the Muskingum, being about three-fourths of a mile long by half a mile in width.

Upon this plain, in 1785, and for many years afterwards, were located a series of ancient works, consisting of two irregular squares, containing respectively fifty and twenty-seven acres area, in connection with a graded way, truncated pyramids, sundry other mounds, exterior embankments, and large artificial wells or reservoirs.

The Graded Way, or Via Sacra, was exterior to and disconnected from the major square and was six hundred and eighty feet long and one hundred and fifty feet in width, the bottom of which was regularly, finished by a crown form of construction. This ancient way was covered by exterior lines of embankment seven feet in height above the adjacent surface. The depth of the excavation near the square was eight feet, but gradually deepened towards the farther extremity where it reached eighteen feet on the interior,—the average depth of the avenue being about ten feet.

The largest of the truncated mounds was one hundred and twenty feet by one hundred and ninety-five feet, and twelve in height, while the second is one hundred and fifty feet long, by one hundred and thirty-five in breadth and eight in height. The conical mound, when first measured was thirty feet in height, with a diameter at the base of one hundred and thirty feet. This mound is surrounded by a ditch five hundred and ninety feet in circumference. On the exterior of this ditch was a wall four feet in height. It will be noticed that in Fig. 8 Colonel Whittlesey gives a single embankment between the circle and the lesser square. I examined the structure in 1882 and noticed the double wall, with slight depression between them, as given in Fig. 10.

Partly enclosed by an exterior wall, the lesser square and the conical mound was a well fifty feet deep and between sixty and eighty feet in diameter at the top.

From the general study of these and other ancient remains of the Ohio valley, we may obtain the following results:

That it was the same race who built the mural structures and great mounds.

The extent of teritory covered by this people prove them to have been very numerous.

The people had arrived at a considerable degree of civilization and had made great progress in the arts.

The builders were skilled in the art of fortification and the construction of regular geometrical works.

The ancient remains show an antiquity long ante-dating the advent of the white man.

The crania, from the mounds, indicate that the people belonged to the great divisions, denominated by Cuvier, the "American Family." The ancient structures prove they were greatly removed from the wild tribes that inhabited the Ohio valley at the time of the discovery. There is not a scintilla of proof that the wild tribes descended from the Mound Builders, or vice versa.

The regular structures are usually classed as sacred enclosures. The graded avenues are only found in connection with such works. The object of the Via Sacra at Marietta must be left to our consideration of the Graded Way at Piketon, in Pike county, Ohio.

Franklin, O., Nov. 9th, 1902.

CLARK'S CONQUEST OF THE NORTHWEST.

BY E. O. RANDALL.

The French were the first to discover and explore the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. While the English were establishing

colonial settlements between the Alle

ghany mountains and the Atlantic coast, the French adventurers were locating missionary stations, military posts and trading centers on the Great Lakes and the river ways of the Northwest. Such lodging places in the western wilderness were Detroit, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia and others. The English colonies in the east were permanent and progressive. The French lodgments in the west were thriftless and deteriorative. The English race thrives in colonization. The French stock is not adapted to transplantation. By the middle of the eighteenth century the English population in the New England colonies was a million and two hundred thousand, while the French inhabitants of New France numbered but eighy thousand. For a century and a half these rival races, the Latin and the Teuton, had contended for the American possessions. That rivalry cul

The material for this article was found mainly in "Clark's Letter to Mason;" "Joseph Bowman's Journal;" "Clark's Memoir;" and the unpublished manuscript of "Clark's Illinois Campaign," written by Consul Wilshire Butterfield. The writer has also freely availed himself of "The Conquest of the Northwest" by William H. English, and "The Winning of the West," by Theodore Roosevelt. The Butterfield manuscript is a most valuable and accurate account of the Illinois Campaign. It is now the property of the Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society, which expects to publish the same at no distant day.-E. O. R.

minated in the dramatic battle between the forces of the intrepid Montcalm and the invincible Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham before Quebec. It was the decree of destiny that the Anglo-Saxon civilization should conquer, and by the treaty of Paris, 1763, the French empire in North America ceased to exist. The Northwest with its French stations became the property of England. But this vast domain was still to be forbidden ground to the American colonists. The British government preempted the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi and the Ohio and the Great Lakes, as the exclusive and peculiar reservation of the Crown. It was to be directly administered upon from the provincial seat of authority at Quebec. It was to remain intact and undisturbed for the continued abode of the Indians whom the British power thus proposed to propitiate and secure. Thus matters stood until Dunmore's War, the prelude to the Revolution, opened the Kentucky country to the Virginian settlers. The exclusion of the colonists from the Northwest was one of the causes of the revolt against the mother government. The fire of the Revolution swept the seaboard colonies. The Northwest was in the powerful and peaceful clutch of Great Britain. It was almost solely inhabited by the Indians and the few and far between French settlements, which had now become British garrisons and supply posts. It was not only the policy of England to hire Hessians to fight its battles on the colonial front, but also its more dastardly determination to subsidize the Savages of the West and bribe them to assault and massacre the colonial settlers on the western frontier. The commander of the British posts at the west and northwest spared no effort to instigate the Indian tribes against the Americans. They armed, sent forth and directed the hostile and merciless expeditions of the red men. It remained for some brave and sagacious colonial leader to comprehend the vast importance of checking and destroying this British power in the Northwest and conquering that territory for the colonial confederacy. The man to conceive that idea, plan and carry out its execution, was George Rogers Clark. George Rogers Clark, deservedly called the "Washington of the West," was born in Albemarle county, Virginia, November 19, 1752. His birthplace was within two and a half miles of