USA > Indiana > Biographical and historical cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong counties, Pennsylvania > Part 2
USA > Pennsylvania > Armstrong County > Biographical and historical cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong counties, Pennsylvania > Part 2
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Fortified Heights .- The second great class in the east are chiefly found in Georgia ; where, in one section of the State, all defensible moun- tains were fortified by this extinct race. Mt. Yond, 4000 feet high, and Stone mountain, 2360 feet high, were fortified with stone rolled and heaped, and built up into defensive walls.
What tools did they employ in the construc- tion of their great works? Revealed by the plow-share, unearthed from the mound, brought up from the half-hidden pit and concealed hiding-place, they are comprised, according to material, of two classes, stone and copper. Of stone, a rude flint chipped in shape of a spade to which a handle was attached was used for digging. Flint spades, axes, tomahawks, chis- els, wedges and knives constituted their tools of stone; while as weapons of stone, they had arrow and spear-heads, besides pipes, tubes, pestles, pendants, sinkers and ornaments. Of copper, rudely hammered out, were tools, such as axes, hammers and spoons, weapons and ornaments obtained by working mines on Lake Superior, where a block of copper weighing six tons was discovered some years ago, that they had commenced to take out, with their rude stone and copper tools lying by its side. They used bone and horn to make cups and spoons, clay and shells to make ceramic ware, and wood to make clubs and rude mauls.
Tools and weapons were found in a mound at Marietta, Ohio, on whose top trees were
growing thirty years ago, and their age was es- timated at eight hundred years. This calcula- tion would give 1050 A.D. as the time when the mound was in existence, whether built ear- lier or not.
There were found at Moundsville, West Vir- ginia, in the great mound of that place, ivory beads and copper bracelets, and a singular hieroglyphical stone incribed with characters in the aucient rock alphabet of 16 right and acute angled single strokes used by the Pelasgi and other early Mediterranean nations. Standing on an elevated plain 75 feet above the level of the Ohio river it was connected by low earthen intrenchments with other mounds. They took in a well, walled up with rough stones; and back on a high hill were found the ruins of a stone tower, apparently a watch-tower, built of rough undressed stones laid np without mortar. A similar tower stands on a high Grave creek hill, and one across the Ohio river on a high projecting promontory. The three towers seem to have been built as watch-towers, or sentinel out-looks for the numerous mounds dotting this elevated plain. Howe says: "On the Green Bottom in Cabell and Mason counties vestiges of a large city, with traces of laid-out streets running to the Ohio river, covering the space of a half mile, were once visible."
Why left this mighty race this great empire ? Did war from the Indian, famine or fever, waste them ? Or sought they a southern clime more warm than glows beneath our Northern skies ?
None with certainty can tell. Cusick gives us Indian tradition, that the Indians drove them sonth 2000 years before Columbus came, and that the Mound-builders came from the south ; which might have been either Louisiana or Mexi- co ; but there are many things to impair the story. Theory favors, but certainly does not stamp, the conclusion that the Mound-builders were the ancestors of the Aztecs and Toltecs, and obeying a migratory impulse, sweeping forward and south ward to the plains of Mexico and Peru,
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established themselves under the reign of em- peror and the rule of inca.
Leaving this country, these mounds may have been the rude model-structures of idcas they developed into those wonderful structures that greeted the greedy eyes of Cortez and Pizarro. The introduction of stoue iuto their mound-structures here must have represented an idea of progress-an experimental mode of a proposed change, whose consummation might have been achieved in the great halls, cities, temples and aqueducts of the Montezumas.
The Mound-builders' age stands as the twi- light of American's earliest civilization. On its close fell a night of barbarism, resting all over the land and extending to the coming of Co- lumbus, the dawn of America's latest and the world's brightest civilization.
The Mound-builders in Indiana and Arm- strong must have come up the Allegheny river in conformity with the great law that governed the race, in following the rivers and settling in their valleys. All evidence tends to sustain their coming up the Allegheny from the site of Pittsburgh or down that river from Lake Chau- tauqua, New York, where they had extensive settlements. The absence of forts, the indispensa- ble accompaniment of their established settle- ments would indicate their intention of but temporary residence, while the bones in their interment mounds would show temporary occu- pation for many years; no doubt made for hunting the game then wonderfully abundant in the Allegheny Valley. The bones of chil- dren in the mounds and the remains of ancient pottery found prove that they brought their families and lived on the river close to their burial mounds while temporarily here.
