HAMILTON COUNTY OHIO - History (published 1881) Ch.3 The Aboriginal American - pgs 21-28 ************************************************************************** USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Tina Hursh ribbit@clubnet.isl.net http://www.rootsweb.com/~ohhamilt/histhc/mnindex.html April 15, 2000 Transcribed by Linda Boorom *********************************************************************** Ch.3 The Aboriginal American - pgs 21-28 *********************************************************************** History of Hamilton County Ohio with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches. Compiled by Henry A. Ford, A.M. and Mrs. Kate B. Ford, L.A. William & Co., Publishers; 1881. pages 21-29 part 1 ~pg 21~ CHAPTER III. THE ABORIGINAL AMERICAN. Are they here- The dead of other days?- and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race that long has passed away, Built them; - a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests; here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. The red man came, The roaming hunter-tribes, warlike and fierce, And the Mound Builders vanished from the earth. -W. C. BRYANT, "The Prairies." THE AMERICAN ABORIGINE. The red men whom Columbus found upon this continent, and whom he mistakenly calls Indians, were not its aborigines. The Western, not the Eastern hemisphere is the Old World. AGASSIZ finely said: First-born among the continents, though so much later in culture and civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line from Nova Scotia to the Far West. Great, learned, and eloquent as was AGASSIZ, however, his doctrine of the separate creation of the races of humanity - that men must have originated in nations, as the bees have originated in swarms, and as the different social plants have covered the extensive tracts over which they have naturally spread - has failed to obtain general acceptance among the scientists. Later investigations tend to return anthropology and ethnology to their ancient basis, upon the principle sounded forth by Paul in the scholarly air of Mars Hill: "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." America, old world as it is, is not a cradle-land. Her native physiognomies, the manners and customs of the races found by Europeans upon her soil, their traditions, and something in their architecture, point toward the historic regions of the far east. The travellers who see Kalmuck Tartars upon the Asiatic steppes, with almost the precise face and figure of the American Indian, catch thus a hint of the far-away past of emigration to and colonization of this continent. Not only across the tract now occupied by Behring's Straits, - very likely dry land in the period of exodus from Asia, - but also across the Atlantic sea, storm-driven or pushed by adventurous souls who never returned to tell their tale, the wave of immigration may have come. Quite certain it is now, the time of man's appearance upon American soil dates long back among the ages previous to the advent of Christ. Before the Indians were, as dwellers here; before the Mound Builders; before Aztec and Nahuan and Mayan civilizations, was still, in all probability, the prehistoric man of millenniums ago. So long since, in the study of our antiquities, as 1839, Dr. McGUIRE, in the Transactions of the Boston Society of Natural History, brought forward evidence, from discoveries recently made in the improvement of the High Rock spring at Saratoga, to show the presence of human beings there fifty-five hundred years before. The find of a human bone near Natchez. in association with the remains of the mastodon and the megalonyx; the human skeleton dug from an excavation at New Orleans, at a depth of sixteen feet, and beneath four successive buried forests of cypress; the matting and pottery found on Petit Anse Island, Louisiana, fifteen to twenty feet below the surface, underneath the fossil bones of the elephant and the mastodon; the mastodon found in his miry grave on the bottom lands of the Bourbense river, in Missouri, with every token about his remains that he had been hunted and killed by savages there; the skeletons found under some depth of soil and accumulations of bones in caves at Louisville, Kentucky, and Elyria, Ohio; - all, with other facts developing from time to time, seem to point a high antiquity for the aboriginal American. Colonel WHITTLESEY, of Cleveland, in his Evidences of the Antiquity of Man in the United States, argues from the find in the Elyria cave, that, "judging from the appearance of the bones and the depth of accumulations over them, two thousand years may have elapsed since the human skeletons were laid on the floor of this cave." The arguments from other finds multiply this number to several scores of centuries. In a later and very recent pamphlet Colonel WHITTLESEY says: Man may have existed in Ohio with the mastodon, elephant, rhinoceros, musk ox, horse, beaver, and tapir of the drift period, as he did in Europe; but to decide such a question the proof should he indisputable.... There is some reason to conclude that there