Part 1

THE ORIGIN

OF THE

_MOUND BUILDERS_

A THESIS

BY

ALFRED O. COFFIN, M.A.,

Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, Rodney, Mississippi.

1889.

CINCINNATI, OHIO: Elm Street Printing Company, No. 176 Elm Street, 1889.

THE ORIGIN of the MOUND-BUILDERS.

I. The Mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley. ──────

“To ask or search, I blame thee not; for heaven Is as the book of God before thee set, Wherein to read his wondrous works.”

Let any traveler start from Wisconsin and traverse the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, and cross the country from the Alleghenies to the Western Plateau, and throughout his course he will find thousands of mounds of earth with a conical or pyramidal apex, and containing within their interior relics of human remains and inventions.

When a traveler asks the origin and reasons of these mounds, he is almost invariably met with the enigmatical answer, “Indian mounds.” They were not made by the Indians whom Columbus found on this continent; in fact, their origin was unknown to the Red Man, since they found them here, and they looked as recent to the first European adventurers, 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 stupendous magnificence of the Mound-builders’ rude art, in crowning a beautiful hill with a throne for their Chieftain, or perhaps a temple to their god of nature, or possibly a sacrificial altar, on which to shed human blood to appease an irate divinity, or to dedicate the triumphal march of a conquering hero. Since a man, I have wandered among the thousands of mounds, from the Great Lakes to the Mexican Gulf, and have pondered among the unclassified tumuli on the plains of Texas that stretch away toward the Rio Grande, and have wondered if these are the watch-towers of a gigantic antediluvian prairie-dog contemporaneous with the _Deinosaurs_, or if they are the mute landmarks of a mysterious people who trafficked here while Cheops was building on the Nile. While modern science is endeavoring to classify the ethnic relations of the Mound-builders, it is also aware that that hypothesis alone will have credence, that accords best with the cumulative evidence of those most infallible guides, comparative craniology and philology.

The science of craniology recognizes three, and sometimes four, kinds of skulls, determined by the ratio of length to the breadth; that is, the length of any skull being represented by 100, the “cephalic index” is the proportion of this 100 covered by the breadth. Skulls with a cephalic index between 74 and 78 are said to be _mesocephalic_, because this is the average of mankind. If the index is above 78, they are said to be _brachycephalic_; if below 74, they are _dolichocephalic_, or long-headed. The _dolichocephalic_, according to Prof. Retzius, are found in the eastern part of this continent, from Labrador through the Antilles to Paraguay. The _brachycephali_, or short heads, are found in the West, from Behring’s Strait, through Oregon and California, Mexico, Central America and Chili, to Terra del Fuego. It must be remembered that the terms “brachycephalic” and “dolichocephalic” are not absolute, but only relative as to length and breadth, for a dolichocephalic cranium may be actually shorter than a brachycephalic one.

The Caribs, who inhabit the shores of the Caribbean Sea, are a nautical people, who conquered the Antilles, as is attested by their war implements being found there, and entered North America by the southeast, and spread north to Canada, giving rise to the red Indian, whose dolichocephalic skulls and roving habits agree precisely with the Caribs of Venezuela. The brachycephalic type is supposed to have entered America by Behring’s Strait, giving rise to the Aleutians and Esquimaux, and passing through Washington Territory and California has characterized the Hualpa Indians of the latter, and the semi-civilized cliff-dwellers of Colorado and Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. The high degree of civilization which Cortez found in Mexico, the unnumbered temples of the Montezumas, the splendor of Toltec civilization, the paved roads of Peru, and the gilded palaces of the sun-worshipers of Lake Titicaca, all show that the brachycephalic civilization of the Pacific Slope was as distinct from the culture of the hunting tribes of the Atlantic, as though separated by an ocean. In the Chicago Academy of Science are a number of Mound-builders’ skulls, taken from mounds in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois. There are no other skulls of any other race in this country like them—with scarcely any forehead whatever, but with a sudden slope from the superciliary ridges backward. These skulls are neither dolichocephalic nor brachycephalic; therefore we can neither look to the ancestry of the Red Men, nor to the Asiatic type, for the progenitors of the Mound-builders, who may justly be considered the autochthones of America.

Before attempting to account for the presence of the Mound-builders in the Mississippi Valley, we will describe a few of their mounds, the only history they have left us.

