The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The Origin of the Mound-Builders.
I.
The Mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley.
──────
Let any traveler start from Wisconsin and traverse theMississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, and cross thecountry from the Alleghenies to the Western Plateau, andthroughout his course he will find thousands of moundsof earth with a conical or pyramidal apex, and containingwithin their interior relics of human remains and inventions.
When a traveler asks the origin and reasons of thesemounds, he is almost invariably met with the enigmaticalanswer, “Indian mounds.” They were not made by theIndians whom Columbus found on this continent; in fact,their origin was unknown to the Red Man, since they foundthem here, and they looked as recent to the first Europeanadventurers, with the remains of ancient forests on their summits,as they do to us now.
When a boy, I have stood and wondered at the stupendousmagnificence of the Mound-builders’ rude art, in crowninga beautiful hill with a throne for their Chieftain, or perhapsa temple to their god of nature, or possibly a sacrificial altar,on which to shed human blood to appease an irate divinity, orto dedicate the triumphal march of a conquering hero. Sincea man, I have wandered among the thousands of mounds,from the Great Lakes to the Mexican Gulf, and have ponderedamong the unclassified tumuli on the plains of Texasthat stretch away toward the Rio Grande, and have wonderedif these are the watch-towers of a gigantic antediluvianprairie-dog contemporaneous with the Deinosaurs, or if theyare the mute landmarks of a mysterious people who traffickedhere while Cheops was building on the Nile. While modernscien