OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 68A ************************************************************************ 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 Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 August 18, 2005 ************************************************************************** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio Tid Bits -- Part 68 A. by Darlene E. Kelley Notes by S. Kelly Archaic Ohio ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tid Bits -Part 68 A Archaic Ohio Perceiving how the land subject to so many mutations and yet suffering so little change came to be as it was given to man, its people should question how the glorious gift has been used and study how it may longest be enjoyed. The Silurian Island, only discovered as such within a few generations, has been known some three times as long as the region of the Blue Limestone and the home of the Blue Grass. Beyond that the early writers knew or cared to tell little more of its past than was found in scanty legends of the Red Men whose learning comprehended no explanation of what has since allured and baffled the acutest research of scholars trained to ponder the puzzling facts. While the results are not satisfactory, something has been gained worthy of meditation and resembrance. The antiquity of man is still mysterious. When and where he appeared may never be known; but recent explorarions of monumental heaps in the milder climes of the American continents have reveiled ruins that rival the oldest of the old world and indicate a higher constructive ability than was found among the Indians hunting by the Chesapeake or fighting across the St. Lawrence. The obvious inference is a decided decadence of one or a double possession by much differing tribes. Either assumption has both supporting and conflicting argumenet. The question is widened by a contention that man must have lived and struggled before the Glacial Age. This contention is based upon the finding of some rudely fashioned stone implements or weapons so deeply bedded in glacial drift as to preclude the supposition of a less recent origin. Some cave preserved remains are also claimed to indicate a prodigious antiquity. A few of these stange examples implying art have been found in Europe, a few in America, and one at Loveland. The last gives a local interest to the wavering discussion and study. For these rare and very accidental finds are considered wondeful, but not conclusive proof that man may have shivered before and fled from the cruel glacier which blent his abandoned designs with that tremendous burial. Upon the new earth succeeding the devastion of that long " Geologic Winter," there is, or was within memory, frequent evidence of a race whose achivements is comprehended by the graphic name of Mound Builders. While what is left of them is widely found wherever extreme cold could be avoided, no other region had more of their favor than the Ohio Valley, in which parts most populated were toward or by the Mississippi, where the Cahokia Mound is the largest of its kind, and in Ohio, where over twelve thousand archaic earthworks have been noted. The immense literature about these works and their makers, ranging from material description, through imagined relations, and beyond the verge of Utopian fancy, leaves one confused with the futility of the discussion. While living in and advancing along the middle portions of the temporate zone almost from ocean to ocean, the Mound Builders either came in the greatest number or made their longest stay in Ohio, where comparison asserts that more than half of all their works have been found. That pre-historic fondness for the plenty and salubrity of this still choicest section should be a delightful reflection for its present people. Ohio was great among the regions ages before the Anglo Saxon made her greater. Until recently, in the early ninteenth century, the Mound Builder's shelter was uncertain, but now some part of their habits can be stated. They had the secret of getting fire from the friction of dry wood, a problem that few of our time wth unaided hands have been able to master. With fire piled around trunks deadened by the bruising of hammering stones, trees were felled and burnt up until spaces were made in the deep shade for light to reach the fertile loam and nourish the martial corn, the twining bean, and the lulling tobacco, planted and tilled with hoes made from larger mussel shells drilled through the strongest places for handles fastened with strips of tough bark or tougher hides. As the tillable spaces were widened for larger crops, they knew where well drained pits could be dug in the terraced gravel for the safer keeping of the surplus corn and beans and the dried fruits and berries of the forest, together with the richly flavored walnut, the oily butternut, and the spicy spoils of the shrubby hazel and lofty hickory. The forceful fight for life utilized much that is disdained by their button wearing successors in the strife. Little, indeed nothing, except by inference, can be told of the herbs that formed their pottage. But we surely know that the fibrous seeds of the pawpaw were saved from the feasts on their lusicious pulp to make the winter days less lean. The mollusk breeding beds of streams were searched for the dumb victims both large and small for great mussel bakes, while the steaming delicacy was lifted from the shells to cool on tines of polished bone. Such and other apparently fantastic speculations have become real since the antiquarian spades have dug deep into a hidden record over which our race has stalked, elate with school