These mounds are divided into three classes, according to their use. The most northern remains of the Mound-builders yet discovered are on the southern shore of Lake Superior, and in the valley of the Wisconsin River. All of these mounds are representations of animals on a gigantic scale—hence we will call them _effigy_ mounds—and seem to represent their religious rites. No other mounds are found here, which was not a place of residence, and this character of mound is not found elsewhere except the great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio. Around Chicago the mounds are not more than twelve feet high, but in Iowa they were so plentiful that the French named the river in that State “Des Moines,” which means “the mounds.” Where St. Louis stands was once so thickly studded with mounds, that the city has been called “The Mound City.” In the State of Mississippi the largest river was so thickly strewn with these prehistoric ruins that the Choctaws called it “_Yazoo-okhinnah_”—“The River of Ancient Ruins.” In Illinois the mounds are oblong, square, ellipsoidal and conical. Cahokia, the largest mound in the United States, stood here. It formed a parallelogram with sides respectively seven hundred and five hundred feet long and ninety feet high, and covered fifteen acres—larger than the largest pyramid in Egypt. On the top of this mound was probably a temple, for many bones and funeral vases were taken from the interior; so we call this a _temple_ mound. The banks of the Ohio, Scioto, Wabash and Muskingum are so thickly covered with mounds and tumuli, that Squier and Davis estimate that Ohio alone contains ten thousand, and plainly indicate that this was the capital of the Mound-builders’ empire. A number of these are conical mounds, and the bones and charcoal indicate that they were _sacrificial_ mounds. Near Newark, Ohio, occur the most stupendous of the Mound-builders’ works, covering two square miles, and containing walls, pyramids, circles and turrets, which in our day, with machinery and horse-power, would require many thousand men many months to perform.

One of the wonders of the world is the great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, which stamps the religious character of the vanished race. The total length of the serpent is fourteen hundred and fifteen feet, and the distance between the jaws one hundred feet. It lies on the crest of a hill, and its folds correspond with the windings of the hill. Is this serpent an emblem of the one that plays such a part in the mythology of the old world? “This symbol prevails in Egypt, Greece, Assyria, and among the superstitions of the Celts, Hindoos and Chinese. Wherever native religions have had their scope, this symbol is sure to appear.”

On the Ohio River, twelve miles from Wheeling, in West Virginia, stands the Grave Creek Mound, seventy feet high and a thousand feet in circumference. This was a _signal_ mound, from the summit of which signal fires could be seen far down the valley, and others transmitted the message in like manner, till it reached Cahokia on the Mississippi.

The growth of civilization has always been along the courses of great rivers—the Nile, Euphrates, Ganges, Hoangho, Danube, the Mississippi and Ohio. The Mound-builders were an agricultural people, for maize has been found in the mounds, and nowhere do we find the mounds where maize will not grow. Where the population of the United States is growing densest every year, there, too, the Mound-builders reached their acme, showing that what we consider natural advantages so did they. Ohio, the second State in the Union, was likewise their capital, with its ten thousand mounds to-day marking the spot where flourished their vanished cities.

They were an agricultural people, because no other occupation could have supported so vast a concourse of people. Their government was despotic; for when we consider that they had no metallic tools or beasts of burden, but that these mounds were raised by earth scraped from the surface and carried up in baskets, we are bound to conclude that these mounds are the work of slaves; for, studying the history of Egypt, we know that no wealth or power on earth could have erected these pyramids by freemen working in competition for freemen’s wages.

Two thousand men were employed three years in carrying a stone from Elephantis to Sais, and the building of one pyramid required the labor of three hundred and sixty thousand men for twenty years.

They understood political economy and the division of labor; else so many men could not have been fed, while their labor was withdrawn from production and locked up in this yearly labor, unless there was a powerful reserve force like Joseph to store the granaries in time of plenty.

They were a commercial people; for in these mounds we find copper from Lake Superior, shells from the Mexican Gulf, mica from the Alleghenies, iron pyrites from Missouri and obsidian from Mexico.

They were an inventive people; for we find specimens of cloth, woven from a vegetable fibre, in several different patterns; and they were not warlike, for most of the instruments taken from the mounds are of agricultural pattern. They were not of the same stock as the red Indian, because the Indian, even in the nineteenth century, is still in the Stone Age, roving in feral tribes, and starving to death annually rather than taint his inherited dignity by manual labor. The Indian’s implements are of flint, and _always_ on the surface of the ground. The Mound-builder’s implements are of argillite, and found _beneath_ the surface and gravel. The Indian’s habitation is never durable enough to be traced by his succeeding progeny, while the Mound-builder has left his mark which ten thousand years will but intensify.

The Mound-builders can not be identified with the Pueblo Indians, because the pottery of the Puebloes is corrugated and indented, and _never_ has the semblance of any animal form whatever; while that of the Mound-builders is striated, and eminently characterized by animal forms and statuettes of the human form divine. They can not be classed with the Esquimaux, because the Esquimaux are a strictly Orarian people, and we have no evidence of their ever having been aught else.

