CHAPTER XI.

SEPULCHRAL MOUNDS.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION—HILL MOUNDS—THE SCIOTO MOUND—THE TAYLOR MOUND—THE ISSAQUINA MOUND—THE ELLIOT MOUND—THE LOCKPORT MOUND —BLACK BIRD’S GRAVE—SCIOTO VALLEY MOUNDS—SYMBOLICAL RITES— HUMAN SACRIFICES—THE GRAVE CREEK MOUND—COMMON SEPULCHRES— CREMATION—SCIOTO MOUND CRANIUM—SACRED FESTIVALS.

When the significance of the military and sacred enclosures of the Mound-Builders has been fully estimated as memorials of a remarkable people belonging altogether to prehistoric ages of the New World, their sepulchral mounds acquire a new value. In the former we see unmistakable indications of a settled condition of society greatly in advance of anything attained by the Red Indian, and of populous communities devoted to agriculture and other industrial arts. From the latter we may hope to recover some traits of ethnical character; to find in the gifts to the dead illustrations of their arts and customs; and to catch by means of their sepulchral rites some glimpses of the nature of that belief which stimulated the Mound-Builders to the laborious construction of so many sacred earthworks. Their great mounds are for us not merely the sepulchres of an ancient race; they are the cemetery of an early though partial civilisation, from whence we may derive illustrations of the life, manners, and ideas of a people over whose graves the forest had so long resumed its sway, that it seemed to the Red Indians’ supplanters to have been the first occupant of the soil.

Barrows, dunes, moat-hills, cairns, and earth or stone mounds of various kinds, abound in many parts of the Old as well as of the New World, and are nowhere more abundant than in some districts of the British Isles. But although corresponding primitive structures are met with from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the Isthmus of Panama, and beyond it, far into the southern continent: nevertheless the works of the Mound-Builders have a character of their own altogether peculiar; and though numbered by thousands, they are limited to well-defined areas, leaving a large portion of the continent, including the whole of the Atlantic sea-board, without any traces of their presence. The Mound-Builders were not a maritime people. Their whole traffic was confined to the great rivers, along the banks of which their ancient traces abound, and to communication by long-obliterated overland routes of travel. Notwithstanding the careful observations which have been put on record relative to the mounds and earthworks of “The West,” much yet remains to be disclosed; for, happily, the excavation of such earth-pyramids is a work greatly too laborious and costly to tempt those who are influenced by mere idle curiosity; while their contents, however valuable to the archæologist, offer no such stimulus to cupidity as, in Mexico and Peru, has led to the destruction of thousands of the memorials of extinct arts and customs.

As a general rule, the earth and stone works appear to have been alike constructed of materials derived from the immediate neighbourhood; so that such differences do not, in the majority of instances, supply any indication of diversity in the enclosed deposits. A special character, however, appears to pertain to one class, designated “Hill Mounds,” from the sites they occupy. Of these Mr. Squier remarks: “The most elevated and commanding positions are frequently crowned with them, suggesting at once the purposes to which some of the mounds or cairns of the ancient Celts were applied: that of signal or alarm posts. It is not unusual to find detached mounds among the hills back from the valleys, and in secluded places, with no other monuments near. The hunter often encounters them in the depths of the forests when least expected: perhaps overlooking some waterfall, or placed in some narrow valley where the foot of man seldom enters.” Similar structures crown many western heights; but some at least are of Indian origin; and our knowledge of the characteristics and contents of those of an earlier race must be greatly extended, before we can assign the true and probably varied objects aimed at in their erection.

But it is to the exploration of one of the smaller hill-mounds that we owe the recovery of the most characteristic illustration of the physical type of the ancient Mound-Builders. The “Scioto Mound Cranium,” described in a later chapter, was obtained from a mound erected on the summit of a commanding height overlooking the valley of the Scioto, with its numerous earthworks. A conical knoll, crowning the hill, rises with such regularity as almost to induce the belief that it is artificial; and on its apex stands the tumulus overshadowed by the trees of the primitive forest. Here under a covering of tough yellow clay, impervious to moisture, a plate of mica rested on an inner cairn, composed chiefly of large rough stones; and within this, a compacted bed of carbonaceous matter contained the skull, with a few bones, and some shells of fresh-water molluscs, disposed irregularly round it. This, therefore, it will be seen, confirms the idea that cremation played an important part in the ancient sepulchral rites.