were people on this territory prior to the builders of the mounds. Our cave shelters have not been much explored, but as far as they have been examined the relies lying at the bottom of the accumulations indicate a very rude people. I anticipate that we shall find here, as in other countries, that the most ancient race were the rudest and were cave-dwellers. I have seen at Portsmouth, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio river, fire-hearths more ancient than the earthworks at that place. Whoever the people were who, made these fires, they must have had arrow-points, war-clubs, and stone axes or mauls. But we have at this time no evidence to connect such a primeval race with the human effigies scattered profusely throughout Ohio. These effigies present no uniformity of type, and, therefore, cannot represent race features. They approach nearer to the North American savage than any other people, but are so uncouth that they are of little or no ethnological value. There was no school of art among either the cave-dwellers, the builders of the mounds, or the more recent Northern Indians, which was capable of a correct representation of the human face. These effigies must have been the result of the fancies of idle hours, produced under no system and with no uniformity of purpose. They thus have no meaning which the historian or antiquarian can lay hold of to advance his knowledge of the pre-historic races. THE PRIMITIVE OHIOAN We are thus brought to consider the peoples who, possibly later, but still anciently, dwelt in the valley of the Ohio. They left no literature, no inscriptions as yet decipherable, if any, no monuments except the long forest-covered earth- and stone-works. No traditions of them, by common consent of all the tribes, were left to the North American Indian. As races, they have vanished utterly in the darkness of the past. But the comparatively slight traces they have left tend to conclusions of deep interest and importance, not only highly probable, ~pg 22~ but rapidly approaching certainty. Correspondences in the manufacture of pottery and in the rude sculptures found, the common use of the serpent-symbol, the likelihood that all were sun-worshippers and practiced the horrid rite of human sacrifice, and the tokens of commercial intercourse manifest by the presence of Mexican porphyry and obsidian in the Ohio Valley mounds, together with certain statements of the Mexican annalists, satisfactorily demonstrate, in the judgment of many antiquaries, the racial alliance, if not the identity, of our Mound Builders with the ancient Mexicans, whose descendants, with their remarkable civilization, were found in the country when CORTES entered it in the second decade of the sixteenth century. THE MAYAS It is not improbable that the first marks of Mayan civilization upon the continent are to be found among the relics of the Mound Builders, particularly in the Southern States. The great Maya race, the first of which Mexican story bears record, inhabited Yucatan and the adjacent districts as early as 1000 B. C., when Nachan, the "city of the serpents," afterwards Palenque, the seat of remarkable ruins to this day, was founded as their capital. It is accounted to have been among the most civilized of the American aboriginal nations. It possessed an alphabet and so a literature, engaged in manufactures and trade, cultivated the ground, sailed the waters, built great temples and other edifices, and executed sculptures, which remain, the wonder of antiquaries, at Palenque, Copan, Uxmal, and other ancient capitals and centers of population. It was, undoubtedly, the oldest civilization in the Western Hemisphere; and so permanent was its influence, and so numerous did the race enjoying it become, that no less than fifteen languages or dialects of Central America, north and south of the Tehauntepee sthmus, are found related to the Mayan tongue. It was already ancient and perhaps decaying when the Nahuas pressed upon it from the northward, partially adopted it, carried it on, and gave it fresh life and vigor. The legends of the Maya people indicate an origin in the Mediterranean countries of Europe or Asia. It is supposed, accordingly, that their home here was upon the Atlantic coast, and that thence they emigrated to Cuba, and in due time into Yucatan and the-region south of the Tehauntepec isthmus, whence they spread in both directions, reaching finally as high as Vera Cruz at the northward. Their story, as still found in the manuscripts, is that their ancestors went into the country from the direction of Florida, which was long afterwards the general name of the country traversed by DE SOTO (who gave the name), from the present Florida coast to the Mississippi. It seems quite within the limits of probability, then, that some of the more ancient of the remains in the east and south of the United States, particularly the immense shell-heaps on the Atlantic seaboard, found all the way from Nova Scotia to the Floridian peninsula, along the Gulf shores, and up the southern river valleys, were left by the Mayas in their advance