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Rh previously to the visit of the authors. It is said to have contained a stone vault, in which were discovered human crania, &c. These were very badly decayed. A sandstone mortar and arrow-points were also found. The burial seems to have been in a sitting posture.

9. The first eight mounds are in a right line, but No. 9 is 60 feet east of No. 8. It was 5 feet high, and yielded nothing upon exploration.

 

The only ancient remains in Ralls County, so far as known to the writers, are what are commonly called mounds. They are located on Salt River, a western tributary of the Mississippi, passing through townships 55 and 56, in ranges 5, 6, and 7 west of the fifth prime meridian.

The mounds are invariably found within less than a mile of a stream affording a permanent water supply. They are always in the bottoms or on the crests of bluffs and ridges, bordered either by the streams or the bottom lands, mostly by the latter.

It is impossible to state what changes have taken place in the course of the streams since the erection of the mounds, but doubtless in some places they have been very great. The growth of timber is universally the same on the mounds and in the surrounding forests.

Occasionally a single one is found, but they are almost invariably in groups, numbering from 3 to 10, and sometimes more. Commonly they follow the crest of the ridge, but when they occur in the bottoms or on a level bluff they are found in direct lines or in gentle curves, extending generally east and west. They exist in large numbers in almost every bottom and on nearly every bluff, on both sides of the river, throughout the entire county, as well as on its branches near the main stream.

The mounds are usually circular in ground plan, and rise above the present level from 2 to 12 feet. They are composed either wholly of earth, wholly of stone, or of the two combined. Where stone was used at all, the plan seems to have been first to pave the natural surface with flat stones in one or two thicknesses for a foundation. In one case the stones were thrown together indiscriminately. Peculiar constructions will be more fully noted in the descriptions given below of mounds examined by the present writers.

The stones were procured from the beds of the neighboring streams or from beneath the bluffs. Barely can it be determined whence the earth was taken, there being only one example where there was any indication of the removal of the earth in the vicinity.