The early settlers paid but little attention to the. Mound-builders' ruins aud generally re- garded them as the work of the Indians, hence but little trace has been preserved of them. Onc of the forts and mounds of the Mound-builders was in West Wheatfield township, and is de-
scribed in Cauldwell's History of Indiana county as follows : " A few miles uorthi from the river, on the old Sides farm, stands 'Fort Hill.' The traditions tell us that it was known as such to George Finley and the early settlers on the river. The soil of the hill is very rich, and till 1817 or 1818, it was nearly all covered with an improved forest. In the early part of the century the outlines of a fort were dis- tinctly marked, being slightly elevated. On the inside were several mounds." In Scott's Gazetteer of 1806 we read the following : " In Wheatfield township, Westmoreland county, Pa., is a remarkable mound, from which sev- eral strange specimens of art have been taken. One was a stoue serpent five inches in diameter, part of the entablature of a column, both rudely carved in the form of diamonds and leaves ; and also an earthen urn with ashes." The mound above alluded to was on the inside of the fort. Beside the articles aforementioned, there were found at an early date, fragments of pottery of a much finer texture than that made by the Indians ; stones of peculiar shape, both carved and hollowed, as if intended for utensils for cooking purposes or receptacles. The latter were both large and small.
Smith in his history of Armstrong county, page 254, makes mention of an ancient earth- work on Pine creek supposed by some to be the work of Mound-builders. On page 288 hc gives an account of another fortified work in Cow- anshannock township enclosing an acre and a half of land. It was circular in form, had a wall some five feet high, and was surrounded with a trench. Mr. Smith describes (page 313) a military fortification and out-works in Manor township. It was on the left bank of the Allegheny river, and on some of its parapets were growing trees that were over 300 years in age. Numerous relics were found near it, aud everything seems to warrant it of pre-historic origin.
That the Mound-builders were cremationists
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is beyond doubt. This is established by the ap- pearance of the bones, which everywhere show the action of fire, as well as by the ashes and charcoal found. Most probably they placed the corpses in a sitting posture, and piled wood around them and fired it. On the remains earth was thrown. The dead were placed in one at a time. When one of their people died, the mound was opened, the corpse was placed be- side the one last put in, and the fiery process repeated. A careful examination of the bones show no traces of death by violence, and seems to contradict the theory that all the dead in their mounds were slain in great battles.
From a mound, the writer obtained a strange skull out of the top layer of bones. Digging down, we came upon several skulls in the bot- tom layer, but could not get them out, as they crumbled to pieces in our hands ; finally the top of one was secured, and where the sutures meet on top of the Caucasian head, they were prevented in this head by a small bone of about one inch in length by one half inch in width, of a peculiar shape. All the other skulls possessed this same peculiar bone. The top of the skull secured and the others that crumbled, showed the heads of the race to have been long and narrow, with low foreheads, and long narrow faces.
The Hon. James C. McGrew and others, in 1834, excavated this mound, and found in it a peculiar shaped stone pipe, and a very peculiar stone relic in the shape of an hour-glass, which was mechanically constructed, neatly dressed, and capable of being used for the purpose of recording time. It might have been captured and placed in the mound for safe keeping by an Indian ; as the Mound-builder is supposed to have left Asia when the sun-dial was used, and before the invention and the introduction of the hour-glass. Fragments of ancient pottery have been plowed up close to these mounds, similar in appearance to the ancient ware described in the " Antiqui- ties of the West " and the " Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley."
The fate of the Mound-builders of the Alle- gheny Valley must have been the same as that of their whole race. When the race left the Mississippi Valley, those of the Allegheny Valley forsook their summer hunting-ground here, and added their numbers to swell the migratory columns again in motion toward sun- nier regions farther south.