More recently Professor O. C. Marsh explored the Taylor Mound, another of the hill-mounds, about two and a half miles south of Newark. Apparently a cemetery had been excavated on the summit of the ridge, within which lay the remains of at least eight skeletons, chiefly of women and children, all huddled together, and some of them showing evidence of long exposure. Along with those were found nine lance or arrow-heads of flint, six small axes, one of them made of hematite, and the remainder of diorite or compact greenstone, a small wedge or hatchet of hematite, a flint chisel, a scraper, numerous implements of bone and horn, including needles, a spatula or modeller’s tool, and a whistle made from the tooth of a black bear. Above this ossuary a number of dead had been disposed: some of them evidently interred with care, others as if slaughtered and flung upon the heap of dead; while a mass of incinerated human remains left no doubt on the minds of the explorers that cremation had taken place directly over the dead, and before the regular interment was completed. Hence they were led to the conclusion that the funeral rites had probably included a suttee sacrifice.

Directly under the apex of the mound upwards of one hundred beads of native copper, intermingled with a few shell beads, lay in contact with portions of the cervical vertebræ of a young child, showing that they had been worn as a necklace. The shell beads are about half an inch long, and have been carefully polished. The copper beads are only half this length, and wrought with the hammer out of the native copper; but with so much skill, that in most of them it is difficult to detect the joining. Only two of the skulls were sufficiently preserved to indicate their true form. Both were small, and showed the vertical occiput and large parietal diameter, supposed to pertain to the Mound-Builders, but which are characteristic of many American crania.

The contents of the two hill-mounds are thus seen to differ widely; and so far furnish no clew to any special mode of burial or funeral ceremonies. But the interment of a detached skull, as shown in the Scioto Mound, is no solitary case. I was shown by Mr. L. M. Hosea, of Cincinnati, a large bowl-shaped vessel of steatite, capable of holding about two gallons, discovered by the blowing down of a tree which stood on the summit of a mound on the borders of Lincoln and Casey Counties, Kentucky. It had been inverted over a human skull, beside which lay a number of shell beads, and a quantity of mica. In the same mound was a large conch-shell, hollowed out, and filled with bone implements, including two large, well-finished whistles, several deers’ horn hammers, and about thirty bone pins and awls. A perforated copper plate, and some well-finished stone and flint implements, completed the contents of the mound. Unfortunately the skull was too much decayed to admit of preservation.

I am indebted to Mr. W. Marshall Anderson for some curious disclosures of the contents of another mound recently opened by him at Issaquina, Mississippi. The first remarkable discovery was the exposure of three skeletons disposed vertically, as if they had been buried with their heads above ground. On reaching the natural level, a heap of ashes, with numerous fragments of bone, showed where cremation had taken place. Over this were three skeletons disposed at length, side by side, with a drinking vessel and a wide-mouthed bowl of native pottery close to the head of each. Numerous implements, including tools of copper, well-finished celts of jasper and lignite, and a grotesque clay-pipe representing a human head with dog’s ears, and a frog’s mouth, lay alongside of them. But most noticeable of all was the discovery of two inverted bowls in the centre of the mound, underneath each of which lay a human skull. One of them is described by Mr. Anderson as “a beautiful skull, worthy of a Greek.” But on being exposed to the sun, as they dried, they crumbled to ashes, “literally,” as he says, “disintegrating before my eyes, whilst I was busy gathering up copper and stone implements which would have waited for ever unharmed.”

