In the basin of the Mississippi, particularly in that portion lying east
of the great river, there are numerous mounds which were reared by human
beings, apparently in very early times, before American history begins.
They are found most frequently upon the banks of lakes and rivers, and
often upon the summits of high bluffs overlooking the country. No
attempt has ever been made to count them, for they could be numbered by
tens of thousands; in the small county of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, for
instance, over two thousand have been found by surveyors. Most of the
mounds have been worn down, by hundreds of years of exposure to rain and
frost, till they are but two or three feet in height; a few, however,
still retain so majestic an altitude as eighty or more feet. The conical
mounds are called by ethnologists _tumuli_. Other earthworks are long
lines, or squares, or circles, and are probably fortifications; some of
the best examples of these are still to be traced at Aztalan, Wisconsin.
In many places, especially in Ohio and Wisconsin, they have been so
shaped as to resemble buffaloes, serpents, lizards, squirrels, or
birds; and some apparently were designed to represent clubs, bows, or
spears--all these peculiarly shaped mounds being styled _effigies_.
The mounds attracted the attention of some of the earliest white
travelers in the Mississippi basin, and much was written about them in
books published in Europe over a hundred years ago. Books are still
being written about the mounds, but most of them are based on old and
worn-out theories; those published by the Ethnological Bureau, at
Washington, are the latest and best. Many thousands of these earthworks
have been opened, some by scientists, many more by curiosity seekers,
and their contents have, for the most part, found their way into public
museums. Many of the mounds have been measured with great accuracy, and
pictures and descriptions of them are common.
Until a few years ago, the opinion was quite general, even among
historians and ethnologists, that the mounds were built by a race of
people who lived in the Mississippi basin before the coming of the
Indians, and that the mound builders were far superior to the Indians in
civilization. Many thought that this prehistoric race had been driven
southward by the Indians, and that the Aztecs whom the Spaniards found
in Mexico and Central America four hundred years ago were its
descendants. We have in Wisconsin a reminder of the Aztec theory, in the
name Aztalan, early applied to a notable group of earthworks in
Jefferson county.
There were many reasons why, in an earlier and more imperfect stage of
our knowledge concerning Indians, this theory seemed plausible. It was
argued that to build all these mounds required a vast deal of steady
labor, which could have been performed only by a dense population,
working under some strong central authority, perhaps in a condition of
slavery; that these people must have long resided in the same spot; and
must have been supported by regular crops of grain, vegetables, and
fruit. It was shown that Indians, as we found them, lived in small
bands, and did not abide long in one place; that their system of
government was a loose democracy; that they were disinclined to
persistent labor, and that they were hunters, not farmers. Further, it
was contended that the mounds indicated a religious belief on the part
of their builders, which was not the religion of the red men. The result
of these arguments, to which was added a good deal of romantic fancy,
was to rear in the public mind a highly colored conception of a mythical
race of Mound Builders, rivaling in civilization the ancient Egyptians.
But we are living in an age of scientific investigation; scientific
methods are being applied to every branch of study; history has had to
be rewritten for us in the new light which is being thrown upon the path
of human development. This is not the place to set forth in detail the
steps by which knowledge has been slowly but surely reached, regarding
the history of the once mysterious mounds. The work of research is not
yet ended, for the study of ethnology is only in its infancy;
nevertheless, it is now well established that the Indians built the
mounds, and we may feel reasonably certain for what purpose they used
them.
Indian population was never dense in North America. The best judges now
agree that the entire native population consisted of not over two
hundred thousand at the time when the Pilgrim Fathers came to Plymouth.
Of these, Wisconsin probably had but nine thousand, which, curiously
enough, is about its present Indian population. But, before the first
whites came, many of the American tribes were not such roamers as they
afterward became; they were inclined to gather into villages, and to
raise large crops of Indian corn, melons, and pumpkins, the surplus of
which they dried and stored for winter. We shall read, in another
chapter, how the white fur trader came to induce the Indian
agriculturist to turn hunter, and thereby to become the wandering savage
whom we know to-day. Concerning the argument that the modern Indian is
too lazy to build mounds, it is sufficient to say that he was, when a
planter, of necessity a better worker than when he had become a hunter;
also, that many of the statements we read about Indian laziness are the
result of popular misunderstanding of the state of Indian society. It is
now well known that the Indian was quite capable of building excellent
fortifications; that the most complicated forms of mounds were not
beyond his capacity; and that, in general, he was in a more advanced
stage of mental development than was generally believed by old writers.
Modern experiments, also, prove that the actual work of building a
mound, with the aid of baskets to carry the earth, which was the method
that they are known to have employed, was not so great as has been
supposed.
It has been recently discovered, from documents of that period, that
certain Indians were actually building mounds in our southern States as
late as the Revolutionary War. In the north, the practice of mound
building had gone or was going out of fashion about a hundred and
twenty-five years before, that is, in the days when the French first
came to Wisconsin. It is thought that some of our Wisconsin mounds may
be a thousand years old; while others are certainly not much over two
hundred years of age, for skeletons have been found in some of them
wearing silver ornaments which were made in Paris, and which bear dates
as late as 1680.
It is easy to imagine the uses to which the Wisconsin mounds were put by
their Indian builders. We can the more readily reason this out, because
we know, from books of travel published at the time, just what use the
southern Indians were making of their mounds, in the period of the
Revolutionary War. The small tumuli were for the most part burial
places for men of importance, and were merely heaps of earth piled above
the corpse, which was generally placed in a sitting posture; he was
surrounded with earthen pots containing food, which was to last him
until his arrival at the happy hunting ground, and with weapons of stone
and copper, to enable him there to kill game or defend himself against
his enemies. The larger tumuli were, no doubt, the commanding sites of
council houses or of the huts of chiefs. Each Indian belonged, through
his relationship with his mother's people, to some clan; and each clan
had its symbol or _totem_, such as the Bear, the Turtle, the Buffalo,
etc. The Indians claimed that the clan had descended from some giant
animal whose figure, or effigy, was thus honored. Many white people
place their family symbol, or crest, or coat of arms on their letter
paper, or on the panels of their carriage doors, or upon their
silverware; so Indians are fond of displaying their respective totems on
their utensils, weapons, canoes, or wigwams. In the mound building days,
they reared totems of earth, and probably dwelt on top of them. As in
each village there were several clans, so there were numerous earth
totems, many of them of great size. This, no doubt, is the origin of the
so-called effigies. Add to these the mystic circles of the medicine men,
the fantastic serpents, and the fortifications necessary to defend the
village from the approach of an enemy up some sloping bank or
sharp-sided ravine, and you have the story of the mounds. An Indian
village in those old mound building days must have presented a
picturesque appearance.
Just why the Indians stopped building mounds is not settled; but it is
noticeable that they were being built in various parts of the country
about up to the time of the white man's entry. It may be that the coming
of the stranger, with his different manners, hastened the decay of the
custom; or perhaps it had practically ceased about that time, as many
another wave of custom has swept over primitive peoples and left only
traces behind.
The mounds, with which the forefathers of our Indians dotted our land,
remain to us as curious and instructive monuments of savage life in
prehistoric times. No castles or grand cathedrals have come down to us,
in America, to illustrate the story of the early ages of our own race;
but we have in the mounds mute, impressive relics of a still earlier
life upon this soil, by our primitive predecessors. It should be
considered our duty, as well as our pleasure, to preserve them intact
for the enlightenment of coming generations of our people.