Savage Period : Indians .- Twilight deepens- the Mound-builder is retreating. Night darkens -the Indian is advancing. Whence comes he ? One theory credits the Indians as being descend- ants of the Jews. Succeeding theories blended them with the Carthagenians, traced them to the Phenicians, derived them from the Egyptians, rendered them of the Grecians, established them of the Romans, gave them origin of the North- men, and made them natives of the soil. The best supported and most plausible theory of their origin is that they are of Mongolian extraction ; that while the wave of population in-the old world was from east to west, in the new world it was from north to south ; that the Indian was the second wave of population from Asia following in the track of the first wave, -the Mound-builder who was then leaving this country and sweeping southward to the plains of Mexico and Peru.
The first fact in favor of the Indians being of Mongolian extraction is that all their traditions state that they came from the North.
The second is the grammatical affinity of all the Indian languages constituting the sixth or American group of languages, which in princi- ple of formation and grammatical construction bears unquestionable resemblance to the Tartar or third group of languages, which is one of the two great language families of the Mongolian race.
The Indian occupation of the United States admits of two theories : first, a peaceable pos- session ; second, a forcible possession. The first is the most likely, as the Mound-builders were a semi-civilized race, and from their great works
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HISTORICAL SKETCH OF
it is fair to presume as strong in numbers as the Indian invaders. But it is fair presump- tion, that between the inferior-advancing and the superior-retreating races, the clash of mor- tal conflict would be inevitable. The with- drawal of the Mound-builder from the field of battle after repulsing his Indian foe, to resume his southward journey, would give to the Indian the idea that his enemy had fled; and on this his tradition of conquest, repeated to white prisoners in 1754-55 ,was undoubtedly founded.
The Indians east of the Mississippi were tall, and straight as arrows, with long, coarse, black hair, which they generally kept shaved off, except the scalp lock ; high cheek bones and black piercing eyes. Their limbs were supple by exercise and their muscles hardened by con- stant exposure to the weather.
Their dress was the skins of wild animals, smoked or tanned with the brains of the animals killed. Their wigwams were poles stuck in the ground and bent together at the top, covered with chestnut and birch bark. Their weapons, war-clubs, bows and arrows and stone tomahawks, until they procured iron tomahawks and guns from the white traders. Their boats were log and birch bark canoes.
Their religion was the worship of the Great Spirit, and they believed there was a happy hunting-ground in the spirit-land beyond the mountains of the setting sun, where brave war- riors went at death and pursued the chase for- ever and ever ; but which no coward was ever permitted to enter.
Their laws were the customs handed down in the traditions of the old men. An offense against custom was punished by exclusion from society. If the offense was murder, it was punished by the nearest kinsman of the slain. Their legislation was enacted by the grand council called together by the chief of the tribe upon the urgency or necessity of the occasion, where the disposition of all questions rested upon the votes of the whole tribe, and where,
commencing with the chief, all had a right to speak.
Each tribe had its head chief or sachem. The succession of this office was sometimes hereditary, even in the elevation of a queen ; sometimes was bestowed for ability and bravery upon a warrior of another tribe, if he was living with them and was brave and daring. Each tribe had its medicine man, who, in addition to gath- ering herbs to effect cures, was its historian, teaching the young braves the traditions of their fathers, and to count time by the moon-as so many moons ago such a thing happened. Some tribes could only count up to ten, others up to ten thousand. The medicine man and the old men taught the young brave never to forgive an injury or to forget a kindness. They taught him that sternness was a virtue and tears were womanish, and if captured and burning at the stake to let no torture draw a groan or sigh from him ; but to taunt his enemies, recite his deeds of prowess, and sing his death-song. He was also taught that the great object of life was to distinguish himself in war and to slay his enemies. He was taught to be faithful to any treaty he made; and to use any deceit or prac- tice any treachery upon an enemy was honor- able, and that it was no disgrace to kill an enemy wherever found, even if unarmed.
Marriage among the Indians was attended with but little ceremony. An Indian could have several wives at one time if he wished, but seldom had more than one. The husband fur- nished the meat by hunting, and the wife or squaw raised the corn and did all the work. The husband when at home did not labor, so his limbs would not be stiffened, but would remain supple for war and the chase. The husband could leave his wife when he pleased, but on separation the children remained with the wife, and she kept the wigwam and had the privi- lege to marry again.