on the final home in Central America. It is hardly probable, however, though not at all impossible, that their habitations extended so far north, on any line west of the Alleghanies, as the Ohio valley. THE NAHUAS - THE TOLTECS. The, conclusion is different, however, concerning the race which, many ages after the settlement of the Mayas at their ultimate destination, confronted them there - the Nahuas, notably that tribe or nation of them known as the Toltecs - neighbored, probably, somewhere in the valley of the Mississippi by the conquerors of the latter in the eleventh century of our era. The Chichimecs are believed to be racially., if not identically, the same with our Mound Builders. The Mexican traditions name the Olmecs as the first of Nahua blood to colonize the regions north of the Tehuantepec isthmus, where they overcame a race of giants, and found also the Miztecs and Zapotecs, not of Nahua stock, who had built up, in what is now the Mexican State of Oajaca , a civilization rivaling the subsequent splendor of the Aztecs. The Olmecs came in ships or barks from the east, as did their relatives some time after, the Xicalancas. The former tribe settled mainly in the present State of Pueblo, and built the tower or pyramid of Cholula, as a memorial , tradition says, of the tower of Babel, whose building the progenitors of the Olmec chiefs witnessed. Other of the Nahua tribes, as the Toltecs, possessed a tradition of the deluge coming close to the Scriptural account. Both of these look to the other side of the continent as affording the points of ingress for the later immigration, which was doubtless originally from Asia, and many think was of Jewish descent. Long before entering Mexico, however, as the story runs, the seven families of similar language who were the ancestors of the Toltec nation, wandered in many lands and across the seas, living in caves and enduring many hardships, through a period of one hundred and four years, when, five hundred and twenty years after the flood, twenty centuries or more before the Christian era, they arrived at and settled in "Hue hue Tlapalan," which has -been identified with reasonable probability as the valley of the Mississippi. Here their families grew and multiplied, extending their boundaries far and wide, until about the middle of the sixth century after Christ, when two families of the land revolted, but unsuccessfully, and were driven out, with their numerous followers, and took their way by devious wanderings to Mexico. Here they fixed their capital at Tulancingo, and eighteen years afterward more permanently at Tolean, on the present site of the village of Tula, thirty miles northwest of the city of Mexico. The character and dates of subsequent Toltec or Mound Builder immigrations, with slight exceptions, has not even the dim light of Mexican tradition to reveal them. The last irruption of the Nahuan tribes is fixed at about 1100 A. D. One of them, and the best known, the famous Aztecs, did not reach Anahuac with their unique and magnificent civilization until near the close of the twelfth century. Previously however (1062 A. D.), the Toltec capital had been taken and its empire had fallen by the hands of the martial Chichimecs, their former neighbors in the far north, who had followed them ~pg 23~ to their new home, and upon a son of whom, three and a half centuries before, as a peace offering, they had bestowed the throne of the Toltec monarchy. The Toltecs now disappear from history, except as amalgamated with their conquerors, and as founding, by many of its fugitive noble families and in conjunction with Mayan elements, the Quiche-Cakchiqual monarchy in Guatemala, which was flourishing with some grandeur and power so late as the time of CORTES. The migrations of the Toltecs from parts of the territory now covered by the United States, are believed to have reached through about a thousand years. Apart from the exile of the princes and their allies and very likely an exodus now and then compelled by their enemies and ultimate conquerors, the Chichimecs, who, as we have seen, at last followed them to Mexico, the Mound Builders were undoubtedly, in the course of the ages, pressed upon, and finally the last of them - unless the Natchez and Mandan tribes, as some suppose, are to be considered connecting links between the Toltecs and the American Indians - driven out by the red men. The usual opening of the gateways in their works of defence, looking to the east and northeastward, indicates the direction from which these enemies were expected. They were, not improbably, the terrible Iroquois and their allies, the first really formidable Indians encountered by the French discoverers and explorers in "New France" in the seventeenth century. A silence as of the grave is upon the history of their wars, doubtless long and bloody, the savages meeting with skilled and determined resistance, but their ferocious and repeated attacks, continued, mayhap, through several centuries, at last expelling, the more civilized people- "And the Mound Builders vanished from the earth," unless, indeed, as