Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

The plan of the "Battle of the Horse Shoe," where the Creeks, protected by breast works, fought General Andrew Jackson in 1814, indicates that these Indians possessed considerable knowledge of military defensive works. The original sketch drawn by the General is appended to his interesting report of the battle, made to Governor Blount of Tennessee.*

General Jackson states in his Report that "Nature furnishes few situations so eligible for defense, and barbarians never rendered one more secure by art. Across the neck of land which leads into it from the north, they had erected a breastwork of great compactness and strength,

[ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

from five to eight feet high, and prepared with double rows of portholes very artfully arranged. The figure of this wall manifested no less skill in the projectors of it than its construction. An army could not approach it without being exposed to a double and cross fire from the enemy who lay in security behind it." Surely no prehistoric defensive work could receive a higher compliment from higher military authority!

These instances have been selected to show the knowledge of military defensive works possessed by the modern Indians. This knowledge was not inferior to that of the so-called mound builders. That the works of the

* Traced by the writer from the original report in the possession of the Tennessee Historical Society at Nashville.

latter surpassed in magnitude all modern native earthworks does not necessarily indicate a higher order of intelligence, nor is there any deep mystery in their larger proportions.

There is, indeed, a striking similarity in all these native works of defense, whether ancient or modern. I have visited a number of the great mounds of the Ohio valley. They are remarkable structures-monuments of labor and patience.

Imagine a thousand Indians-women and children-men, also—with

[blocks in formation]

baskets of willow and skins, bearing on heads and shoulders the alluvial soil from the river side, to raise a mighty memorial to some great warrior, or to build a strong defensive work as a protection against a dreaded enemy, or a towering home for an honored chief, and it will not be difficult to account for most of these large earthworks.

I have seen the busy throng of a hundred or more Italian women and boys with baskets removing the earth that covered ancient Pompeii. The ashes of Vesuvius, nearly nineteen centuries old, buried the city twenty feet deep; yet about one-half of the entire city has been uncovered and laid bare to the eyes of the travelers. Less than a tithe of this vast labor

of removal would have erected the largest purely artificial mound in the Mississippi Valley.

The highest of the great mounds of America, at Cahokia, Illinois, is but one-fifth of the height of the solid stone pyramid of Gizeh on the banks of the Nile; and how insignificant does the largest system of native American earthworks appear, when compared with a work of antiquity like the Chinese Wall, built long prior to the Christian era!

There is an interesting ancient work near Manchester, Tennessee, called the "Stone Fort." It differs from the other aboriginal defensive works in Tennessee, in its partial construction of stone, yet upon examination we find there is no masonry in it, no wall of stone. Large stones from the adjacent river were used with the earth in building in. Its position is well selected for defense, but it shows no greater skill in engineering than other Indian earthworks. It is similar in construction to a number of works

in the Ohio valley.*

INDIAN AGRICULTURE

The large population necessary to have enabled the ancient tribes of our great river valleys to construct these works, has been given as a reason why they should not be attributed to the ancestors of the red Indians. It is argued that such population could only have been supported by a race devoted mainly to agriculture. It seems to have been presumed that the modern Indians knew little or nothing of the cultivation of land as a means of living, yet we find upon investigation that all the historic tribes were more or less devoted to agricultural pursuits. The Southern Indians, the Iroquois, the Ohio and Illinois tribes cultivated immense fields of maize or corn, especially during periods of repose and freedom from wars. The Choctaws, in their ancient home east of the Mississippi River, were called "a nation of farmers."

Adair mentions a maize field of the Catawbas of South Carolina "seven leagues long," a field that would do credit to the prairie-farms of the West. Think of cultivating such a field with the rude wood and stone implements of the Indians!

The Plymouth Fathers were taught the art of planting and raising corn by the Indians. Drake tells us that King Philip, the great chief of the Pequots, "had a thousand acres of corn at Mount Hope."