“The brain is the seat of mental activity, and we place the seat of the intellectual faculties in the anterior lobe; of the propensities which link us to the brute, in the middle lobe; and of those which appertain to the social affections, in the posterior lobe. The predominance of any one of these divisions in a people would stamp them as either eminently intellectual, eminently cruel, or eminently social.” From an examination of the few authentic skulls of the Mound-builders, we are confident that these people were neither eminent for great virtues nor great vices, but were a mild, inoffensive race, who would fall an easy prey to a crafty and cruel foe. The Mound-builders entered the Mississippi Valley by way of Mexico, being drawn thither by the superior attraction of the soil and climate of our river terraces and bottoms, and they remained here until crowded out by the savage hunting tribes of red Indians, when they retraced their steps to Mexico and developed that higher intellectual and architectural skill which we will now consider.

And now, having hastily glanced at a very few of the tens of thousands of mounds familiar to every inhabitant of the Mississippi Valley, we will follow the trail of the Mound-builders as evinced by their works, through Phillips County, Arkansas, four miles from Helena, thence to Red River, where they disappear.

Taking up the trail again at the Hollywood plantation, near Saint Joseph, Louisiana, in Tensas Parish, we find ten mounds in a circle facing the temple. A few miles southward, facing Natchez, in Catahoula Parish, is another group. Crossing Louisiana, we enter Texas, and from the Trinity to the Colorado River there are millions of mounds, all of a conical form, that have baffled ethnologists for the last fifty years. They are from one to five feet in height, and from thirty to one hundred and forty feet in diameter. All scientists who have examined them have pronounced them the “inexplicable mounds.” During the summer of ’87 and ’88 I have traveled for days among the same mysterious mounds in Texas, stretching in an unbroken line toward the Rio Grande, and have pronounced them “landmarks” that indicated the line of departure of the Mound-builders, in their migration across the treeless prairies.

This conclusion brings us to consider the Mound-builders after the migration, in their new home.

II. The Mound-builders in Mexico. ──────

“Nations melt From Power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt The sunlight for a while, and downwards go.”

We know that the Mound-builders had a knowledge of Mexico before their southwestern migration, because obsidian was found in their mounds, and this mineral is found only in Mexico.

No links are so conclusive in connecting the Mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley with those of Mexico, as the truncated, pyramidal mounds. True to the historical traditions that all great centers of civilization have been along the great river basins, we would naturally turn to the water-courses of Mexico to resume the trend of our narrative, and we are not disappointed.

On the Panuca River, near the Gulf of Tampico, Mr. Norman found twenty-five mounds, some of them covering two acres, and built of earth as those in the Mississippi Valley, though some were faced with stones. According to the Smithsonian Report of 1873, across the river from Vera Cruz occurs a locality of mounds covering three square leagues. The pyramids of Papantla and Tuscapan are of solid masonry with steps on the outside. The pyramid of Cholula is truncated, its base being one thousand four hundred and twenty-three feet long, covering forty-four acres. Its perpendicular height is one hundred and seventy-two feet, and its truncated summit contains more than one acre; this was the Mecca of the valley of Anahuac. The hanging gardens of Tezcuco had a summit reached by five hundred and twenty steps and crowned by a fountain. Nezahualeoyotl built a pyramidal temple nine stories high, dedicated to “The Unknown God, the Cause of Causes.” In the ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca, Guingola, and numerous others, we have numerous ruins of different construction; but to say that they are the works of different races of people is saying too much. All the inhabitants of Nahuac were kindred tribes, and spoke the Nahuatl language, though entering the valley at different times in different clans. Winchell states that the Mongoloids entered North America by Behring’s Strait and spread east and southward; that the beginning of this wave is lost in obscurity, but in due succession the Nahuas moved forward. The Toltecs followed and crowded the Nahuas through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec into Yucatan and Central America. The Astecs followed the Toltecs in occupancy. While the Astecs crowded on the Toltecs, these pushed farther the Nahuas, and the Nahuas pressed on the rear of their unknown and mysterious predecessors, and so forth to the borders of Chili. Also another branch of Mongoloids entered South America by the Polynesian route, crossed the Andes, ascended the Atlantic Slope to the Caribbean Sea, crossed to the Antilles and entered North America by the Tortugas and Florida, ascended the Atlantic Slope and began war on the peaceful inhabitants of the Pacific Slope, when the white man arrived and interrupted this symmetrical rotation and sequence of invasion. I beg leave differ with regard to a part of this plan, on grounds adduced further on.

The Toltec clan was among the first to enter the Valley of Mexico or Nahua, followed by the Chichimecs, who were succeeded by the seven clans or tribes who dwelt in the valley at the same time, and who probably are connected with “the seven mysterious cities of Cibola” in New Mexico.

These tribes were the Xochimilcos, Cholcos, Tepanecos, Acolhuas, Tezcucans, Tlascaltecas and Astecs. For political strength the Astecs, Tezcucans and Tlascans formed a triumvirate, and each had their capital city, viz.: Tezcuco, Tlasca, and Tenochtitlan. The Astec clan in its peregrinations had kept the name _Astec_, in honor of their ancient home, _Aztlan_ or _Atlantis_, but their priest, Aacatl, decreed that they should be called _Mexicatls_, in honor of their war god, _Mexitli_, because he had enabled them to conquer their brethren.