the works of learned antiquaries assume1 and as is assumed above, they afterwards appear in the Mexican story. Many of the remains of the defensive works at the South and across the land toward Mexico are of an unfinished type and pretty plainly indicate that the retreat of the Mound Builders was in that direction, and that it was hastened by the renewed onslaughts of their fierce pursuers or by the discovery of a fair and distant land, to which they determined to emigrate in the hope of secure and untroubled homes.2 Professor SHORT, however, arguing from the lesser age of trees found upon the southern works, is "led to think the Gulf coast may have been occupied by the Mound Builders for a couple of centuries after they were driven by their enemies from the country north of the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers." He believes two thousand years is time enough to allow for their total occupation of the country north of the Gulf of Mexico, "though after all it is but conjecture." He adds: "It seems to us, however, that the time of abandonment of their works may be more closely approximated. A thousand or two years may have elapsed since they vacated the Ohio valley, and a period embracing seven or eight centuries may have passed since they retired from the Gulf coast." The date to which the latter period carries us back, it will be observed, approximates somewhat closely to that fixed by the Mexican annalists as the time of the last emigration of a people of Nahua stock from the northward. THE MOUND BUILDERS' EMPIRE Here we base upon firmer ground. The extent and something of the character of this are known. They are tangible and practical realities. We stand upon the mounds, pace off the long lines of the enclosures, collect and handle and muse upon the long-buried relies now in our public and private museums. The domain of the Mound Builders is well-nigh coterminous with that of the Great Republic. Few States of the Union are wholly without the ancient monuments. Singular to say, however, in view of the huge heaps and barrows of shells left by the aboriginal man along the Atlantic shore, there are no earth or stone mounds or enclosures of the older construction on that, coast. Says Professor SHORT: No authentic remains of the Mound Builders are found in the New England States.... In the former we have an isolated mound in the valley of the Kennebec, in Maine, and dim outlines of enclosures near Sanborn and Concord, in New Hampshire; but there is no certainty of their being the work of this people.... Mr. SQUIER pronounces them to be purely the work of Red Indians.... Colonel WHITTLESEY would assign these fort-like structures the enclosures of western New York, and common upon the rivers discharging themselves into Lakes Erie and Ontario from the south, differing from the more southern enclosures, in that they were surrounded by trenches on their outside, while the latter uniformly have the trench on the inside of the enclosure, to a people anterior to the red Indian and perhaps contemporaneous with the Mound Builders, but distinct from either. The more reasonable view is that of Dr. FOSTER, that they are the frontier works of the Mound Builders, adapted to the purposes of defence against the sudden irruptions of hostile tribes.... It is probable that these defences belong to the last period of the Mound Builders' residence on the lakes, and were erected when the more warlike peoples of the north, who drove them from their cities, first made their appearance. The Builders quarried flint in many places, soapstone in Rhode Island and North Carolina, and in the latter State also the translucent mica found so widely dispersed in their burial mounds in association with the bones of the dead. They mined or made salt, and in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan they got out, with infinite labor, the copper, which was doubtless their most useful and valued metal. The Lower Peninsula of that State is rich in ancient remains, particularly in mounds of sepulture; and. there are "garden beds" in the valleys of the St. Joseph and the Kalamazoo, in southwestern Michigan; but, "excepting ancient copper mines, no known works extend as far north as lake Superior anywhere in the central region. Farther to the northwest, however, the works of the same people are comparatively numerous. Dr. Foster quotes a British Columbia newspaper, without giving either name or date, as authority for the discovery of a large number of mounds, seemingly the ~pg 24~ works of the same people who built further east and south. On the Butte prairies of Oregon, WILKES and his exploring expedition discovered thousands of similar mounds." We condense further from SHORT: All the way up the Yellowstone region and on the upper tributaries of the Missouri, mounds are found in profusion. The Missouri valley seems to have been one of the most populous branches of the widespread Mound Builder country. The valleys of its affluents, the Platte and Kansas rivers, also furnish evidence that these streams served as the channels into which flowed a part