Page:Oregon, her history, her great men, her literature.djvu/240

 that placed their dead in these mounds* or when the mounds were huflt, is not known. But it is believed that the mounds are so ancient that th^ may haye been in use as retreats for human beings long before the channels of the Willamette and the Calapooia rivers had worn deep enough to prevent the overflow of the lands during the wet season; also that the mounds were built by a race that inhabited this country before the Indians lived here; and it is suggested that in some respects the system of worship of the people who built the mounds vras similar to that of the most ancient peoples known to history.

Significance of Oregon Mounds. Because of numerous points of resemblance, the mounds of Oregon and those of

the Middle States and France appear to belong to the same system as the mounds of Mexico and the pyramids of Egypt. All were modeled <ifter the mounds or pyramids of some country; and while it is commonly believed that the pyrannds ot Esi^ypL antedate the mounds of our continent, there is on the contrary a possibility that the Oregon mounds antedate the pyramids of Egypt and the mounds of Europe and Asia, and that the rest of the world are only emigrants from America. Should the latter theory eventually become established, it would lend color to the belief of Agassiz that "First born among the continents, though so much later in culture and civilization, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the 'New World.* Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea. America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the 'Far West'." The prehistoric burial mounds of Oregon when sufficiently explored, may, therefore, prove valuable in determininii: the relative ages of America and the grauid divisions of the Eastern Continent.