Collins historical sketches of Kentucky. History of Kentucky: Vol. I, Part 76

Author: Collins, Lewis, 1797-1870. cn; Collins, Richard H., 1824-1889. cn
Publication date: 1874
Publisher: Covington, Ky., Collins & Co.
Number of Pages: 1452

USA > Kentucky > Collins historical sketches of Kentucky. History of Kentucky: Vol. I > Part 76

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In Montgomery county, || there is a large truncated mound, connected by an elevated way, with a circular work having a central mound and a gateway opening to the east. There is also a group of works on Brush creek in the same county, exhibiting features of peculiar interest; a circular work, 500

* See Vol. II, p. 765. t See Vol. II, p. 548. # See Vol. II, p. 302. | See Vol. II, p. 632

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feet in circumference, with an interior ditch and an hexagonal inclosure, each face or side measuring 50 feet-both works having gateways opening to the east, and the former work having certain features of construction which are common to works of the same class in Ohio. There are ancient works of considerable interest in Fayette county,* at the junction of the Town and South forks of the Elkhorn, and another group at the mouth of Flat run in Bourbon county t-both of which, from obvious characteristics, must have served at one time as works of defense.

But as it is impossible, in the brief limits necessarily assigned for the con- sideration of this subject, to refer to these works in detail, a few general re- marks of an explanatory tenor must suffice.

The defensive or military character of an ancient work seems to be indi- cated by its commanding position, its general strategic advantages, its conti- guity to water, its exterior ditch, and its peculiar situation with reference to other works. A high antiquarian authorityt is satisfied with a single criteri- on-the relative position of the ditch. This he deems decisive. But when, in addition to this, we find a line of simple or bastioned works occupying a peninsular terrace or a precipitous height, "covering" an important region of country, commanding every position, guarding every approach, served by protected lines of communication, and convenient to points of supply, there would seem to be no further room to doubt. It must be remembered, too, that we see the works in a thoroughly dismantled condition. Possibly those parapets once bristled with palisades; the glacis, we may suppose, was fringed with abatis; and who knows but that those mysterious gaps in the lines of defense (which hasty theorists assume to have been gateways) were once filled with bastion-like projections of wood, analogous to the later " block- houses" of the pioneer ? If any such engineering devices were employed by the Mound-builder (and the archaeologists are by no means sure that they were not), they were constructed of perishable material, and have long since passed away.

There seems to have been a complete system of these defenses, extending from the sources of the Alleghany and the Susquehanna to the Wabash-as if designed by a peaceful and prosperous population to afford permanent pro- tection against savage aggressions from the North and East. It has been suggested, however, that a tide of emigration flowing from the South received its final check upon this line-these defenses marking the limit, just as military remains are often found marking the tenable limits of Roman conquest. The two theories are not irreconcilable. This line of defenses may have been a Chinese barrier guarding a peaceful and populous realm, or a Roman wall securing a subjugated province by holding the barbarian at bay.

But at least one conclusion we are obliged to accept: These defenses were not constructed by a migratory or nomadic people. They are the work of a vast population, perfectly organized and permanently established on an agri- cultural basis. Whether Indian Corn [Zea Mays] was indigenous to America, or whether it came in with the Toltecs, it certainly is safe to assume that it was the Mound-builder's staple grain. There is not the slightest proof that he had any knowledge of the so-called "cereals of the Orient"-wheat, rye, barley, oats, &c. On the other hand, there is incontestable evidence that the aboriginal knowledge of Indian Corn greatly antedated the discovery of the continent. Maize was a sacred grain, a divine gift, an immemorial blessing. It was the legendary Mondamin, with garments of green and plumelets of gold; and, less poetically, it was the agricultural staple which gave substance and strength to the powerful semi-civilization of Peru.