taught pride in its destiny, and unheeding the awful obliterations buried beneath. The more obvious realities of the Mound Builders had the earliest attention, but a sympathetic view of their homely joys and toils obscure was more slowly gained. Thousands of scattered facts consistently arranged by practical skill combine to prove a few conclusions and refute a lot of once popular fancies. From these conclusions, a few characteristics are safely to be accepted. Gathered into villages and living in famiies, the Mound Builders were sociable, domestic, industrious, obedient, fifial and devout. The rude methods by which they gained their harvest required the patient toil that makes a people tame and governable. Notwithstanding the weariness that must have attended their stern, crude stuggle largely to live by grain, they found strength to undertake and had the fortitude to finish the strangest and most enduring structures ever accomplished with such deficient means. A conservative estimate claims their structures in Ohio alone, if joined, would form a continuous line of over three hundred miles. This line amost entirely gathered from southern Ohio, when composed for panoramic effect, would challege the ruins of any race for weird comparison. Curiosity could idly wander from end to end by symmetrical mounds crowding the size of a room or covering the space of a city block and reaching from the structure of a man to steeple heights. Zeal reveretly inclined should longer pause by frequent temple sites within enclosures wrought in geometric forms and set with alters to forgotten gods. And while piously musing on the decline and fall of superstitions, dim-eyed pity should follow staring surprise, where monstrous effergies heave the turf and prove their faith reached the folly of serpent worship. But most impressive of all to patriotic aspiration should be the long lines of the once lofty walls of their fortifications that have crumbled and tumbled to receive a slowly thickening soil through which mighty trees have sent roots of hundreds of annual growths to pierce the mysterious mold of the vanquished builders: - for, " The secret of their fall has not been won, Unless the best and most in all the past, That time has done, has been in turn undone By time, because it was not fit to last. " Writers have much disputed the motives impelling their stupendous and, with our lights, futile sacrifice of human enegry. Some have supposed the loftier mounds and those on natural heights were for signal stations by day and beacon lights by night, so that warnings of war could been flashed from the Muskingum to the Miamis. Out of abundant suggestion, imagination has supplied machinery of an empire ordered by priestly potentates with shrines to appease wrathful deities, and forts for refuse from invasions.Such notions have been counterbalanced by incredulous disbelief which cares for none of this and asserts that all Indians have a common knowledge of stone impliments. A larger conservative opinion, halting between these extremes and encouraged by the exploration of the antiquities of the old world, resolved to undertake a series of thoroughly scientific excavations. In some places the results were disappointing, in others the rewards were beyond expectation. As trench after trench was advanced through the mounds and across the village sites, much of the people of old was exposed as it was near the time of their death. Then some of the once mysterious mounds were found to be simple memorial heaps piled with infinate love and labor above the funeral houses or pens, where the dead and what they prized most when living had been stored and lightly covered with ashes and clay -- not beneath but above ground -- until a grassy dome could be made over the one or many below. The trenches cut smoothly down through the mounds showed the manner of the making by the little piles of differing clays or soils still keeping the shapes taken as they fell from aprons or sacks or baskets, in which the dirt had been carried from where it had been dug with scooping shells whose broken bits were part of the proof. The lines of excavation through the quondam villages uncovered places in a firmer ground surrounding a looser mold. On carefully removing this mold, found to be of vegetable origin, and filling the so renewed " post holes " with plaster, the casts obtained frequently show the bark on the posts or pickets cut to a length by fires that charred the ends still found as they were when set and tamped, maybe twenty centuries ago. With wider excavations, these casts made in the trenches of the decayed palisade have strangely restored the outlines of their tepees, whereby the kind of homes and the manner of their people may be determined. For people inclined to quit nomadic ways and to make permanent abodes in a timbered region, the palisade has afforded the readiest protection from both the pinch of frost and the spite of either man or beast. The enclosures walled with logs fastened in the ground and reaching opposing heights to serve as a refuge for those who fought the battles of the American Wilderness were models of the Mound Builder' tepees, enlarged and improved by axes of steel. Without iron tools, the tepees were roofed with bark or the skins of deer stretched over poles with a funnel like escape from fires that baked the floors beneath. For, they had not learned to make chimneys and their hearth was for a fire, when the chill was worse than the stifling warmth. Such floors were found with broken pottery and pipes, with worn or wasted pieces of all they made from flaky flint, from shell to horn, from bone or stone, scattered