Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/28

 or ashes of the great man for whom it was intended. The exploration has considerably lowered the mound, it being now about sixty feet in height.

"Fort Ancient, on the Little Miami, is a good specimen of the military defenses of the Mount-Builders. It is well located on a long, high, narrow, precipitons ridge. The parapets are now from ten to eighteen feet high, and its perimeter is sufficient to hold twenty thousand fighting men. Another prominent example of their works exists near Newark, Licking County. This collection presents a great variety of figures, circles, rectangles, octagons and parallel banks, or highways, covering more than a thousand acres. The county fair-ground is permanently located within an ancient circle, a quarter of a mile in diameter, with an embankment and interior ditch. Its highest place was over twenty feet from the top of the moat to the bottom of the ditch."

One of the most curious-shaped works in this county is known- as the "Alligator," fi-om its sup- posed resemblance to that creature. When measured, several years ago, while in a good state of preservation, its dimensions were two hundred and ten feet in length, average width over sixty feet, and height, at the highest point, seven feet. It appears to be mainly composed of clay, and is overgrown with grass.

Speaking of the writing of these people. Col. Whittlesey says: "There is no evidence that they had alphabetical characters, picture-writing or hieroglyphics, though they must have had some mode of recording events. Neither is there any proof that they used domestic animals for tilling the soil, or for the purpose of erecting the imposing earthworks they have left. A very coarse cloth of hemp, flax or nettles has been found on their burial-hearths and around skeletons not consumed by fire.

"The most extensive earthworks occupy many of the sites of modern towns, and are always in the vicinity of excellent land. Those about the lakes are generally irregular earth forts, while those about the rivers in the southern part of the State are generally altars, pyramids, circles, cones and rectangles of earth, among which fortresses or strongholds are exceptions.

"Those on the north may not have been contemporary or have been built by the same people. They are far less prominent or extensive, which indicates a people less in numbers as well as industry, and whose principal occupation was war among themselves or against their neighbors. This style of works extends eastward along the south shore of Lake Ontario, through New York. In Ohio, there is a space along the water-shed, between the lake and the Ohio, where there are few, if any, ancient earthworks. It appears to have been a vacant or neutral ground between different nations.

"The Indians of the North, dressed in skins, cultivated the soil very sparingly, and manufactured no woven cloth. On Lake Superior, there are ancient copper mines wrought by the Mound- Builders over fifteen hundred years ago." Copper tools are occasionally found tempered sufficiently hard to cut the hardest rocks. No knowledge of such tempering exists now. The Indians can give no more knowledge of the ancient mines than they can of the mounds on the river bottoms.

"The Indians did not occupy the. ancient earthworks, nor did they construct such. They were found as they are now — a hunter race, wholly averse to labor. Their abodes were in rock shelters in caves, or in temporary sheds of bark and boughs, or skins, easily moved from place to place. Like most savage races, their habits are unchangeable; at least, the example of white men, and their effi^rts during three centuries, have made little, if any, impression."

When white men came to the territory now em- braced in the State of Ohio, they found dwelling here the Iroquois, Delawares, Shawanees, Miamis, Wyandots and Ottawas. Each nation was com- posed of several tribes or clans, and each was often at war with the others. The first mentioned of these occupied that part of the State whose northern boundary was Lake Erie, as far west as the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, where the city of Cleveland now is; thence the boundary turned southward in an irregular line, until it touched the Ohio River, up which stream it continued to the Pennsylvania State line, and thence northward to the lake. This nation were the implacable foes of the French, owing to the fact that Champlain, in 1609, made war against them. They occupied a large part of New York and Pennsylvania, and were the most insatiate conquerors among the aljorigines. When the French first came to the lakes, these monsters of the wilderness were engaged in a war against their neighbors, a war that ended in their concjuering them, possessing their territory, and absorbing the remnants of the tribes into their own nation. At the date of Champlain 's visit, the southern shore of Lake Erie was occupied by the Eries, or, as the orthography of the word is