ART. VII.-MONUMENTS OF THE MISSISSIPPI

VALLEY.

Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, comprising the results of extensive original surveys and explorations; by E. G. SQUIER and E. H. DAVIS. Being Vol. I. of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. 1848.

THE regents of the Smithsonian Institution have done well in commencing 'the Contributions to Knowledge,' published under their direction, with a work relating to the antiquities of the Mississippi valley. Probably, indeed, had they not looked on it with favor, the work itself would have come before the public under some other auspices, and being in a less expensive form would have obtained more general circulation. Thus the diffusion of knowledge among men would have been as well secured by a bookseller calculating the changes of a private undertaking, or even by a historical or ethnological society without funds, as by that institution which foreign liberality has endowed. But however this may be, since the regents of the Smithsonian had a duty to perform, it speaks well for their future selections of publications offered for their acceptance, that they began, with proper national feeling, at home; that instead of inaugurating themselves by accounts of dodos on the other side of the globe, or of extinct volcanos in middle Asia, or by vocabularies of the Papuan islanders, they chose for the subject of their first volume the antiquities of those mysterious races within our own borders, who may be called human fossils, and whose last vestiges are fast disappearing before the labor of civilized men.

The remains of ancient nations in the West had been frequently noticed, and had been explored with some success before our authors began their explorations. It had been a prevailing theory that they were constructed as works of defense; a very considerable antiquity had been assigned to these works; and it was the common opinion among persons who had inspected the monuments, or had read the reports of visitors, that the remains belonged to an anterior race, who had reached a higher civilization than those tribes which were coeval with the first settlements in this country;—a race which perhaps came from the south-west, and had some connection with the Aztecs of Mexico. There was, however, after all the explorations, a want of facts, and many of the observations were careless and inaccurate. It is not doing injustice to the early investigators to say that Messrs. Squier and Davis have surpassed them much in exactness of observation, and that, by laboriously penetrating to the bottom of the mounds, they have established results which were beyond the scope of their predecessors.

It is our intention, in the few pages devoted to this work, to follow our authors, without theory, by a brief statement of the principal facts which they have brought to light. They have wisely abstained from theorizing themselves, and the good sense with which they have in a simple, natural manner given their statements of facts, is quite praiseworthy. We shall confine ourselves, too, for the most part, to those localities where they have made explorations in person, or to those (chiefly in their own state of Ohio) where they have been aided by other competent surveyors. The region of Indian monuments is one of wide extent, yet a large portion of it has never been adequately examined. It will be safer, therefore, if we confine ourselves to facts, to move within a narrow range, and only to pass beyond it for the purpose of comparison, and of showing that the builders of the monuments through the whole valley of the west were but

one race.

The state of Ohio is full of ancient works, which however seem to grow smaller and more insignificant towards Lake Erie, as if the center of activity had been near the southern border of the state. Yet several spots, by the multitude of their remains, are more particularly marked as the seats of a numerous population, or as the capitals of some predominant superstition. The remains are clustered together most thickly in rich valleys capable of supporting a great number of inhabitants, as in Butler county, and the neighboring parts of the great Miami valley, in the Scioto valley, from Circleville to the mouth of the river at Portsmouth, and along the valley of Paint creek, a branch of the Scioto. Nor ought a remarkable group of works, near Newark, on a tributary of the Muskingum, to pass without notice. Ross county, through which Paint creek runs, and where Chillicothe is situated, is most populous in these monuments of an extinct race: not far from one hundred enclosures occur in this small territory alone. It was in the Scioto valley, and in that of its tributary, that Messrs. Squier and Davis made their principal explorations.

For the sake of method, these gentlemen divide the monuments into enclosures and mounds; and subdivide these two classes according to a view of the purpose which they were intended to serve. The correctness of this subdivision must be justified in the one case by the position and nature of the enclosures; and in the other by the situation and construction of the mounds, and above all by the results of explorations in them. Whether these divisions can be sustained in every instance, may be a question; but there is reason to think that in general they will commend themselves to persons of sound judgment.

Following the order observed in the work before us, we shall call the attention of our readers in the first place to enclosures made for defensive purposes. The design with which these

enclosures were built is betrayed by their position, and by the care taken to guard the points of approach. They are, for the most part, situated on high and nearly inaccessible hills, formed by the force of water wearing deep channels below the highest level or upper platform of the country. The sides therefore are high walls of rock, through which one or more streams have cut their way in many cases the spot selected is a peninsula with a narrow entrance, around which two brooks run in a circuitous path to a main river. The areas of these enclosures vary in Southern Ohio from twelve to one hundred and forty acres. The artificial defenses consist chiefly of an embankment, on or just below the brow of a hill, composed of earth generally taken out of a ditch or pit, and interrupted by numerous gates which may have been openings for the superfluous waters of the hill. Neither the small height of the earth wall, which is often not more than four or five feet above the level of the hill, nor these frequent breaks, allow the belief that any great reliance was placed upon this wall itself as a means of defense. Yet where the nature of the ground left a point in the circuit more than usually exposed, the mound is found to be considerably higher than the average. The entrance or entrances to these forts are often carefully and even singularly guarded by reëntering walls of earth, accompa nied by outworks, and outlying mounds answering perhaps for lookouts. The fort in Hamilton, Butler county, Ohio, has four gates: at three of them there are inner defenses calculated to expose the side of an enemy, and at the principal entrance there is quite a series of embankments dividing the passage, and forming a maze, like the labyrinths which children draw on their slates.

