OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 68C

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Historical Collections of Ohio
And Then They Went West
Know Your Ohio
Tid Bits - Part 68 C.
by Darlene E. Kelley
notes by
S. Kelly   [     ]
Archaic Ohio -3

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Tid Bits- Part 68 C
Archaic Ohio -3


The places chosen for habitation by the Mound Builders of Ohio prove
that rich land was appreciated. From the big circle near the mouth of
Stone Lick, the scattering traces up that rapid stream and through Stone
Lick township thicken toward its northeastern line, where the diminished
heights encircle a lonely but pretty valley of some forty acres made
very fertile by the elements washed from the weathered hills. Several
mounds once adorned summits not far fom this sequested vale, at first
the home of the pioneer, John Metcalf, and then of Ira Williams. No
enclosure enhanced the scene which must have been a place of much resort
and probably the site of one or several tepees, whence the peope hasted
away, perchance, when the forts failed and left the woman and children
without help to carry their wealth of impliments along to safety sought
but never found. For, in few places or none in old Clermont has the plow
lifted to modern gaze such a profusion of flint and granite tools as has
therein been found, and thence, like Wycliff's ashes, been 
" scattered wide as the waters be."
So long as the odd stones were held to be the abandoned ad altogether
useless trumpery of the recent Indians, the shapely granites and flints
made with utmost patience of many lives were carefully gathered and
carelessly heaped where plows and hoes would not again be dulled. When
more disconcerning culture asserted them to be wonderful survivals with
a marvelous story from a voiceless past and when bartering agents for
far away collectors went seekng them along country lanes, the highly
valued and never to be recovered tokens of  vastly ancient possession
were sold for a petty price and with wonder at the buyer's folly. Still,
some of the best were kept, from which several of the most excellant
came to the Bryron Willams. One much admired by him was a curved flint
knife ingeniouly flaked to fit four different ways of grasping and
present four different angles for cutting. [ Bryon Williams was the
Historian of Clermont county, Ohio and a distant relative of the Kelley
family. He has since donated the knife to the Historical Society for
safe keeping.]

The general effacement of mound work elsewhere has had much regrettable
repetition in Brown and Clermont. Will living in Williamsburg, in the
midst of his overwork between 1800 and 1810, while the lines were plain,
General Lytle made careful surveys of the earthworks east of Milford.
The square was 950 feet on each side with a gate at each corner and in
the middle of the sides. The circle was irregular to fit a very ancient
course of the river. The large circle was connected by parallel walls
with a small circle of 300 feet in diameter on top of the island like
hill now marked by the water tower. Fan-like walks also extended down
the river. This and the plan of the Edward's works across the river,
were published in the classic works of " Squier and Davis on the Ancient
Monuments of the Mississipi Valley." Besides these, General Lytle
surveyed " a position of about 100 acres, about 20 miles up the East
Fork." The plan of that position was so singular that it has been
reprinted in the most eleborate foreign works, among others, in the very
expensive Du Paix Collection. What obtained fame among the learned has
been ignored and forgotten at home. Inquiry about that position has not
been satisfied. If " about 20 miles up " is taken along the banks of the
very winding stream, nothing has been located. But if taken as the roads
cross the country, the circuitous course of the East Fork presents quite
as many miles of equally distant slopes for consideraion.

In the absence of other claim, the most probable scene of much lost and
otherwise forgotten toil is the once pretty woodland just above the
mouth of Crane Run, locally known as Indian Graves. Up to the inactment
of the stock laws after the Civil War, the neighboring herds kept the
fenceless grove like a swarded park, which was a trysting place for the
fishers and hunters in that direction, and a wooing ground where picnic
parties warbled life away and gentle footsteps lightly tripped a dance
with pleasant hope. But, that too, may not be again until another aeon
of change shall have massed the chemical elements to refit the earth for
another race, perhaps no more thoughtful of our sort than we have been
of others. Ax and fire have overcome the great populars, beeches and
sugars that stood in lng lines both curved and straight with a
regularity seemingly too cunning for chance. 

