Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 23.djvu/117

Rh The only inhabitants found here by the white race were uncivilized Indians.

They found no ancient cities of stone or brick, or other structures, such as were found in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. They discovered no mag- nificent ruins of ancient architecture rivaling that of Egypt ; no buried cities with stuccoed walls of once beau- tiful temples ; no pyramids standing out as silent memor- ials of a vanished civilization, as in Mexico, Central America and Peru. They found here Indians, called then the Callapuyas, and others in the Oregon country, apparently a cross between Japanese or northeastern Siberian savages, and some unknown race, and having no knowledge whatever of the mounds which dotted the plains of the Calipooia or of those along the Willamette. At the advent of the white men here the Callapuya In- dians roamed from the headwaters of the Calipooia river in the Cascades in eastern Linn county, to the Great Falls of the Willamette, now the present site of Oregon City. Northward and eastward from the Great Falls were the Chinooks, Cowlitz, Walla Wallas, Chickeeles, Clalams, Nisquallys, Pischoos, Flatheads, Kootamies, Nez Perces, Cayuses, Shoshones, Snakes, Punosh and Boonacks, while along the coast of the Pacific were the Kilamukes and Janocs. Southward from the Callapuyas were the Um- quas, Shastes, Klamets, Lutuans and Poliaks. The Ore- gon country then, in 1842, comprised all the land be- tween the Rocky mountains and the Pacific ocean lying north of the forty-second parallel, and extending to 54 degrees and 40 minutes north latitude, but afterwards reduced by compromise between the United States and Great Britain to the forty-ninth parallel.

From an exhaustive Smithsonian publication edited by Dr. H. C. Yarrow, we learn the mortuary customs of all the Indians of North America, with numerous illus- trations giving pictures of their different modes of burial

but no modern Indians erected mounds to their dead, although many prehistoric burial mounds are found east of the Rocky mountains.

To write of the various prehistoric burial mounds found over the surface of the earth would make several volumes, but this essay is intended only to establish the origin of the prehistoric mounds of Oregon.

The aborigines who built the prehistoric mounds of Siberia and of Japan could easily have come to America by crossing Bering strait, which is only about 30 miles wide between the East Cape of Asia and the Cape of Prince of Wales in North America; and the island of Diomede, situated in Bering strait about half way be- tween the capes, with other smaller islands adjacent, makes the connection practically only a swimming dis- tance for man or beast. Again canoes from Japan have been known to drift to the Pacific coast with the Japa- nese gulf stream, a mighty river of warm water, which plows from near Japan across the Pacific ocean to the Oregon and Alaskan shores. Geologists inform us that not many years ago, where now the northern islands of Japan and the promontory of the Peninsula of Kamchatka nearly connect, there was then solid land which extended by the way of the Aleutian archipelago to North America. I now conclude by pointing out the similarity of the prehistoric mounds of Oregon with those of Siberia and Japan.

Several mounds along the Calipooia and Willamette rivers near Albany have been explored sufficiently to state that they are prehistoric burial mounds. They are not as high as some in Japan or Siberia, but there are prehistoric burial mounds, both in Siberia and in the northern islands of the Japanese empire of the same size and dimensions as found here. The rude stone hoes or wooden implements to dig or convey dirt in the Neolithic age were doubtless one drawback to building mounds of

very great height, and again burial mounds for the ordi- nary chief were not constructed so high as for a king or a mikado. The burial mounds of Oregon are only about four feet above the level and are from 75 to 150 feet in diameter. These mounds in western Oregon were prob- ably much higher when first built, but being composed of the rich soil of the land adjoining, soon settled and the storms of centuries have leveled them to their present low elevation, but the remains therein found prove them to be the burial mound of a chief of the stone age. The fire beds showing remains of ashes and charcoal over the chief skeleton in the mound furnish the reason for the preservation of the skeleton of him in whose honor the mound was erected.

On some of the larger mounds along the Willamette river great fir trees have grown with rings indicating an age of more than 300 years, one in a mound close to the Calipooia river having 275 rings by actual count. To de- scribe one of the burial mounds of the Calipooia will be sufficient to serve as an index of what may be found in others. In one of the mounds up the Calipooia river not far from Albany was found near the center, at the base or extreme bottom, a human skeleton buried in clay and over it the remains of charcoal, ashes, burnt soil, mingled with pieces of burnt or scorched fragments of bone of animals, indicating a sacrificial fire and feast. Some well executed obsidian arrow heads, evidently of the secondary Neolithic age, and several pieces of the antlers of deer were found in the mound, about 15 pieces of native copper beaten thin and rolled into hollow tubes each from two to about four inches long, and with a hole passing through lengthwise, the whole fastened or held together by means of a small buckskin string, there being two strings of these copper ornaments, the whole constituting a double necklace, and while the string in places