Within the limits of the State of Kentucky the remains of ancient fortifica- tions are numerous. Almost invariably we find them situated upon large water-courses. In Allen, Bourbon, Boone, Fayette, Pendleton, and other coun- ties of the State, are some very interesting monuments; and it is worthy of note that these structures generally correspond in site with modern centers of popu lation; that, wherever found, they are strikingly analogous in their essential features to the military remains of ancient Mexico and Peru, and are palpably

* See Vol. II, p. 228. t See Vol. II, D. 70. ± Stukely.

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impressed, as are the other remains of the Mound-builder, with the stamp of a peculiar ethnic genius-suggestive, if not significant, of affinities which a superficial consideration of the remains would scarcely lead us to suspect.

The religious structures of this ancient people are equally curious in the analogies which they reveal. Why, for example, did this old superstition build its structures usually upon the margin of a stream ? In ancient Mex- ico and Peru, lakes and rivers were objects of religious veneration. Was water a sacred element in the worship of the Mound-builder ? In Mexico, natural caverns were used as places of sepulture. Is it not probable that the caves of Kentucky were ancient depositories of the dead? Mummies and human skeletons and bones have been found in some of them. The Mexicans practiced inhumation, embalming, and cremation. The Mound- builder, in disposing of his dead, likewise buried, embalmed, and burned. The Mexican and Peruvian temples corresponded in position with the cardi- nal points of the compass. We have noted the same peculiarity in the sacred structures of the Mound-builders. The traditional name of the ancient mounds, among the Choctaws, was Nanne - Yah-the Hills or Mounts of God-a name almost identical, it is said, with that of the Mexican pyramids. Who can fail to perceive that the same principles of architecture have governed the con- struction of both ? and that the Temple Mound of Kentucky is but a ruder form of the Mexican teocalli ?

The mythology of the Toltecs symbolized creative power, or the productive principle, under the form of the Phallus. There is strong reason to believe that the primitive inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley were worshipers of the same significant emblem; and that the doctrine of the reciprocal principles of nature, as symbolized in Mexico and Peru by the Sun and the Moon, or the Sun and the Earth, also obtained a distinct recognition in the Mound- builder's mysterious creed. Wherever humanity has worshiped and wrought, may be traced the symbolical worship of the Serpent. Whether we explain the universality of the symbol by the orthodox assumption that it resulted from a traditionary recognition of the Paradisiacal Devil, or whether we in- cline to the philosophic theory that like conditions and constitutions may generate religious ideas of a cognate type, we are equally obliged to accept the alleged universality as a symbological fact. It was conspicuous in the re- ligious system of the ancient Mexicans, and was essentially significant of the same cosmological idea which it represented in the primitive mythologies of the East. There seems to be nothing incredible, therefore, in the suggestion of Mr. E. G. Squier that "the Serpent and Egg of Ohio are distinctly allusive to the same specific notions of cosinogony ;" and quite as plausible is the sup- position that the mystic inclosures and parallels of Greenup have their sym- bolical analogues in the vast serpentine structures of Abury and Carnac. Nor is the supposition incompatible with the theory which assigns to these works a military origin-since not unfrequently, in the pressing emergencies of war, a people's only strongholds of defense are its temples of devotion and the sepulchers of its dead. Were human struggles ever fiercer or bloodier than upon the terraced adoratorios of Anahuac ?

The structural remains of the Mound-builder, in all their varied forms, are characterized by that simplicity, symmetry, and solidity which Humboldt re- marked in the Toltecan monuments of other lands. Some of them, it has been plausibly inferred from reason and analogy, are symbolical in construction, and connected with the observance of superstitious rites. As we have previ- ously intimated, the peculiar structures in the county of Greenup, with their associate groups, are supposed to be works of this class-though it must be confessed that the indications of the fact are by no means decisive. But whether these ancient structures are military, sepulchral, or sacrificial- whether square, elliptical, circular, or polygonal-or whether combining these geometrical elements in series or group, and designed at once for worship, sepulture, sacrifice, and defense-there are architectural elements common to all, which identify them as parts of a peculiar and comprehensive system; a necessary and characteristic outgrowth of an embryonic civilization, originat- ing with a race distinguished in all its branches by common traits, created unto a common destiny, moving under the same original impulse, undergoing

