Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/625

Rh its own independence, an almost constant warfare against its neighbors" ("Smithsonian Contributions," vol. i, p. 44).

2. The mound-builders occupied the entire country from Lake Superior, at least, on the north, to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and from the Alleghanies, at least, on the east, to the Sierras on the west. This is demonstrated not so much by the distribution of the mounds—though they are said by Lewis and Clark to occur on the upper waters of the Missouri, and, by Mr. A. Barrandt, in the valley of the Yellowstone—as by the existence of copper implements from Lake Superior in the same mounds with mica from the Alleghanies, pearls from the Gulf shores and. from the Carolinas, and sharks' teeth from the cretaceous beds of the South and. West.

3. They were an agricultural people, of generally homogeneous customs, habits, religion, and government, each tribe carrying on a trade with surrounding tribes, and some of them with distant tribes.

4. They worked copper in a cold state, having no knowledge of iron, nor of the methods of smelting any of the ores of the metals by the aid of fire.

5. They built extensive earthworks and mounds, both for purposes of warfare and for sepulture.

6. They exhibited very frequently a remarkable flattening of the shin-bone (platycnemism).

7. They made a coarse kind of cloth, by twisting and weaving the fibers and bast of various plants.

8. They made pottery of clay, which they hardened by burning, and rudely ornamented with figures of animals, or by simpler lining.

9. They wrought stone, making axes, arrow and spear heads, knives, wedges, pestles, discoidal stones, tubes, pipes, beads; and they had a high regard for mirrors of mica.

10. They made rude sculptures, in stone and burned clay, of animals and of the human face.

11. They had no knowledge of writing by the use of an alphabet, nor hieroglyphics; but sometimes resorted to pictures to convey information.

12. They employed shells, pearls, sharks' teeth, obsidian, copper, silver, steatite, black and mottled slate, mica, coralline limestone, the bones of some animals, and some other minerals, especially galena and hematite, for making articles of personal adornment.

13. Besides rude sculptures of most of the present animals of the larger types, the elephant (or mastodon) was also known to them, as evinced by the "elephant-mound" in western Wisconsin, by the