Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/229

Rh that stock controlled it till the last incursion of the Ojibway from Lake Superior, when, with the great battle of Kathio, another culminating event of the hereditary war took place. This brings us to recent time in Minnesota and it is not necessary to enter upon later tragic events.

There is still, however, one other point to which I wish to refer, viz., in coming to Minnesota those mound-builders who ascended the Mississippi above the mouth of the Wisconsin River returned to their former home. They may have recognized it as the scene of their first defeat by the Lenape, and probably some of them remained there and resumed the construction of mounds. It is admitted by all who have given attention to the subject that the effigy mounds are of a class distinct from and older than the tumuli that are scattered amongst them and which prevail in Minnesota and Dakota. The Winnebago may have been effigy-builders when the Lenape crossed the Mississippi. If so, they must have fled northward from their enemies, instead of southward, and thus escaped the fate of their kindred. They perhaps remained in southern Wisconsin during the whole Lenap'Alligewi war, and so probably welcomed the fugitives on their return. This may account for that curious geographical extension of the Dakota stock on the east of the Mississippi in a narrow tongue reaching Lake Michigan; and it also accounts for the fact that linguistically the Winnebago dialect is one of the oldest of the Siouan stock found in the upper Mississippi region; and further, that the Winnebago are called "grandfathers" by the other tribes.

Thus it appears that the mound-builder dynasty was divided into two parts by a great national misfortune. The Ohio dynasty endured a long period of time. It was probably coeval with the effigy mound-building period or closely followed it. The Minnesota dynasty is comparatively recent, and was short, at the utmost not exceeding 500 years, and extended down to the incoming of the whites.

In conclusion, I can make the merest reference to another prehistoric migration affecting Minnesota, of later date than the preceding. It is well established by coherent and reliable tradition that the Hidatsa Indians, associates of the Mandans on the upper Missouri, also called Minnitari, of the same stock as the Mandans, migrated from Minnesota across the prairie and settled with the Mandans.

We see then that the succession of dynasties in Minnesota is as follows:

1. Algonquian (small area in the southeast also held by the Ohio mound-builders).

2. Siouan, fugitives from Ohio (establishing the Minnesota dynasty of mound-builders).

3. Ojibwa (Algonquian) incursion from Lake Superior, dividing the state with the Siouan people.

4. Aryan civilization.