The only skeletons exposed in the Evans Mound,—a large mound, near Newark, Ohio, at the opening of which I was present, were in a similar condition of extreme decay. Among the contents of the Taylor Mound, in the same locality, the curious fact was communicated to me, that the fractured quarter of a nearly spherical mass of hematite was found, which at the time attracted less notice than a well-finished wedge and hatchet of the same material. But on subsequently opening the Elliot and Wilson Mounds, situated about five miles apart, in the same valley, each of them was found to include among its contents a corresponding fragment of hematite, which on being placed in juxtaposition, proved to be portions of the same broken sphere, or nodule of hematite, valued in all probability for some wonder-working power. Meteoric stones and pieces of hematite have been repeatedly found in the Mounds; and were evidently objects of special regard. The Elliot Mound furnished another object of interest, in a pipe 7½ inches long, neatly carved in grey limestone, with the bowl finished in the form of a bear’s head. As shown in Fig. 72, it is of an unusual style of design.

The establishment of the village of Lockport, on the outskirts of Newark, and the more recent erection of extensive ironworks there, have swept away a curious group of mounds in that neighbourhood, including a truncated pyramid, the contents of which appear to have been of unusual interest. I examined in the collection of Mr. Wm. L. Merrin, a solid copper armlet, a pair of remarkable objects like double cymbals, a sheath subdivided into three tubes, supposed to be a quiver, a polished axe, and several perforated plates, all of copper; a perforated lead amulet, a polished chisel of diorite, numerous large shell beads, and large plates of mica cut into a horse-shoe shape: all of which were found at the base of the Lockport Mound, along with a number of skeletons. Subsequently other objects of interest, including a large, well-finished stone maul, of oval shape, with a deep groove round its centre, and a mass of pure lead weighing upwards of four pounds, have been found on its site, in opening up a road. But it is obvious that in this, as in so many other cases, we have to regret the destruction of a valuable memorial of the past, without any adequate record of its disclosures being preserved. Happily a more intelligent interest has now been awakened in the subject; the rarer objects of antiquity in stone and in metal are highly prized, and are therefore likely to be preserved as marketable articles even by those who can see in them no other value; and as each mound or earthwork discloses some novel feature, further research may be expected to add materially to our knowledge.

The remoter hill-mounds may reveal similar analogies in structure or contents to those of the plains; and so furnish evidence that the population which crowded the great centres, was diffused in smaller numbers, far inland from the river’s banks, in outlying valleys and among the secluded recesses of the hills. There, perhaps, as among the higher valleys of the Andes under the rule of the Incas, a pastoral people supplemented the agricultural industry of the central provinces, and shared with them the common rites and superstitions of the national religion.

In some cases the lofty site of the hill-mound may have determined its selection from the same motive which occasionally guides the modern Indian in his choice of a spot for his grave. Of this a striking illustration is furnished in the history of one modern tumulus on the Missouri. Upwards of half a century has elapsed since Black Bird, a famous chief of the Omahaws, visited the city of Washington, and when returning was seized with small-pox, of which he died on the way. When the chief found himself dying, he called his warriors around him, and, like Jacob of old, gave commands concerning his burial, which were as literally fulfilled. Dressed in his most sumptuous robes, and fully equipped with his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, he was borne about sixty miles below the Omahaw village, to one of the loftiest bluffs on the Missouri, which commands a magnificent extent of river and landscape. His favourite war-horse, a beautiful white steed, was led to the summit; and there, in presence of the whole nation, the dead chief was placed on its back, looking towards the river, where, as he had said, he could see the canoes of the white men as they traversed the broad waters of the Missouri. His bow was placed in his hand, his shield and quiver, with his pipe and medicine-bag, were hung by his side. A store of pemmican and a well-filled tobacco-pouch were supplied, to sustain him on the long journey to the hunting-grounds of the good Manitou, where the spirits of his fathers awaited his coming. The medicine-men of the tribe performed their most mystic charms to secure a happy passage to the land of the great departed; and all else being completed, each warrior of the chiefs own band covered the palm of his right hand with vermilion, and stamped its impress on the white sides of the devoted war-steed. This done, the Indians gathered turfs and soil, and placed them around its feet and legs. Gradually the pile rose with the combined labour of many willing hands, until the living steed and its dead rider were buried together under the memorial mound; and high over the crest of the lofty tumulus which covered the warrior’s eagle-plumes, a cedar post was reared to mark more clearly to the voyagers on the Missouri, the last resting-place of Black Bird, the great chief of the Omahaws.