The plowman has also levelled numerous heaps from which many a load of
stone has been wagoned off to make walls and roads for the wanton
wasters. Any trace of an enclosure surveyed by General Lytle, if this be
the place, has been lost in the tranformaion wrought by the early
clearings, but cairns in the more recent hilly grove are a fixed memory
with many still living. Whatever was left undone in plundering the
graves by the first generation of the irreverent whites was completed by
the next, and soon there will be nothing but this mention to memorate
the scene. This place has had some local celebrity as the graves of
those killed in a battle of or with Indians. The tradition is lacking in
fact. The battlefield of Grassy Run is for miles or more farther up the
river. Although that Indian band was successful in their favorte,
patriotic and exhilarating pursuit of horse stealing, it is impossible
they returned so far a dangerous tail loaded with so many dead for such
an elaborate burial. The largest number said to be slain in that battle
would not account for the burials at Indian Graves, and the mode of
burying was not the Shawnee fashion.

Such durable sepulture indicates a more settled life than found by the
earliest explorers along the Ohio. Topped by the most aged trees, such
graves mark an ancient occupation down the Miami, along the East Fork
and up the Ohio where the valleys of Nine Mile, Twelve Mile, Indian
Creek, Bull Skin, White Oak, Straight Creek, Red Oak, Eagle Creek and
beyond were the abode of people who covered cribs of wood with mounds or
made stone graves if possible, and sometimes both. These graves usually
by the brow of far looking hills or slightly knolls were made by setting
suitable stone on edge around a space for one or several bodies wit
bottoms of flagging stone and a stronger covering of wider and longer
stone, all sunk more or less and heaped wit earth. The heaps sometimes
had the appearance of having had a secondary curbing and even a coping.
In noting whence the larger stones had been carried by hand, or other
way was none, the performance seems incredible to those who can remember
the tales of many years ago. [ However, the Spinx of Egypt and Tombs of
Egyptian Kings, was also incredible. ]

Eastward from East Fork, enclosures are few and small or blotted out.
One near New Richmond is a ditched and walled triangle of about an acre.
Perhaps those works were less needful, or maybe the people were not
sufficient for such tasks, or they may have been required for further
duty farther north, where the great forts must have helped them from
far. Some properly conducted explorations have been proved uniquely
interesting. On July 12-15, 1888, in Jackson township, by the county
line near Marathon, under the skilled direction of the noted
archaeologist
Prof. Warren K. Moorehead, a trench twenty-five feet wide, and much
larger at the center, was cut through a mound seventy-five feet wide,
ninety-five feet long, and known at first to be quite twnty feet high,
but reduced to eight feet by many plowings. Within ten feet from the
center and within seven feet from the suface, large quantities of burnt
clay mingled with charcoal were found, and than a skull with teeth burnt
black. At the center and four feet from the bottom, a well preserved
skeleton was found covered with what was thought to have been elm and
hickory bark. Beneath this skeleton were three layers of earth, each six
inches thick. The upper layer was white, the next sand, and the lower
layer was red burnt clay. Below this was another skeleton badly charred
at the extremeties, and surrounded with black and yellow earth slightly
burnt. On the level, seven feet below the surface, a large slab of
limestone with the imprint of seven ribs had been subjected to intense
heat. Snail and mussel shells, deer horns, and pottery occurred in
fragments.