in and about the ashes left undistrurbed, since the last occupant fled or was taken to the charnel; except that the blinding dust of time drifting from the hills and mingling with the melancholy mold of the forest had covered all but the mounds beyond the ploughman's eager share. The tepees generally had a few nearby and sometimes many surrounding grain pits. Apparently, if one was deemed unfit, another was dug and the old was filled with refuse of the house. From this refuse -- this that was waste -- we learn what they had. In some pits lined with woven mats eight or ten rowed ears of corn were neatly stowed. Other pits still held shelled corn with hulled nuts and beans closely massed as if to save space. Such stores grown musty or forgotten of through accident were covered with ashes, where wind strown sparks may have started fires, that charred the perfect forms into lasting coal with sad loss to the owners and much gain to antiquarians. Whatever little possession they had, and nothing was large, was likely to go into the open, catch-all use of abandoned pits. Awls, drills, knives, balanced arrow points, beautiful spear heads and blocks of flint from which they were flakes by pieces of elk horn under hammers of stone, all, in every stage, from rejected chips to perfect completion, just as they were left by vanished hands, were found in the rubbish thus - assorted by chance. Imprefect specimens broken or unfinished, when blemished, show the progressive chipping from a suitable boulder or splinter of granite to a perfect pestle for pulverizing grain or shredding dried meat. Others prove the process of making a single or double grooved ax equally excellent for braining a foe or for cracking and splitting bones for the marrow thereof. Other heaps disclose the development of the finely proportioned and elegantly polished celts or chisel like implements both useful in tanning and handy as tomahawks. Anything dropped among the refuse in a careless moment or thrown by a heedless child, once within the pits among the bones and littered with ashes, was likely lost until discovered by our curio seeking age. The bones thus found testify that they ate much of what we call Virginia deer, black bear, elk, squirrel, beaver, otter, fox, wolf, wildcat, panther, mink, muskrat, groundhog, and the faithful dog that bore them company. They were familiar with the flavors of the wild turkey, the wild goose, and the trumpeter swan, and they did not waste eagles, owls, or hawks. They also liked the turtle tribe and made cups and spoons from the pretty boxes of the painted kind. Scrapers, single and double pointed pins, awls, some slender and sharp for piercing leather, and some stouter and blunter as if for handling hot meat, and tips for darts or arrows were all made from chosen bones. The toughest bones of birds were used in making fish hooks and needles shaped and polished with flints and sand stone. The skeletons of all. from beak to talon, from tooth to claw, from horn to hoof, were searched for a fancied charm or a grotesque ornament. All this is proved by the refuse rescued from pits and by the relics plundered from tombs where the untutored mind offilial love or paternal grief placed the favorite tools and trinkets of the dead, with precious pottery filled with relished food ready for instant need on the gloomy trail to the spirit land. In thinking of the dangers that prompted their defensive works it is easy to believe that zeal to learn their mystery has chanced upon much of their little, where the apprenhensive, even in the waste pits, may have heaped and hidden their treasure, with never a thought of those who should find and gather them into crystall cases in marble halls. Such was the homes of the Mound Builders. If there had been no more--- if they had lived longer or came later, so that history could have noted the simple life made noble by their singualr devotion of incedible exertion to commemorate their mutual dependence, fair science would have frowned less severely on their oblivion, and few or none would have cared to vex their deep repose. But, by a strange perversion of fate, the care to keep their ashes always has caused their remains to be sought with an unrelenting purpose to scatter. Yet the most ardent antiquary quick to read the meaning of every detail is prone to pity, when his spade uncovers a token that makes all time akin. An exploring trench came upon two skeletons where a carefully opened grave showed that an aged couple had been decently buried side by side, along with several finely polished impliments that were the work of years to make, and may have been their proudest possessions or a rich tribute of respect. And the right arm of the man was under the woman's neck and close by her right shoulder. Thus the semblance of a long life of affection composed by those who knew them well and adored them much had lasted and come through many centuries to prove that love goes on the same, yesterday and forever. If any in the world today and his wife were thus placed with many tears to dream the ages by, the least of realizing thought could have no better wish for their dust than such unbroken rest. Even when gained through breaking precepts that should be kept holy, worthy emotion delights to find charming sentiment in unexpected forms and places. But gray clad meditation, knowing the tireless haste of time to make the ceaseless waste of change where everything abideth not, will decry the ruthless havoc of such a tomb to please a learned holiday, as never worth the violence done the voiceless dead . ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ to be continued in part 68 B.