One of the most striking evidences of the extent of occupation of the country, and the denseness of its ancient population, is furnished by a map in the _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, showing a section of twelve miles of the Scioto Valley. Square, circular, and polygonal enclosures, single and in groups, parallels, ditches, and mounds, occupy every available terrace along the banks of the Scioto River, and its tributary Paint Creek. A group of mounds in Ross county, Ohio, occupies the third terrace on the east side of the Scioto Valley, nearly a hundred feet above the river, and about equidistant from two remarkable sacred enclosures. The principal mound is twenty-two feet high; and on penetrating to its centre the traces of a rude sarcophagus of unhewn logs were indicated by the cast which still remained in the compacted earth. The bottom had been laid with matting or wood, the only remains of which were a whitish stratum of decomposed vegetable matter; and the timbers of the sarcophagus had in like manner decayed, and allowed the superincumbent earth to fall on the skeleton. Alongside of it were several hundred beads, made of the columellæ of marine shells and the tusks of some animal, several of them bearing marks which seemed to indicate that they were turned, instead of being carved, or ground into shape by the hand. They retained their position, forming a triple row, as originally strung round the neck of the dead; and, with the exception of a few laminæ of mica, were the only objects discovered in the grave. A layer of charcoal, about ten feet square, lay directly above the sarcophagus; and seemed, from the condition of the carbonised wood, to have been suddenly quenched by heaping the earth over it while still blazing.

Similar layers of charcoal constitute a noticeable feature in mounds of this class, and seem to indicate either that sacrifices were performed over the bier, or that funeral rites of some kind were celebrated, in which fire played an important part. On these funeral pyres probably many perishable articles were consumed; as the beds of charcoal are intermingled occasionally with fragments of bone, stone implements, and other evidences of sacrifices and tribute to the deceased. It is also apparent that the fire was kindled and allowed to blaze only for a limited time, when its flames were quenched by heaping the earth over the glowing embers; so that while charcoal occurs beneath as well as above the skeleton, the bones are unaffected by fire. The rite was practised where cremation was not followed; and may have been symbolical of the lamp of life quenched for ever in the grave. Implements, both of stone and metal, have been found in these grave-mounds, but for the most part their contents indicate a different condition of society and mode of thought from what Indian sepulture implies. Weapons are of rare and exceptional occurrence. The more common articles are personal ornaments, such as bracelets, perforated plates of copper, beads of bone, shell, or metal, and similar decorations worn on the body at the time of its interment. Among the objects which appear to have been purposely disposed around the dead, plates of mica occur most frequently. In some cases the skeleton has been found entirely covered with this material; and in others the laminæ have been cut into regular figures: disks, ovals, and symmetrical curves. As a general rule, however, it would appear that reverence for the dead was manifested in other ways than by depositing costly gifts in the grave; nor do the relics found indicate any belief akin to that which induces the modern Indian to lay beside his buried chief the arms and weapons of the chase, for use by him in the future hunting-grounds or on the war-path. In a few cases the simple sarcophagus has been constructed of stone instead of wood; in others the body appears to have been merely wrapped in bark or matting. In some of the Southern States both cremation and urn-burial seem to have been practised; but throughout the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries a nearly uniform system of sepulchral rites has been traced. These no doubt bore some important relation to the solemn religious observances indicated by other works of the same people; and as it is not in the sepulchral mounds, but in those which cover the “altars” on which the sacrificial fires of the ancient worshippers appear to have often blazed, that the greater number of their works of art, and even their implements and weapons have been found: it may be that there, rather than at the grave-mounds, they propitiated the manes of the dead, and sought by sacrifices of love and reverence to reach beyond this world to one unseen. Other indications, however, present analogies to the arrangements of cists and cinerary urns in ancient British tumuli, which suggest no less clearly the probability of human sacrifices, and a suttee self-immolation at the grave of the great chief, so congenial to the ideas of barbaric rank. Such cruel rites we know were practised among the Mexicans and Peruvians on the largest scale; wives, concubines, and attendants being immolated by the latter on the tomb of their deceased Inca, in some cases even to the number of thousands.