Henry Hudson, who sailed up the Hudson River in 1609, writes that he "found dried corn and beans enough in and about one house on the bank of the river to load three ships, besides what was growing in the field.”

* Slightly changed from plan in " Antiquities of Tennessee," Jones, p. 100.

General Anthony Wayne reported that he never saw such large maize fields as the Miami Indians cultivated.

The granaries and caches of the natives furnished the soldiers and horses of De Soto their main supplies.*

In his expedition against the Cherokees in 1779 General Shelby is said to have destroyed more than 20,000 bushels of corn. Hawkins tells us that to constitute a legal marriage among the Muskogees [Creeks] the man “must build a house, make his crop, and gather it in; then make his hunt and bring home the meat; that when all was put in possession of the wife, the ceremony was ended and the woman bound, and not till then.”

What better proof do we need of the ability of the Southern Indian to support himself by agriculture than the progress made by the tribes removed to the Indian Territory?

The Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, have not only become "a nation of farmers," but are far advanced on the march toward civilization.

Hominy, succotash and mush were evidently included in the regular aboriginal menu.

Those instances of Indian success in agriculture might be multiplied indefinitely. †

They clearly establish the fact that the advanced tribes of historic Indians had the ability to support the population necessary to the erection of even the greatest mounds.

MOUNDS OF RECENT DATE

We have, however, direct testimony that some of these mounds, long regarded as the exclusive work of an ancient and more civilized race, have been built by modern Indians since the period of European discovery.

There are a number of instances, well authenticated, where articles certainly of modern European manufacture and origin, have been found in mounds, undistinguishable in general character from more ancient mounds.

Col. C. C. Jones, in his "Antiquities of the Southern Indians," + reports at least one absolutely certain instance where "a portion of a rusty oldfashioned sword," evidently of European manufacture, was found in a

Hist. Col. La., Part 5, page 203.

This subject is considered at length and with much force by Mr. Lucius Carr in Mounds of Mississippi Valley," page 7.

"Antiquities of the Southern Indians," page 131.

mound with decayed bones of a skeleton alongside of pottery, and a stone cell. Atwater, a well-known archæologist, tells us of his discovery in an Ohio mound of articles of silver and iron of modern European origin.

Prof. F. W. Putnam, in the 14th annual publication of the Peabody Museum, reports the discovery by Dr. Mack, in Florida, of glass beads and ornaments of silver, brass and iron, deeply imbedded and associated with pottery and stone implements of native manufacture, all found in a burial mound, and furnishing conclusive evidence that the Indians of Florida continued to build mounds over their dead after contact with the Europeans.

The National Bureau of Ethnology also reports in detail similar discoveries in a number of mound explorations in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Illinois and Arkansas.*

It has thus become a well-settled fact in American archæology, that modern tribes of Indians have to some extent been builders of mounds within the historic period, and that it is not necessary to attribute our ancient remains in Tennessee to any other or more civilized race than the ancestors of our Southern Indians.

ART IN ANCIENT TENNESSEE

Passing from the mounds and earthworks to a consideration of the manufactured articles or antiquities, images, implements, pottery, pipes, tablets and pictographs of the ancient inhabitants of Tennessee or the Mississippi valley as a test of their civilization or development, we find an interesting field of inquiry.

The result may be summed up under two heads:

First. Nothing has been found in mound or grave or elsewhere in Tennessee or the Mississippi valley, showing an advanced state of civilization or semi-civilization. No article has been found requiring in its manufacture skill or intelligence beyond the capacity of the best representative tribes of modern Indians.

Second. No antiquarian or archæologist can distinguish the implements, pottery, pipes or inscriptions of the mound-building people from the same general character of articles manufactured by the more advanced tribes of modern Indians within the historic period.

It seems strange that among the vast stores of material discovered in these mounds, graves and ancient habitations, no single article has been * Report Burcau Ethnology, 1882-83, page xxxii.

« AnteriorContinuar »