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90 were proof against all civilizing influences. At length, about the year 1843, forty or fifty men, women, and children—the sole remnant of this tribe, which twenty-one years before numbered nearly a thousand souls—emigrated to Mexico, and were permitted to settle in the interior of the State of Tamaulipas. At this time it is not improbable that the Carancaways are almost, if not quite, extinct. I am unable to ascertain whether any of the other tribes mentioned before in this paper are also verging on extinction, but it is well known that they have all rapidly diminished in numbers since they came in contact with civilization, and the conclusion is inevitable that in a score or two of years all the smaller tribes will become as extinct as the mammoth and the mastodon that preceded them.

 

Three mounds are to be seen in township 17, range 1 west, of Jefferson County, about 4 miles north of Birmingham, and west of the South and North Alabama Railroad, in that portion of Jones Valley through which flows Village Creek from east to west. They are on the north side of the creek where it is forded, on the Birmingham and Huntsville wagon road, and west of the machinery and buildings of the Birmingham Water Works Company about 1 mile. The largest of them is nearest to, and visible from, this road toward the west. The one, which is the most southerly of the group, appears to be about 30 feet high, conical, and about 100 feet in diameter at its base; the others, distant from it and from each other, about 300 yards, are not in a direct line with each other. The second one north has not one-third the dimension of the first, and the third is much smaller than the second. They are situated on the plain of one of the most fertile tracts of land in Jones Valley, which has been cultivated for more than fifty years.

Five Mile Creek, also flowing from east to west, through the hills, from out of this Jones anticlinal Valley, along the base of low ridges of Millstone Grit, bordering the Warrior Coal Field on the southeast, being crossed at Boyles Gap, on the South and North Alabama Railroad, places these mounds between two streams, abounding in fish, and tributary to the Black Warrior River. Their immediate locality is unsurpassed by any other region of the State for number, size, clearness, and coolness of the springs, issuing from out both the ridges of Silurian quartzites, and beds of limestone outcropping in the valley. They have been injured to some extent by hunters and farming operations, particularly the smallest one, but the largest one has oaks and other trees of large dimensions on it, growing without thriving. No explorations having been made of any of them, their arrangement and composition remain unknown.

