A reaping match; "The rivalry was a matter of strength

and agility"

The traveling schoolmaster. Initial

A sunrise court during the "Toledo War"

The road to Liberty; a station on the Underground

Morgan's raiders; "Their thieving had neither order nor

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205

219

225

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has watched the coming and the going of new peoples, who fought some of their bitterest battles in its sight; and it has witnessed the rise of a last and greatest people whose genius has in the space of one hundred years transformed a wilderness into a great and prosperous State.

The river has, indeed, now and then attempted

10 VIMU

to tell us something of the earlier time by laying bare with its gentle yet persistent touch some fragment of metal or pottery long hidden in the earth. But the witnesses thus called from the mysterious past have disclosed but little; and the mute ruins in which they lay buried, though torn with pick and spade, have held their secret well. Unless the river shall speak more plainly, these ruins, covered first by forests and then by cities, must continue to taunt us with that rather comfortless possession, a half-told story; a story of which we know neither the beginning nor the end.

From these middle chapters of the story what do we learn? Not much that helps us to understand the part that went before, or the part that came after, yet a great deal that must excite our interest and wonder. We learn that an active, intelligent, and widely-scattered race occupied the great valley of the Ohio thousands of years before our own race found the Indians in possession; that this nameless people had certain instincts and habits very different from the instincts and habits of the Indians as we have known them; that its ways of cultivating the ground were larger and more careful than were the methods known to have been practiced by the Indians, who usually left agriculture to those who did the kitchen work; that it opened the ground, found its salts and metals, and shaped

furnaces, tools, vessels and ornaments, all of a more perfect kind than those formed by the later inhabitants of the valley; that its village organization was more complex, and its houses, public places and fortifications more exact, secure and permanent than those made use of by its successors; that it was, in fact, less given to roaming, more domestic, and more advanced in respect to many of those traits which go to make up what we are accustomed to describe as civilization.

On the other hand, these ancient remains, which are scattered in greatest number over the Ohio Valley, do not contain anything to prove that these people of the past were not also, in a great many other respects, very much like the modern Indian. Their tastes were evidently higher, their methods of living, from our standpoint, greatly superior; yet we cannot say, with knowledge, that they were in any proper sense a distinct race, that they were much, if any different, from what we might expect the Indian to have become had he abandoned his nomadic ways and settled down for any time. Both did many things in the same way, particularly where religion was concerned. Thus they both buried their dead in mounds; though the ancient "Mound-builders," as they are commonly called, usually raised iarger and more symmetrical heaps, which we may readily believe were built to serve a purpose other than

often

that of covering the dead; at least these very occupied positions suggesting their use as watchtowers. Raised at a point commanding a broad view, they would have proved a useful adjunct of the carefully-arranged earthworks — embankments, ditches, causeways, sunken and underground passages which have been found near them.*

Whether the foe against which these elaborate defenses were erected at last crushed and scattered the people that raised them, or whether some other impulse or necessity depopulated these entrenchments, the real story of the "mounds" remains as much a mystery as does the origin and the decline of the race that reared them. The red man who was afterwards found in this region had no record or tradition that might render the mystery of the race which he had superseded less complete.†

*Mounds and ancient works were found, and are, in most cases, still to be traced, at or near Cincinnati, Miamisburg, Marietta, Newberg, Liberty, Paint Creek, Potsmouth, Dayton, Salem, Lancaster, Somerset, Circleville, Worthfield, Brush Creek, and at numerous other points throughout the State. Sculptured stone images have been found at Columbus, Cincinnati and elsewhere, and sculptured markings in various other localities in the State.

Unlike the modern burial heaps of the Indian, the ancient mounds have often been found to contain the remains of a single body, undoubtedly that of sonie person of prominence, together with curious trinkets and utensils of metal, crystal, sea shells, etc. In a mound near Lancaster, in the midst of a heap of other skeletons, was one of a child with a string of beads about the neck; while in another at Chillicothe, was made the strange discovery, on the breast of a solitary body, of a piece of copper in the shape of a cross. The whole valley is sown with these strange human relics. All sorts of earthworks, and not the mounds alone, appear to have been used for sepulchre.

+ The Indians have various traditions as to their origin, but none that has actually made the past any clearer to us. Perhaps the only link is their belief in an origin somewhere to the West. That the Mound-builders, so called, had a Western origin, perhaps in Asia, is frequently held; and the theory is in some degree borne out by the location and character of the ancient remains. But all such speculation has a very slender basis. For the latest study of this interesting subject see Chap. I. Brooks's "Story of the American Indian."