Flood-plain and the Mound Builders. — Peet. 47 
writer had the privilege of visiting this mound in company with 
Hon. Wm. Collins who spent his 3-outh at Collinsville near this 
mound. He informed me that, in the ^-ear 1840, this American 
bottom was overflowed and that steamboats floated over it in res- 
cuing cattle and men, and landed their cargoes at the foot of the 
bluff three miles from the group of mounds. There has been no 
overflow for flfty 3'ears and the land is now as dr^' as the prairie. 
It is covered with fine farms and the mounds are covered with 
farm-houses and barns, and outhouses, many of them l^eing large 
enough to accommodate all these and give room for the kitchen 
garden besides on the summit. Now the point which we make is 
this: if the hunter mound-builder built his burial mounds before 
the time of the disappearance of the elephant or mastodon, and 
the agriculturist built his pyramid upon the flood-plain as a place 
for an agricultural settlement, how long ago was the mound builder 
living and filling the scene with his activities? These pj-ramids 
were perhaps built while the bottoms were subject to overflow. 
Perhaps it would l)e called a cit^- of the mound-builders, but it 
was a cit}" which in some respects resembled the palafittes or lake 
villages of Switzerland, "a lake dwelling" on dr}- land a part 
of the time, and a palafitte in an overflowed district the other 
part. The bottom lands extend for eighty miles north and south 
and are in places some eight and ten miles wide, and are covered 
with a number of mound-1)uilders' villages similar to the one de- 
scribed .... The same fact is also perceptible in the pyramids at 
Seltzertown and in Bolivar count}^. Miss. 
The drainage of the flood-plain has occurred since the p^Tamids 
were built. The p^'ramids are reall}- older than the flood-plain. 
The height of the platforms and of the levees or long walls is sig- 
niflcant here. In looking over the works we learned that the 
terraces were all at least twenty feet above the level of the ground. 
The majority were three times that hight — or were so originall}-, 
for many of them have been graded down to make foundations 
lor the farm-houses. Now take a vast plain covered with large 
farms and villages scattered over it and not a flood that has cov- 
ered it since 1840 and then put water over it twent}* feet with the 
inhabitants crowded on the summits of their p3'ramids or crowded 
on the terraces looking down on the wide spread flood, and you 
have a pictui-e of the two ages, the historic and the prehistoric, 
and the contrasts between the two. As to the Bufl'alo havins: 