of the tide of population which either descended or ascended the Missouri. The Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, however, formed the great central arteries of the Mound Builder domain. In Wisconsin we find the northern central limit of their works; occasionally on the western shores of Lake Michigan, but in great numbers in the southern counties of the State; and especially an the lower Wisconsin river. The remarkable similarity of one group of works, on a branch of Rock river in the south of this State, to some of the Mexican antiquities led to the christening of the adjacent village as Aztalain - which (or Aztlan), meaning whiteness, was a name of the "most attractive land" somewhere north of Mexico and the sometime home of the Aztec and other Nahua nations. If rightly conjectured as the Mississippi valley, or some part of it, that country may well have included the site of the modern Aztalan. Across the Mississippi, in Minnesota and Iowa, the predominant type of circular. tumuli prevails, extending throughout the latter State to Missouri. There are evidences that the Upper Missouri region was connected with that of the Upper Mississippi by settlements occupying the intervening country. Mounds are found even in the valley of the Red river of the north. Descending to the interior, we find the heart of the Mound Builder country in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It is uncertain whether its vital center was in southern Illinois or Ohio - probably the former, because of its geographical situation with reference to the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers. The site of St. Louis was formerly covered with mounds, one of which was thirty-five feet high, while in the American Bottom, on the Illinois side of the river, their number approximates two hundred. It is pretty well known, we believe, that St. Louis takes its fanciful title of "Mound City" from the former fact. The multitude of mound works which are scattered over the entire northeastern portion of Missouri indicate that the region was once inhabited by a population so numerous that in comparison its present occupants are only as the scattered pioneers of a new-settled country. The same sagacity which chose the neighborhood of St. Louis for these works, covered the site of Cincinnati with an extensive system of circumvallations and mounds. Almost the entire space now occupied by the city was utilized by the mysterious Builders in the construction of embankments and tumuli, built upon the most accurate geometrical principles, and evincing keen military, foresight. The vast number as well as magnitude of the works found in the State of Ohio, have surprised the most care- less and indifferent observers. It is estimated by the most conservative, and Messrs. SQUIER and DAVIS among them, that the number of tumuli in Ohio equals ten thousand, and the number of enclosures one thousand or one thousand five hundred. In Ross county alone one hundred enclosures and upwards of five hundred mounds have been examined. The Alleghany mountains, the natural limit of the great Mississippi basin, appear to have served as the eastern and southeastern boundary of the Mound Builder country. In western New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and in all of Kentucky and Tennessee, their remains are numerous and in some instances imposing. In Tennessee, especially, the works of the Mound Builders are of the most interesting character. Colonies of Mound Builders seem to have passed the great natural barrier into North Carolina and left remains in Marion county, while still others penetrated into South Carolina, and built on the Wateree river. Mounds in Mississippi also have been examined, with interesting results. On the southern Mississippi, in the area embraced between the termination of the Cumberland mountains, near Florence and Tuseumbia, in Alabama, and the mouth of Big Black river, this people left numerous works, many of which were of a remarkable character. The whole region bordering on the tributaries of the Tombigbee, the country through which the Wolf river flows, and that watered by the Yazoo river and its affluents, was densely populated by the same people who built mounds in the Ohio valley. The State of Louisiana and the valleys of the Arkansas and Red rivers were not only the most thickly populated wing of the Mound Builder domain, but also furnish us with remains presenting affinities with the great works of Mexico so striking that no doubt can longer exist that the same people were the architects of both. It is needless to discuss the fact that the works of the Mound Builders exist in considerable numbers in Texas, extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, establishing an unmistakable relationship as well as actual union between the truncated pyramids of the Mississippi valley and the Tocalli of Mexico, and the countries further south Such, in a general way, was the geographical distribution of the Mound Builders within and near the territory now occupied by the United States. -----Continued in Part 2-----