A. The McConnel, or Rock Bluff Skull. From Brown County, Illinois. B. Indian Skull from a Mound near Alton, Ill., in the National Museum. conformation were unearthed, from the Stimpson and Kennicott mounds near Chicago, the Baehr mounds in Brown county, mounds near Alton, near Albany in Whiteside county, in Cass, Schuyler and Adams counties, and from many other localities in northwestern Illinois. So uniform were their shapes, measurements, cephalic index, etc., that all idea of freakish malformation was dispelled, and they were recognized as constituting a generic racial type. Concurrence of art motive, and cultural status, observed in certain artifacts of these primitive Illinois Indians and of those of the earliest mound builders of Ohio, the absence of temple mounds, similarity of mortuary customs, and identity of skeletal deficiencies, in both, tend to strengthen the supposition that they were contemporaneous and intercommunicant, and either cognate peoples, or derivatives of a common ancestral stock. Those pioneer Indians remained upon their preempted portion of Illinois a long time. How long? Then what caused their final departure, disappearance, or extinction? are questions unanswerable, riddles of the anthropologist and despair of the historian. They were perhaps gone when another tide of immigration from the south-Indians also, but of an advanced grade-came to Illinois by the same route, and chose the American Bottom for their dominion; and there in time erected the well known elaborate system of mounds. These new-comers were semi-sedentary, and agriculturists to a considerable extent, cultivating corn, cotton, tobacco, and beans, and had dogs, remote descendents of the domesticated wolf. Skilled and esthetic stone workers, they carved it in form of images, and moulded images of clay. They spun the cotton and wove it deftly; and their fictile wave was the acme of aboriginal pottery art. They were sun worshipers, and probably burned their dead, as no cemeteries of theirs have yet been discovered. The few of their remains recovered prove them to have exceeded the first Indians in stature, and in cranial and skeletal development. About the time the temple mound builders settled on Cahokia creek, or some time before, another swarm of Indians, from the south-or possibly they were a colony from the early occupants of Ohio-ascended the Wabash and its tributaries, and left their impress there in the form of ordinary sepulchral and memorial mounds, and the usual implements and imperishable residuum of the Stone Age. Time passed, and the great mounds on the American Bottom were old, grass-grown, and weather seamed,perhaps abandoned--, when a new element of population appeared there known as the Stone Grave Indians. Their route of migration from the parent hive in the Cumberland Valley of Tennessee, is readily traced by their mode of burial in stone-lined graves. The first objective point they sought in the new country north of the Ohio was the Saline Springs in Gallatin county. From there they wandered west to the Mississippi; thence, by slow stages, continued along its bluffs to the Falling Spring east of Cahokia. Abiding there awhile they left Illinois, crossing the great river, and disappeared in the wilds of Missouri. The only mounds they built were aggregations of stone cists, containing their dead, piled together in tiers on the ground and covered over with earth. They excelled all their kindred in the Mississippi Valley in the arts of domestic life, and particularly in sculpture, flint chipping, and pottery making. "Progress, on the whole," says Ex-President Roosevelt, "has been rhythmic, long periods of retrogression succeeding the periods when the world has gone forward." This is especially true so far as relates to the history of primitive American Indians. Beyond doubt the tendency of the race was, in the main, to a higher > The Outlook. New York. May 14th, 1911. 1 |