After a fruitless exploration of two mounds more in the vicinity, Prof.
Moorehead's party excavated a circular mound in Perry township, near
Fayetteville, about one hundred feet in diameter and five feet high,
undisturbed in a woods and surrounded with a circle two hundred feet in
diameter, with a base of seven feet and about three feet high. Nothing
was found except forty-two mica sheets laid in neatly overlapping layers
covering about three square feet some ten feet east of center. The use
seems to have been purely ceremonial. The party then undertok a mound
seventy feet long and sixty-five feet wide that stood nearly twenty-five
feet high, with a corresponding circle, near St.Martins in the same
township. Two skeletons were found whose skulls indicted death in
battle. One skull was faced with a sheet or plate of copper five by
seven inches stone, hammered cold from the ore, with two preforations to
fit te eyes. Close by on a three-inch layer of earth burnt hard as brick
was another skeleton with a battle broken skull. The same party then dug
through a group of seven mounds about thirty feet in diameter and having
an average distance apart of one hundred feet along the front of the
hills facing East Fork, nearly two miles below Marathon. These mounds
were each composed of both earth and stone and all belonged to the
burial class.

Such are the memorials of the people that once hunted and fished and
made merry along, but knew nothing of, the line common to the counties
of Brown and Clermont. While what was so frequent on the west side has
been so ruthlessly wasted the less common remains on the east side have
been preserved. If Brown county has few enclosures to remember, several
mounds remain to be cherished. This is notably so of the Ripley mounds
which, and all that are anywhere, will be
kept fr centuries-- if the owners will stay wise. For, until man ceases
to ask his origin or to question his distiny, the mystery of the Mound
Builders will have peculiar fascination, and refinement will regret that
so much of their strangely beautiful work has been destroyed. Yet, with
what might have been learned from careful study of the scattered or
demolished and forever lost relics of Old Clermont, we could have only
slight assurance about the social scheme resulting in such productions.
For larger opinion hold the enclosures to be probable sactuaries and
possible retreats, and the mounds to be voluntary or prescribed tributes
to petty greatness; and no view includes the mothers and children, or
the pain and sorrow of the common lot. Who so would know something of
this must revisit the tepee villages " down in the valley which was full
of bones " and these give heed, while conquoring Science armed and
charted scrolls and magic glasses bids the " very dry " bones to declare
a tale that makes the antique world seem never before so dark.

In reveiwing the hope or failure, the pride or shame, the ecstacy or
weariness, of an ended life, we are apt to think the grave covers all.
And so it was with the earth protected spaces between the moldered logs
or crumbling stones through the years since Columbus, and, through how
much longer before, any can guess but none can tell. A comparison of
many investigations shows that the custom, purpose, progress -- in a
word -- the culture -- of a people thoughout Southern Ohio, West
Virginia, Central Kentucky, and on to Tennessee was contemporaneous in
respects too frequent to be accidental. This people seems to have been
numerous enough to be self-protecting against a probable foe. But when
the sheetless dead are called from the midst of the valley of bones, it
is found that three-fifths of the born died under the age of sixteen and
three-fourths of these children did not live to be six years old. More
than half of those surviving childhood did not reach thirty years, and
hardly one in a hundred passed the age of fifty. To make the tabulation
still more terrible, one-sixth of the skeletons, on various diseased
bones, have brought, through all the hundreds of burying years, the
ineffaceable lesions of a horrble infection which, in the innocence of
their ignorance must have seemed the scourge of all their gods. With
constructive imagination for linking historic suggestion between an
imperative cause and inevitable result, this shocking revelation
supplies enough reason for the utter displacement of the ruined and
ruining race. Burdened with unutterable weakness, for which they could
neither plant nor hunt because of incessant raids, the strong men worn
few ceased from the staggering strife. Thus, they fell at last, not from
a fault done by them, but because of a far away ancestral share in harm
that set the children's teeth on edge.

Compared with other events in the drama of man, the scene most replete
with interest for a benevolent mind is the conflict for freedom in
America. As in the progress of the fossil world so in man's culminating
struggle, there has been a place for all, and nothing useless.The mythic
Mound Builders played an early and a leading part on the ever tragic
stage, where the fittest is to survive. After more pondering than may
seem profitable, and through many may deride an opinion more easily
doubted than refuted, as an inference both reasonable and sufficient, we
can venture this conclusion.