The Grave Creek Mound, at the junction of Grave Creek with the Ohio river, in the State of Virginia, commands, on various accounts, a prominent distinction among the sepulchral monuments of America. It occupies a site on an extensive plain in connection with works now much obliterated; but its own gigantic proportions bid effectual defiance to the operations which are rapidly erasing less salient records of the ancient occupants of the soil. In the year 1838, when various circumstances combined to direct an unusual degree of attention to American antiquities, Mr. Tomlinson, the proprietor of the land, had it explored at considerable cost. A shaft sunk from the top, and a tunnel carried to the centre, disclosed two sepulchral chambers, one at the base, and another thirty feet above. They had been constructed, as in other cases, of logs, which had decayed, and permitted the superincumbent earth, with stones placed immediately over them, to fall upon the skeletons. In the upper chamber a single skeleton was found in an advanced state of decay, whilst the lower one contained two skeletons, one of which was believed to be that of a female. Beside these lay between three and four thousand shell beads, a number of ornaments of mica, several bracelets of copper, and sundry relics of stone carving, referred to, along with works of art from other ancient mounds, in a future chapter. But among them was included an inscribed stone disc, which constitutes one of the marvels of American antiquities. On reaching the lower vault, after removing its contents, it was determined to enlarge it into a convenient chamber for visitors, and in doing so ten more skeletons were discovered, all in a sitting posture, but in too fragile a state to admit of preservation. The position of these immediately around the sepulchral chamber, in the very centre of the mound, precludes all idea of subsequent interment, and scarcely admits of any other mode of accounting for their presence than that which the human sacrifices both of ancient and modern American obsequies suggest.

A tumulus of the gigantic proportions of the Grave Creek Mound serves emphatically to impress the mind with the conviction that such structures, even when of smaller dimensions, were no accompaniments of common sepulture, but the special memorials of distinguished chiefs; or, it may be, at times, of venerated priests. Of the busy population that once thronged the valleys of the West we have no other memorials than those which commemorate the toil of many to give a deathless name to one now as nameless as themselves. The investigators of their works, after describing in detail the monumental mounds, remark: “The graves of the great mass of the ancient people who thronged our valleys, and the silent monuments of whose toil are seen on every hand, were not thus signalised. We scarcely know where to find them. Every day the plough uncovers crumbling remains, but they elicit no remark; are passed by, and forgotten. The wasting banks of our rivers occasionally display extensive cemeteries; but sufficient attention has never been bestowed upon them to enable us to speak with any degree of certainty of their date, or to distinguish whether they belonged to the Mound-Builders or a subsequent race. These cemeteries are often of such extent as to give a name to the locality in which they occur. Thus we hear, on the Wabash, of the ‘Big Bone Bank’ and the ‘Little Bone Bank,’ from which, it is represented, the river annually washes many human skeletons, accompanied by numerous and singular remains of art, among which are more particularly mentioned vases and other vessels of pottery, of remarkable and often fantastic form.”[87] I have been fortunate enough to obtain an interesting example of the latter class of pottery, from Big Bone Bank, figured on a subsequent page, which is specially valuable from the striking analogy it suggests to familiar forms of Peruvian pottery.