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contemporaneous or successive development under like conditions, and con- forming throughout its existence to the same laws of origin, progress, and de- cline. . The Mound-builder fixed his habitation, established his fortresses, and builded his temples precisely where the highest civilizations seek sustenance and strength; that is to say, in a land and latitude where the climate is genial, where the grasses flourish, and the waters flow. His chosen seats, as we have shown, were contiguous to broad streams, and in the midst of fertile lands- the one insuring easy communication; the other, abundant food. If occasion- ally he deserted the alluvial valleys, and went up into the mountains or builded upon the hill-tops, it was manifestly for peculiar purposes of worship, or when driven by the necessities of war. His favorite site for structures of large di- mensions and regular design was the broad, level terrace of a river valley ; but where the works are irregular in design, and indicate in their.construction the handiwork of the military engineer, they are usually so situated as to guard an important approach, or complete the defense of a position naturally strong.

A comprehensive and critical treatise on Aboriginal Art would be a work of rare interest; not that the Aborigines cultivated the arts with signal success, nor that there was the faintest gleam of promise in the almost puerile crude- ness of the results-for the art-remains of the Mound-builder reveal only the merest dawning of the aesthetic faculty or instinct; but that such a treatise would be a valuable contribution to our knowledge of an extinct civilization by extending our range of related data, and enabling us, in a measure, to re- construct its annals from its monumental debris. Possibly the Champollions of the future may do something toward wresting these coveted secrets from the silent past. That the Mound-builders were in possession of a hieroglyph- ical method of communicating ideas and recording events, is by no means a violent assumption. It may not only be inferred from the complex, powerful, and progressive character of their civilization, but the inference can easily be sustained by evidence bearing directly on the point. The sculptural in- scriptions observed by Bishop Madison in Western Virginia, near the conflu- ence of the Elk and Kanawha rivers, have been particularly indicated as pos- sessing a hieroglyphical significance. A stone presenting similar characteris- tics is said to have been found near the confluence of the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers, on the Kentucky shore-which, falling sacrifice to the utilitarian spirit of the age, was robbed of its "outline figures and emblematical devices" through the vulgar agency of a stone-mason's hammer .* Is the story true ? We trust sincerely that it is not. We should be loath to believe that any denizen of that charming valley would have permitted himself to feel less interest in the solu- tion of ethnological problems than in the symmetrical construction of a " cel- lar wall." We dismiss it, therefore, as a bit of archaeological gossip.

Whilst it is impossible to present the evidence on this subject.in detail, we think it is highly probable that the Mound-builder was familiar with an ideo- graphic method analogous to that of the Aztec; but whether he had advanced so far in the arts of civilization as to have evolved the idea of printing in colors, is a question which we shall not hastily decide. And yet the assertion has been gravely made, respectfully considered, and favorably received. "This nameless people," says a late writer, *

* * "approached very near to the discovery of printing, if, as it is believed, they traced designs in relief, which, coated with oxide of pulverized iron, served to impress various ornaments on the skin; "+ that is to say, by means of movable types, smeared with an ink of iron rust, they gave their bodies the impress of a superficial ." tattoo."

The Mound-builder was nothing of a Greek in matters of art. His con- ception of "aesthetics" was but elementary at the best. At the same time. his art was admirable within certain limits. The carvings upon his red stone pipes, and the designs upon his sculptural tablets, were marked by ex- quisite delicacy of finish, and, in the merely-mechanical portraiture, by a marvelous fidelity to detail. In his representations of the human form, he has been surprisingly felicitous in depicting attitude and physiognomical ex- pression, though less so than in his representations of the lower animals.