A very extensive work of this kind near Bourneville, Ross county, Ohio, may serve as a specimen of the whole genus, although differing from nearly all of them in the use of stone instead of earth. It lies on a hill nearly four hundred feet in height, which is formed by Paint Creek and two small tributaries. There are two feasible approaches to the plateau of the hill, from two opposite points, but the rest of the circuit of the walls is very difficult of access or else quite inaccessible. The area is very large, no less than one hundred and forty acres; and two large works lie in the neighborhood, at distances of two and five miles. In this case the wall is continuous except at three entrances and at an impregnable point, and consists of stones rudely placed together. Indeed so little does the wall present the appearance of human designs that our authors say "but for the amount of stones it might be taken for a natural feature,-the debris of the out-cropping sand strata. Such certainly is the first impression which it produces upon the visitor; an impression, which is speedily corrected upon reaching the points where the supposed line of

debris, rising upon the spurs, forms curved gateways and then resumes its course as before."

On the eastern side of the hill, where the summit is most easy of access, the wall resembles a loose heap of stones, of fifteen or twenty feet base, and from three to four feet in height. At the southern point of approach, where the wall is carried across a neck of lower land seven hundred feet in width, the stone work is the heaviest, "and although stones enough have been removed from it at that point to build a stout division wall between the lands of two proprietors, their removal is not discoverable.” There are three gateways in this neck, formed by the curving inwards of the wall for forty or fifty feet, and leaving passages between of not more than eight feet in width.

The wall of this fortification measures more than two miles and a quarter in length, and the quantity of stones is calculated by our authors to be great enough to form a wall eight feet broad and eight feet high. The spot is abundantly supplied with water, one depression of two acres containing enough for the wants of a thousand head of cattle.

The work known as "Fort Ancient," on the east bank of the little Miami, thirty-five miles above Cincinnati, and which was first described in print forty years ago, is constructed of earth, and has a circuit of between four and five miles. The embankment is in many places twenty feet high, without a ditch; the materials being obtained from a number of pits, which are still discoverable. Within this work is enclosed a very irregular piece of ground, consisting of two areas united by a natural isthmus of more than a thousand feet in length. The free passage through the isthmus was interrupted by an embankment carried across with the evident design of making two forts out of one. The average height of the embankment round the hill is ten feet, but it rises to twenty where the hill is connected by a narrow neck with the surrounding table-land. A little outside of the wall at this point, occur two mounds, and just beyond them two parallel walls of earth, one thousand three hundred and fifty feet in length, which unite together around a small mound. We only add that there are as many as seventy interruptions in the wall of circuit. of the fort, from ten to fifteen feet in width, which no one will suppose to be gateways, and which our authors account for on the hypothesis that they were once occupied by blockhouses of timber which have since decayed. :

A very large work in Ross county, Ohio, situated on the second terrace above the north fork of Paint Creek, is estimated to be surrounded by three miles of embankment, and to occupy an area of one hundred and eleven acres. On one side of this area a small stream, diverted from its original bed, was made to run just outside of the embankment, thus performing the office of the

ditch which can be traced around a considerable portion of the circumference. A part of the enclosing barrier consists of a wall of smooth stones from the creek cemented by tough clay. Within this area are two enclosures, the one a perfect circle three hundred and fity feet in diameter; and the other a semi-circle two thousand feet in circumference, containing seven closely contiguous mounds which have been explored with interesting results. From the area an opening in the wall leads to a perfect square, which measures eight hundred and fifty feet on each side.

These smaller enclosures, we may say here, were constructed for religious purposes; and from this circumstance, as well as from the not very strong position of the greater area, it may be argued that we have here the site of a little city, whose inhabitants, when exposed to attacks from an enemy, fled to one of the strong holds in the same valley, lying on the third terrace, where the wall of natural rock was far more to be relied upon than any superadded work. And perhaps the great area of some of these strongholds will justify the hypothesis that they were not so much citadels regularly garrisoned, as places of refuge to which a numerous population might retire, and obtain their subsistence from the soil, when the supplies carried with them should have been exhausted.

We pass on now to a second description of works, to which Messrs. Squier and Davis give the name of sacred enclosures. These likewise are very numerous: plans of nearly forty, principally within the sphere of their own explorations, are given in the volume before us. They differ from the works supposed to have a defensive character, in being smaller; in being often commanded by neighboring heights; in having the ditch, if it occurs at all, inside rather than outside of the embankment; in the greater frequency of accompanying mounds, which as will be seen must have been used for sacrificial purposes; in the regularity of their forms; and in the complication of works connected with one another. The height of the embankments at present generally falls between four and nine feet. The mounds rise sometimes to the height of thirty. As for the forms of these enclosures, it may be said in general that they are circles connected by a shorter or longer passage with squares, or octagons, and surrounded by separate smaller figures. The authors speak of the squares and circles, as surprisingly regular; so much so that no means which we possess could make them come much nearer to geometrical accuracy. Several of the circles, in different spots, have a diameter of one thousand and fifty feet, and five or six of the squares have sides of one thousand and eighty feet: probably some venerated primitive model gave law to succeeding enclosures. The parallel embankments affording communication from one such figure to another, or, it may be,