home, hidden in the tall, dense forest of the 
rich valley, was the largest mound in America. 
One day in the year 1772 Mr. Tomlinson took down 
his flintlock rifle and started southward through the 
woods to replenish his larder with venison. Good 
luck attended him, for soon he killed a deer, and by 
that act found the mound. As was the custom in 
those days, he disemboweled the deer, skinned the legs, 
tied the skin from the legs together and shouldered the 
game. On the homeward journey he came to what 
he supposed was a steep hill and climbed it. Then he 
saw the smoke from his cabin chimney and realized 
that he was standing on the apex of a cone of earth 
which his path a few yards to the right or left would 
have avoided. He immediately laid a land warrant upon 
200 acres more of the valley to include the mound. 
Originally the mound was 90 feet high and 240 feet 
in diameter at the base. It is composed of many 
varieties of earth, apparently carried there in baskets 
or small conveyances. Seventeen varieties of forest 
trees- grow upon it. Some of the trees are quite large, 
one being nineteen feet in circumference. 
After the valley became thickly populated a shaft 
was sunk down from the top of the mound to the bot- 
tom and a tunnel dug out to the northern side, the 
of five cents from each pupil in the State. Marshall 
county children contributed about $400 on the day ap- 
pointed by the State superintendent of schools_ for con- 
tributions to be made, but not a penny was given out- 
side that county. Now that small nest egg seems to be 
lost somewhere about the State capital. 
When Mr. Carnegie began establishing libraries the 
city of Moundsville put underway plans to buy the 
spot and erect a library building there, provided Mr. 
Carnegie would donate the usual library. The great 
philanthropist returned to Scotland before he could be 
approached by the city's committee, and thus another 
movement failed. A plan for State control has been 
brought to the front when the Legislature has been 
in session, but not enough statesmen could be enlisted 
in its support. 
Four hundred feet east of the mound the West Vir- 
ginia penitentiary is located. The recent plan for 
State control designed a water reservoir to be located 
on top of the mound, to give a water supply and fire 
protection to the big State institution, where more than 
goo State and United States convicts are confined. The 
top of the mound is higher than the prison buildings. 
Convict labor could be utilized very advantageously in 
beautifying and caring for the mound and the square 
surrounding it. 
Unless something is done before next summer, Mr. 
McFadden will have the timber removed, make use of 
the 85,000 brick used in the tunnel, and dispose of the 
earth to whoever may want it for making fills in lots, 
streets or along railroads. 
In response to an inquiry about the present con- 
ditions of the mound and the plans for its preservation, 
Mr. McFadden, who is now in his eightieth year and 
"enjoying life with pretty good health," writes under 
date of Oct. 2, 1904: 
Moundsville, W. Va., Oct. 2. — Editor Forest and 
Stream: I am pleased to learn that there is some one 
interested in .the fate of the prehistoric mound from 
which our beautiful little city takes its name. The 
mound still stands as a monument to some prehistoric 
THE MOUNDSVILLE MOUND. 
From a photo in 1904. 
apex leveled off and a three-story pagoda-shaped build- 
ing erected for dancing, and a museum established at 
the bottom of the shaft. The enterprise did not pay, 
and since then the place has been totally neglected, 
except that it is the mecca of pilgrims from all sections 
of the country every day. 
When the excavation was made three skeletons were 
found directly in the center, but raised a few feet from 
the level of the surrounding land. One of the skele- 
tons had belonged to a male human being about 
eight feet in height, one a female and one a child. There 
was also in the rude chamber a tablet of stone, upon 
one side of which were hieroglyphics, which is now in 
the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, many heads 
of ivory and other articles. 
The present owner, G. S. McFadden, has owned the 
city square, upon which it stands, for more than thirty 
years, and in that time has never derived one penny of 
financial benefit from it. He has lent enthusiastic sup- 
port to various movements designed to transfer it to 
State control and have the property improved and 
cared for in a fitting manner to preserve it to future 
generations, but now, since nothing has been accom- 
plished in thirty long years, he will transform the 
square into a building site. 
One of the movements exploited for giving to the 
mound the attention it deserves was for the school 
children to acquire ownership of it by a contribution 
race. Their name and the country from which they 
came are the mystery unsolved. I presume you have 
read of it, and I hope you may have had the pleasure 
of seeing it in its grandeur, when the large forest trees 
and shrubbery are in full leaf. 
The location of the mound is almost in the geograph- 
ical center of nearly 4,000 acres of a beautiful valley, 
The hight now is 70 feet; it was originally 90 feet. 
At the base it is 245 feet in diameter, and is now 63 feet 
in diameter on top. The fate of the mound depends on 
the action of our Legislature this coming winter. The 
plot of ground in the mound property is 340 feet long 
and 242 feet wide, and is surrounded by four streets. 
The mound stands within 150 yards of the West Vir- 
ginia penitentiary, and 300 yards from the County Court 
House. I have offered the mound and surrounding 
plot of ground to the State for $30,000. I could sell 
the dirt, material of which the mound is composed, 
55,000 cubic yards, at 10 cents per yard, purchaser to do 
his own hauling; there are 85,000 good bricks inside 
the mound, put there by a son of old Joseph Tomlinson, 
the discoverer of the mound. The forest trees are 
large, some of them three feet in diameter. The earth, 
timber, bricks and thirty-five building lots would bring 
me $50,000. If the State takes me at my price of $30,- 
000, the State will be bound to preserve it for all time, 
unless destroyed by the elements. 