* Squier and Davis. t Western Journal and Civilian, vol. IV, No. 3.

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All are striking, faithful, and animated, but slavish, unspiritual, uninspired, not the glorious and inimitable creations of Hellas, but the groveling concep- tions and servile imitations of Egypt and Cathay. It is interesting to observe. however, that in his plastic presentments of the human head, the anatomical configuration and physiognomical traits conform in all essential particulars to what ethnologists have recognized as a universal American type; and this cir- cumstance gives a scientific value to sculptural remains which are compara- tively valueless as specimens of art.

Akin to sculpture, is the less ambitious art of the potter; and, oddly enough, to the antiquarian student no field of observation is more inviting or instructive than the potter's field. A familiar type of fragility is the potter's vessel; fictile passivity is expressly imaged under the scriptural similitude of clay in the hands of the potter. And yet the frail products of the potter's. art often outlast the palaces of kings, and every-where specimens of primi- tive pottery are recovered from the earliest ruins of " the antique world." The shattered civilizations of America have left abundant traces of this primeval art. The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley have furnished speci- mens which, in delicacy of finish and elegance of design, rival the strikingly similar productions of ancient Peru. The material from which they are wrought is either simple, unmixed clay, or a composition of varying elements -sometimes consisting of gypsum (sulphate of lime) mixed with clay. In composition, quality, and finish, many of these specimens exhibit an advanced knowledge of " applied " chemistry-being equal, in all technical requisites, to the most pretentious products of modern art. The Triune vessel, as it is called,* found in an ancient work upon the Cumberland, and consisting of three heads joined in one, presents three human faces brilliantly colored in yellow and red-the colors having been applied, doubtless, before the clay or composition was subjected to the action of heat. That the Mound-builder was a practical chemist of no mean pretensions, is further indicated by the beads of glass which he sometimes deposited in his mounds-glass of a trans- parent green, with an opaque enamel of an exquisite white or red-the whole curiously fashioned and artistically wrought. The Mound-builders were also skillful workers in stone.t To say nothing of minor proofs of their skill in fashioning this material, their fortresses sometimes had walls of stone; and in this State have been found sepulchral tumuli of the same material. But in the manufacture of weapons, mechanical implements, domestic utensils, and ornaments of stone, they exhibited marvelous skill. The crystal spear- head, the granite axe, the obsidian knife, and breccia urn-lid, are finished specimens of their proficiency in this art, and are all the more astonishing as artistic productions, that the pre-historic artisan seems to have been wholly unacquainted with the mechanical uses of iron ; and yet, without this metal, it is certain that he was in possession of mechanical agencies by which forests were felled, and fields were tilled, and the most obstinate materials wrought into shapes of surprising symmetry and grace. It is probable that they em- ployed instruments of copper, worked in the cold state without alloy, and hardened by hammering. The Mound-builder's pipe was exquisitely sculptur- esque. He seems to have lavished upon it all the resources of his art, and we can easily believe that the elaborate trifle was as sacred in pre-historic eyes as a carefully imbrowned meerschaum is supposed to be in the estima -. tion of the modern connoisseur. The great number and variety of these beautiful antiques have led to the supposition that they had a religious sig- nificance, and were in some way connected with observances of ceremonial worship. Among thie minor relics recovered from the mounds are certain tubes of stone, which swift antiquarian conjecture has associated with the ab- original pursuit of "star-gazing;" some hastily assuming the tubes to have been telescopic aids to the eye. We incline to the more commonplace hy- pothesis, that they were simply the tubes of pipes.# Undoubtedly, there is reason to believe that the Mound-builder was familiar with the elements of astronomical science; but there is also ground for the impression that he had

* Archeologica Americana, vol. i. p. 238. t Bradford's Antiquities, p. 168. ; Western Journal.