The Indian copied after the Mound-builder. He used flint to make his arrow and spear-
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heads, and stone to make his tomahawks, ham- mers, pestles and ornaments ; clay and shells to make his pottery ware, but failed to work copper, and had lost all trace of the mines left by the Mound-builders. The stone-grave cham- ber of the Mound-builder suggested the stone- pile grave of the Indian. Stones of memorial constituted the second class of Indian stone heaps. They were thrown up in heaps at the crossing of trails, and on the summit of some mountain, and each Indian that passed added a stone. " Lawson's Carolina," published in 1709, at page 309, makes mention of the Indians in the South piling up these memorial heaps. They were piled up in Asia by the Hindoos, according to " Coleman's Hindoo Mythology," page 271.
The earliest mention we have of memorial stones was when the Children of Israel passed over Jordan, and Joshua pitched twelve stones as a memorial heap in Gilgal, to commemorate Israel's passing over on dry land. Joshua 4 : 22. And the earliest mention we have of stones piled over the dead is in II Samuel 18 : 17, when Ab- salom was cast into a great pit and a great heap of stones laid on him.
Stone circles existed as the third class of the Indians' stone-heaps, being stones piled in a great circle and sometimes placed standing, in- side of which the East Virginia Indians gath- ered and went through a great many ceremon- ies, according to Berkly's History of Virginia, page 164.
The Indians of the United States were divided into eight grcat families: Algonquin, Iroquois, Catawbas, Cherokees, Uchees, Mobilians, Natches and Dacotahs or Sioux. The great plains, the Rocky mountains and the Pacific coast were in possession of powerful tribes not in the above division. Each family was divided into numer- ous tribes, and these tribes were generally en- gaged in bloody wars witlı each other.
The Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians came about 1700 into the territory of Indiana and
Armstrong counties on account of the game, and were soon followed by the Shawanees from east- ern Pennsylvania, where they had settled in 1677 when driven out of Georgia and South Carolina. These two tribes were the tenants at will of the Allegheny Valley, which was under the dominion of the Six Nations of New York, who were called by De Witt Clinton the Romans of America, and whose council resembled the Wittenagamott of the Saxons.
The Delawares and Shawanees did not have many villages, were chiefly hunters and a more complete account of them will be found in the description of the French and Indian war and in the individual histories of the two counties.
Cusick gives the following tradition account- ing for the scarcity of Indian towns in the Al- legheny Valley : The Mound-builders, twenty- two hundred years before Columbus discovered America, lived in a Golden city in the south, under a great emperor. This emperor invaded the Mississippi Valley, and built all its mounds. The Indians, coming from the north, drove him back after terrible fighting and divided the country among themselves, excepting the Mon- ongahela and Allegheny Valleys, over which various tribes waged long and bloody wars. They finally called a grand council, and agreed that no tribe was to inhabit them or build towns on their soil, but that, on account of the wonder- ful abundance of game, they were to remain a common hunting-ground for all the tribes.
The White Race .- It is not foreign to the history of Indiana and Armstrong counties, and will add much to a right understanding of the great movement by which they were conquered and peopled by the white race, to glance back over the race-history of their English, German, Irish, Welsh and Scotch pioneers; and that wonderful Scotch-Irish people whose advent into the territory of these countics was but a part of the initial step of the winning of the "Great West " by the Backwoodsmen of tlie Alleghenies.
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It is not inappropriate of this substantial seetion of country to make more intelligible the hastily sketehed record of its English-speaking people, to notiee, also, the part which they have played in modern history.
The empires of the ancient world were under the domination of a single idea, while the nations of modern times are composed of di- verse elements that hold each other in clieck and prevail together. Religious motives have influenced the political movements of modern history which commenced with the barbarian ascendancy of the fieree north-land German races of Europe when they subverted the Roman Empire and conquered the sea-girt realm of Great Britain.