In the midst of the beautiful Lake Tezcuco, on an island, they built their national capital, Tenochtitlan, which the Spaniards called “the most beautiful spot on earth.” Cortez destroyed this beautiful city and built the modern city of Mexico on its ruins. It was here that the ill-starred “Moteuczoma”—whom the Spaniards have misspelled Montezuma—poured the wealth of his kingdom into the coffers of Cortez, and in return suffered the most humiliating degradation and death recorded on the pages of history.

Tenochtitlan was a great city. Two thousand temples, one hundred palaces and a thousand sumptuous dwellings have melted before the desecrating Spaniards as a mirage before a thirsty traveler.

The priests, in their too zealous zeal to uproot polytheism, wreaked their holy vengeance upon temples and idols; and history can produce no parallel to the vandalism that would sack the temples of all the written documents and ideographic paintings and make a bonfire of them on the public plaza, on the plea that they were from the devil!

The zenith of New World civilization became a setting sun before a savage Christianity. The path of the Christian became a sirocco, the garden spot of the world became a holocaust.

Tenochtitlan, the city of palaces, the capital of the Valley of Anahuac, was razed to the ground, and the testimony of a thousand years of civilization was as completely lost to the modern world as the buried island of Atlantis, and by a Christian nation!

It matters little with which particular tribe of Anahuac the Mound-builders have become identified, since all the Nahuatl tribes were Mound-builders, and were forging a high civilization out of Nature herself.

The differentiation of the Mound-builders’ intellectuality, the gradual increments of their power of specialization, would naturally improve an earth mound by facing it with stone, and in turn to build it entirely of stone, and finally truncate a solid pyramid, crown its top with a palace or a temple, and its terraces with fountains and hanging gardens. It is but natural that the pottery of the Ohio mounds, with their rude images of animals and things, would suggest the association of several such images to record a thought, and, as civilization advanced, to resolve itself into the curious hieroglyphics of the Astecs. The effigy mounds of Wisconsin were but an inherent impulse to perpetuate their symbols of worship upon the most lasting monuments known to their rude art—earth mounds. What could be more natural than that, as soon as stone temples took the place of earth mounds, they should emblazon those same symbols on the lasting rock? That same perseverance that could raise Cahokia and Grave Creek Mound has intensified itself in chiseling beautiful facades and frescoes out of solid porphyry, with no other tools than obsidian chisels. The bas-reliefs are as delicate as those cut by steel, and the paintings on the temples of Mexico of human faces, are as identical with the shape of the skulls in the museum in Chicago, with their retreating foreheads and prominent superciliary ridges, as a painting can be like a skull.

The laws of the Astecs were written in blood by a Draco, and a historian who misrepresented facts was punished with death. Accepting the above as proof evident that the paintings are correct, the large nose of the statues will forever contradict the alliance of the Astecs or Mound-builders with the Mongoloids. Hereafter we shall use the word Mound-builders as a synonym for Astecs, since we believe we have established sufficiently the analogy.

You ask, Then why have not the records of the Astecs preserved their early history in the Mississippi Valley? Such in all probability was the case, but the Spaniards burned every record they could find, and whatever history we have is fragmentary, and only such as escaped the diligence of the priests. We may marvel at first that the cupidity of the Spaniards should thus outweigh every other consideration of right and justice, but we must consider that this was the age of chivalry, just succeeding the Crusades, when all Europe turned knight-errants and went to war against the Saracens of Asia. It was the war of the Cross against the Crescent, when each Christian thought it his duty to kill a Turk, in order to plant the Cross in heathen lands.

This fever struck chivalrous Spain, and no leader could have been found more imbued with the spirit than Hernando Cortez, and it was with this spirit that he entered Mexico—to win gold for his crown and the country for his church. Iconoclasm was his creed, gold his desire, and fire and the sword his argument. When he entered the sanctuaries of their temples, and offered the sacerdotal official the image of the Virgin, in an unknown tongue, as a substitute for their tutelary divinities, on their inability to comprehend his motives, he invariably overturned their altars, broke their idols, and, with the assumption of a man ordained by Jehovah, invoked the saints to let them be anathema maranatha. No cataclysm of nature since the destruction of Atlantis has been so blighting to the growth of a nation, or so completely annihilating to their past history, as the Spanish Conquest of the New World.

Tenochtitlan, the mistress who demanded tribute of all Mexico, has vanished, and the Modern Mexico, phœnix-like, soars aloft with outstretched wings, and hovers over the earth with her music, then sinks with the last sad notes of the dying swan, to immolate herself, that she may rise from her ashes, to rise higher and sing clearer.