G. M. S. McFadden. 
Monarch, the Big Bear. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Mr. John Malone's letter, calling attention to the 
parallelism of Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton's latest book, 
"Monarch the Big Bear," and the stories in my 
obscure little volume of bear tales entitled "Bears 
I Have Met — and Others," calls for an explana- 
tion from me. It is true that I supplied to Mr. 
Seton substantially all the material for his story, and I 
appreciate at its full value the compliment he has paid 
me in using my unpretentious tales as the basis of an 
intimate animal study, and making of my detached 
sketches — some true and others avowedly mere camp-fire 
yarns — an historical novel of bear life. Nevertheless I 
feel that Mr. Malone's implied criticism of the manner 
in which Mr. Seton has bestowed that compliment is 
justified, and that I have reason for objecting to wholesale 
appropriation of my work without credit by another 
writer. 
In a certain sense I did give my consent to the use of 
my material by Mr. Seton, but there seems to have been 
a difference in our understanding of the extent of that 
use. Mr. Seton explains in the foreword of his book that 
he has taken two liberties that he conceives to be proper. 
The propriety of other liberties he has taken depends, 
perhaps, upon the point of view. Some of them may be 
•regarded as permissible literary license. For example, 
the "dedication," in which Mr. Seton describes Lan 
Kellyan, the man who secured Monarch and told him the 
story of the big bear's life, as "a rough man of the hills, 
ready to talk but knowing not how," and giving him the 
story in "a tongue unknown to script." It amuses if it 
does not flatter me to be pictured as a wild and woolly 
mountaineer, capable of seizing a bear by the ear and 
hauling him into camp, and as a teller of "rude tales." 
That is literary license, which I also may have taken now 
and then in the thousands of columns of matter I have 
written for newspapers and magazines in my "tongue 
unknown to script" during thirty years of labor with 
the . pen. 
About five years ago Mr. Seton brought to me at Los 
Angeles a letter of introduction from my friend Louis 
Ohnimus, the Lou Bonamy of his tale, no doubt. Mr. 
Ohnimus explained that Mr. Seton was anxious to learn 
something about the habits and traits of grizzlies ; and 
that he and Mr. Seton had made an unsuccessful hunt for 
bear signs in the Sierras; and he asked me to assist Mr. 
Seton. 
Mr. Seton said he had had no opportunity to observe 
the grizzly in a wild state, and wanted to study the animal 
in its native haunts. I offered to take Mr. Seton into 
the msuntains and put him on the trail of. a large bear, 
whose habits and haunts I knew well, and to devote two 
weeks to his service for the fun of the thing and for the 
sake of my friend Ohnimus. Mr. Seton desired much 
to accept my offer, but his time was limited, and we were 
obliged to abandon the plan, regretfully on both sides. 
As the next best thing, Mr. Seton suggested that I 
tell him what I could about bears. In the parlor of the 
Van Nuys Hotel, Los Angeles, not at a camp-fire on 
Tallac, I told to Mr. Seton many bear stories, some of 
which I afterward put into my book. I told them substan- 
tially as they appear in my book, and I informed him that 
most of them had been published by me in newspapers, 
and that I intended to publish the rest. He said : "I will 
give credit for what I use." I replied : "You are welcome 
to any information about the habits and characteristics 
of bears you are able to extract from the stories. I am 
very glad to be of service to you." Possibly he inter- 
preted that as a relinquishment of the right to credit for 
the stories themselves, but it seems to me that the publica- 
tion of those stories in a copyrighted volume should have 
been sufficient to disabuse his mind of any such misap- 
prehension. 
I told to Mr. Seton the story of Jack and Jill almost 
literally as he tells it in the first two chapters of his 
book. I had written and published it in similar but briefer 
form in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, under the 
title of "Morgan Clark's Bears." It was a story of two 
black bears captured and tamed by Morgan Clark, a 
hunter in Siskiyou, who had been my companion on hunt- 
ing trips. Perhaps I failed to make it clear to Mr. Seton 
that Jack, the bear that followed Morgan Clark like a dog, 
watched his coat in the hay field, and had the adventure 
with a hornets' nest, which he pulled from a branch and 
drowned in the Shasta River, was a black bear and not a 
grizzly. However, it is asserted by many naturalists that 
although the adult grizzly cannot climb, a grizzly cub can 
and does climb trees while his claws are short and his 
weight small. Mr. Seton's tree-climbing grizzly is repre- 
sented to have been a young cub. The original Jack was 
a well-grown black bear, but the substitution of a grizzly 
in the story is a permissible literary liberty. 
Because nearly all the adventures and incidents of 
Monarch's life, as told by Mr. Seton, are contained in the 
stories in my book, it may not follow necessarily that 
Mr. Seton took his material directly from "Bears I Have 
Met*' True, my book was published more than a year 
ago, and I sent a copy to Mr. Seton, who had kindly 
given me a pencil sketch of Monarch to use in the book, 
but I had told him many of the stories, and he had taken 
full notes, five years ago. 
It might be argued that Mr. Seton did not refer to 
my book while writing his ; otherwise he would have 
noticed that many of the incidents treated by him as 
"known truths" of natural history are frankly told by me 
as imaginary adventures of a mythical bear in the chapter 
of my book entitled "Chronicles of Clubfoot." In that case, 
it might be held that I am therefore responsible for 
an imposition of fanciful tales upon the public as veritable 
natural history. I _may have failed to differentiate fact 
from fiction while 1 was spinning bear yarns in the Van 