The Ohio and Erie canal traverses the river-terrace of the Scioto Valley in the vicinity of Chillicothe, where the ancient works of the Mound-Builders are more abundant than in any other area of equal limits hitherto explored. In some cases the canal has been cut through them, and it can scarcely admit of doubt that many interesting traces of the arts and habits of the remarkable people who once filled the long-deserted scene, must have been disclosed to heedless eyes. Here and there, doubtless, a stray relic was picked up, wondered at, and forgotten; but no note was taken of the circumstances under which it was found, and no record made of the discovery. And so must it ever be. The pioneers of civilisation in the uncleared wilds of the West are too entirely preoccupied with the present, to spare a thought for long forgotten centuries. Happily, however, this state of things is passing away, and every year shows increasing evidence of intelligent zeal in the recovery and preservation of whatever is calculated to throw light on the prehistoric ages of America.

The contents of the Scioto Valley Mound, as well as of others described above, prove that the human remains were deposited in them long after the body had gone to decay; and while numerous indications serve to show that cremation was extensively practised by the Mound-Builders, it is not improbable that a custom may have prevailed analogous to the modern Indians’ scaffolding and subsequent sepulture of the bones of their dead. The remains thus periodically gathered were sometimes deposited in a common ossuary, as in that of the Taylor Mound; and in other cases were burnt, with fitting rites, and their ashes heaped together, forming mounds, such as one opened on the bank of Walnut Creek, in the Scioto Valley. The principal portion of this consisted seemingly of long-exposed and highly-compacted ashes, intermingled with specks of charcoal, and small bits of burned bones. Beneath this was a small mound of very pure white clay, resting on the original soil, without any traces of the action of fire, over which the incinerated remains had been piled into a mound, nine feet in height by forty in base. The customs of the North American Indians, however, were very diverse; and among the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians inhumation, cremation, urn-burial, and mummification, accompanied with deposition in artificial vaults and in caves, were all practised. It need not therefore surprise us to find exceptions among the ancient Mound-Builders to any practice recognised as most prevalent among them. Considering the decayed state of most of the bones recovered from the great sepulchral mounds, where they were equally protected from external air and moisture: if the common dead were inhumed under the ordinary little grave-mound, their bones must, for the most part, have long since returned to dust. Nor must it be overlooked that the extremely comminuted state to which most of the skeletons in the larger mounds have been reduced, when brought to light by modern explorers, is due, in part at least, to the falling in of a superincumbent mass of earth and stones upon them, when the timber ceiling of their sarcophagus had sustained the weight long enough only to render them the less able to resist its crushing force. The perfect preservation of the “Scioto Mound cranium” was due to its being imbedded in charcoal, over which a superstructure of large stones enveloped with tough yellow clay had been piled, without any treacherous timber vaults. It lay in the centre of the carbonaceous deposit, resting on its face. The lower jaw was wanting, and only the clavicle, a few cervical vertebræ, and some of the bones of the feet were huddled around it. Unaccompanied though it was by any relics of art, it is, in itself, one of the most valuable objects hitherto recovered from the American mounds.

Such are some of the traces we are able to recover of the sepulchral rites of this people. In discussing the conclusions suggested alike by their disclosures, and by those which the sacrificial mounds, the sacred circumvallations, and the buried works of art reveal, we are dealing with characteristics of a race pertaining to periods long preceding any written history. For us these are their sole chronicles; and yet, even from such data, we are able to deduce some traits of moral and intellectual character. Perhaps the most important fact for our present purpose is the rarity of weapons of war among the sepulchral deposits. It accords with other indications of the condition of the Mound-Builders. They had passed beyond that rude stage of savage life in which war and the chase are the only honourable occupations of man. Their weapons of war, like their fortresses, were means for the defence of acquisitions they had learned to prize more highly. They had conquered the forests, and displaced the spoils of the hunter with the wealth of autumn’s harvestings; and with the habits of a settled agricultural people, many new ideas had taken the place of the wild imaginings and superstitions of the savage. As among all agricultural nations, the vernal and autumnal seasons doubtless had their appropriate festivals; and we can still, in imagination, reanimate their sacred enclosures and avenues with the joyous procession bearing its thank-offering of first-fruits, or laden with the last golden treasures of the harvest-home.

[87] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, p. 171.