48 The American Geologist. .luiy. isoi 
been prevalent at this time, we leave tiiat to eonjeeture and to 
tradition. 
Gen. Claiborne in his history of Mississippi says that the tradi- 
tion was common among the Choetaws that a race of giants 
formerly existed at the south and that they used herds of mam- 
moths as lieasts of burden. These herds devoured e\'ery thing and 
broke down the forests. The last animal of the kind had his home 
on the Tombigbee. The Great Spirit struck him several times 
with the lightning. But he presented his head to the bolt and 
it glanced off. Annoj-ed by this, he tied to the Mississippi and 
with one mighty leap cleared the stream and fled to the west. 
Here we have a tradition of the buffalo which formerly roamed as 
far south as Florida. 
We now return to the Hood plain in southern Ohio. Here the 
villages were attended with covered ways and canoe landings, etc. 
and these covered ways, all of them, end at the edge of the 
terraces but the water has gone, and the land is high and dry .... 
This occurs so often that it ceases to surprise us. We find it at 
Piketon, at Hopeton, at High Bank, at Newark, at Marietta and 
in fact at every place where there is a covered way .... The hight 
of the terrace above the water varies with localities but it is about 
equal to the hight of the platforms at Cahokia and ranges from 
thirt}' to forty feet. The following are some of the figures given 
by Squier and Davis .... At Piketon the graded way ends at a 
point half a mile from the river, and there are between it and the 
river two terraces each twenty- feet high. The evidences are, how- 
ever, that the river "once flowed at the foot of the graded way." 
At Marietta the grade runs from the upper terrace to a lower one 
680 feet long and 150 wide; the hight on which the same enclos- 
ure is found is from 40 to GO feet above the bottom land, and 
the bottom land is from 35 to -AO feet above the water of the river. 
The graded wa}' ends at a distance of several hundred feet from 
the water's edge though "it is supposed that when they were built 
the water flowed at the edge of the terrace. " At Hopeton the 
covered way formed of parallel walls runs from the village en- 
closure to the river about half a mile, and is one hundred and fifty 
feet wide. The walls terminate at the edge of a terrace, ' ' at the 
foot of which it is evident the river once ran, but between which 
and the present bed of the stream a broad and fertile bottom now 
intervenes.". . . .At Seal township the square and circle are upon 
