Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/47

 CHAPTER II

HE mounds of these first Americans of which we know are found between Oregon and the Wyoming valley, in Pennsylvania, and Onondaga county in New York; they extend from Manitoba in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

The great seat of empire was in the drainage area of the Mississippi river; on this river and its tributaries were the heaviest mound-building populations. Few mounds are found east of the Alleghany mountains.

In the Catalogue of Prehistoric Works East of the Rocky Mountains, issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, the geographical extent and density of the mounds in central North America is brought out state by state with striking suggestiveness. While the layman is