In the dawn of modern history arose the rival systems of Christianity and Mohammed- anism which immediately entered into a great struggle for the mastery of Europe. In the mighty contest which followed the Creseent fell before the Cross and the barbarian conquerors of Rome, who had vanquished the hosts of the Prophet, finally embraced the Christian faithi. In the afterward struggle of the barbarians to- wards civilization, two great leaders loomed up in Charlemagne, the Frankish sovereign, and Alfred the Great of England. The next period in barbarian history was that of Feudalism, a system growing out of the peculiar military in- stitutions of the Teutouic raee. In due time came the Crusades, which were followed by the rise of the Free Cities, wherein were born po- litical liberty, and by the establishment of Modern Monarchy.
The overflow of the Germauic peoples upon the continent of Europe, while it stimulated the Latin nations into vigorous life, yet added noth- ing to the increase of German territory, nor con- tributed in the least to the spread of the German language. But "the day when the keels of the low Dutch sea-thieves first grated on the British coast was big with the doom of many nations. These sea-rovers who won England, to a great
extent, displaced the native Britons, and England grew to differ profoundly front the German coun- tries of the mainland." Celtic and Scandinavian elements were introduced into the Englishi blood, and the Norman conquest brought about "the transformation of the old English tongue into the magnificent language which is now the common inheritance of so many widespread peoples."
After the alleged Pre-Columbian discoveries of portious of the North American continent, Spain was the first nation to discover, to con- quer, and to colonize any portion of this coun- try, but England soon won from her the mas- tery of the sca and the " sun of Spanish world- dominion set as quickly as it had risen." In the colonization of this country Spain had pow- erful rivals in England, France and Holland.
In the English settlements and conquests of the Atlantic sea-board, southern colonization was commenced by the Cavalier at Jamestown, northern occupation dates to the landing of the Roundhead or Puritan on Plymouth Rock, and central settlement was inaugurated by Calvert, the Catholic, at St Mary's, in behalf of relig- ious toleration, and by Penn, the Quaker, at Philadelphia, in the interests of universal lib- erty.
The Puritan swept King Philip and his tribes from the face of the earth and extended New England to the Hudson. The Cavalier crushed Powhattan's thirty-tribe confederation and car- ried westward his line of settlements in Virginia and the Carolinas to the Blue Ridge mountains ; and Penn by treatics sccured the peaceable pos- session of his province to the Susquehanna river.
The Backwoodsmen of the Alleghenies .- At tlie opening of the eighteenth century the Alle- ghenies constituted the western boundary of English colonial territory, but in the mountain valleys between the tide-water regions of the south and the Alleghenies, and in the same lon- gitudinal mountain valleys between the Susque- hanna river and the Allegheny mountains, arose
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a wonderful class of people whose arms and whose courage won the great west from the Al- · leghenies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific. They will be known in the future as the Back- woodsmen of the Alleghenies, a name applied to them by Roosevelt in his work entitled " The Winning of the West."
The backwoodsmen were American by birth and parentage, and of mixed race, Irish, German, Scotch, English, Welsh and Scotch-Irish. But the dominant strain in their blood was the Scotch- Irish, whose preachers taught the creed of Knox and Calvin. The English element of this back- woods race was represented by Daniel Boone, and its Cavalier spirit had fitting exemplification in Clarke and Blount, while the German element produced the Whetzels and the Welsh contribu- ted the Morgans.
Of these different elements the Irish possessed all those traits of national character for which they have been distingnished for centuries, and bore well their part in the frontier struggle.
They were warm-hearted, impulsive and gen- erons, and when a settlement was established they were among the first to open taverns, build mills and distilleries and speculate in land. Many of that blood and race have ever since been prominent in military and civil life.
The next distinctive class was the German, who came principally from eastern Pennsyl- vania, although some of them were from the Rhine provinces and various portions of Ger- many. G. D. Albert says of them : " They were not so aggressive as the former (Scotch-Irish), and, as a rule, they laid out a life-work devoted to labor. They were a strong body, yet, owing to their detached locations and their character- istics in not meddling in public affairs, the whole controlling of affairs in the first years of our history was monopolized by the Scotch- Irish and the Americans of English descent." Toward the end of the Revolution, however, the German had coalesced with the other cle- ments, and they were prominent in civil as well
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