The Southern or Toltecan or Mexican Indians of Asiatic origin coming
early and ever seeking an easier life in more fruitful climes, found and
with long cultivation domesticated the tropical corn plant upon which
they grew numerous and ceased to be nomads. But, then as now, when
people came to be many and game scarce, band after band impelled by need
or lured by traveler's tales, turned back to northern plains teeming
with game, nowhere, by all accounts, so fine and so plentiful as that
which grazed the blue grass of the Silurian Island. The bands trailing
back to the north only took the skill of their day, and, hidden in
lodges of the wilderness, never learned the larger art of their race in
Mexico, that afterward caused the conquoring Spaniard to become a fiend
of avarice. With humble skill of the Stone Age and a strange taste in
heaping curious forms of earth, they also brought their tropic corn and
made it to be all but native along the Ohio. Waxing rich in what was
taken with toil they became the envied prey of the tribes gathering in
and bursting from the north. Then the mighty forts were arched about the
northern part of the Blue Limestone, in front of their choicest and most
endangered land, both to guard their homes and save their templed groves
and mounded graves. In spite of all that, the fierce northman from
beyond the Lakes enacted the fall of Rome along the Ohio and wrested its
rule from care encumbered men who trusted in vows and walls instead of
shorter spears.

If this be true, and nothing proposed seems more likely, then the memory
of much suffering and sad fated planters and fort makers is redeemed
from the reproach of wasted effort. For their golden gift, their brave
bequest, the proudest plant, the goodliest grain of the New World, the
kingly corn, easy and quick to raise, and also easy and long to keep,
has done more than its kings to prosper the world.

Having accomplished their sublimely simple destiny of planting corn on
the Ohio, and having no nobler part to play, the Mound Builders vanished
amid the deep dismay of dire defeat. While reflecting on their awful
extirpation, gratitude should be mingled with the sympathy due to the
little offending and much enduring race. As charity covers a multitude
of sins, so their great respect for the dead who must have been loved
exceedingly, palliates whatever else was wrong. In holding the counrty
long with no harmful effect and in leaving it with a lasting blessing,
they only met the frequent fate of suffering most for doing best. To him
seeking oracles and hoping answers to make us less forlorn, History
answers; The thorns are many but the flower is fair. The evolution of
perfection is painful. Every change to larger plans---from moss to blue
grass-- from trilobites to Indians-- from Indians to railroads -- has
involved the forced supplanting of something weak by something stronger.
Measured by the standards of some unhappy because their greed is greater
than their mead, the want or plenty of a tribal feast equally shared by
all should be ideal of impartial fortune. But those harping about the
happy long ago or those mooning about a reign of earthly fraternity will
learn nothing from those oldest memorials to prove mankind is lapsing
from innocense or approaching a promise of safety from human passions.

The race with time no longer beckoning with a blunted scythe but armed
with urgent lightenings gives scant chance to saunter by the ancient
mounds and linger for harmless tales of when the world was very young.
All such curious lore, however entertaining, can be, at best, but
speculative and inconclusive. Still, there is a grave pleasure in the
study of the rare and broken proofs of a perished people. As we climb
them utmost toil we can but wonder whether they were prompted by war or
worship. As we look upon the rude memorials of their plundered graves,
we gather new lessons on the transient nature of all our schemes. As we
chance upon the shapely flints that tipped their darts, we can but guess
whether their last swift flight was forced by hunger or vegeance. We
poise their axes with a subtle thought that they were far fitter to
destroy than to prolong life. We stand by cabinets containing more of
their weapons and utensils than a tribe possessed, and we muse with
compassion for the pitiful
beings that depended upon such meager mechanism in the cruel strife with
their relentless fate. But thus musing we kindle with admiration for
their brave defiance of the doom that made them die fighting for the
beautiful land they could not hold. 

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Tid Bits continued in part 69.