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a devout and enlightened appreciation of the virtues of the "sacred plant." Tobacco was the soothing and propitiatory incense which he offered to his gods; and it is not incredible that the fumes of his consecrated calumet were breathed to the sky a thousand years before the "golden youth" of England were seduced by the charms of Virginian leaf. And who knows but that the "sacred soil " of Kentucky-a land of temples, ecclesiasts, and tombs-was additionally consecrated by a contemporaneous culture of the "weed ?"

The pre-historic Kentuckian was familiar with the Art of Embalming. Of this there is incontestable proof. Disregarding all conjecture on the subject, we limit our remarks at present solely to a consideration of the fact. In the sketch of Edmonson County, page 159, Vol. II, there is a minute and accurate description of a mummy found in the Mammoth Cave in the year 1813. In the year 1815, a mummy from a cavern in the neighborhood of Glasgow was on exhibition in the city of New York, and was described by the Hon. Samuel L. Mitchell in a letter to the American Antiquarian Society .* Hav- ing characterized the embalmed body as a "perfect exsiccation"-a mere anatomy of osseous and cuticular tissue-he says :

" It was found enwrapped carefully in skins and cloths. The outer envelope of the body is a deer-skin. The next covering is a deer-skin, whose hair has been cut away by a sharp instrument. The next wrapper is of cloth, made of twine, doubled and twisted, but the thread does not appear to have been formed by the wheel, or the web by the loom. The warp and filling seem to have been crossed and knotted, by an opera- tion like that of the fabrics of the North-west Coast and the Sandwich Islands. The innermost tegument is a mantle of cloth, like the preceding, but furnished with long brown feathers, arranged and fastened with great art, so as to be capable of guarding the living wearer from wet and cold. The plumnage is distinct and entire. The body is in a squatting posture with the right arm inclining forward, and its hand encircling the right leg ; the left arm hangs down, with its hand inclined partly under the seat. The individual, who was a male, did not probably exceed the age of fourteen at his death. There is a deep and extensive fracture of the skull, near the occiput, which probably killed him. Theskin has sustained little injury ; it is of a dusky color ; but the natural hue can not be decided with exactness from its present appearance. The scalp, with small exceptions, is covered with sorrel or fox hair. The teeth are white and sound. The hands and feet, in their shriveled state, are slender and delicate."

The description is interesting and suggestive, but, for the purposes of scien- tific investigation, not sufficiently full and precise. It does not vary materi- ally, however, in its essential features from descriptions of other mummies found in this State, nor of similar remains discovered near the Cumberland river in Tennessee, in the caves near Durango, and in the huacas of Peru. In the Mexican caves the mummies were found "in a sitting posture, and wrapped in bands of cloth." The bodies recovered from the Peruvian mounds or huacas bore the marks of an embalming process, and occupied a flexed or sitting posi- tion. Both the Mexicans and Peruvians buried, with their dead, ornaments or articles of familiar use; and the cloths fabricated by the peoples of the South are said to be similar in texture to the wrappings which encase the mummies found in the caverns of this State. Travelers tell us that the natives of the Pacific islands "interred their dead in a sitting posture," and practiced a method of embalming similar to the American-" the body being preserved by exsiccation, without removing the entrails," and wrapped in voluminous folds of cloth. "These embalmed remains," says Bradford,t "resemble closely the mummies found in the Kentucky caves, both in the method adopted for their preservation, in the wrappings or mummy cloths, and in the texture or fabri- cation of the latter." Marine shells, t of an exclusively Oriental habitat, have been gathered from the sepulchral tombs of the Western World. Certain shell-fish (murex) found in an ancient work near Lexington, are said to be identical with the species which is sacred to Mahadeva, the Hindoo Neptune. But what is more to the purpose, as pointing to the immediate origin of the

* The Weekly Recorder, Chillicothe, Ohio, vol. iv, 1815; late in possession of Rev. Joel K. Lyle, Lexington, Kentucky.

t Antiquities, p. 411.

: In India, the Shell is sacred to the Moon. The Mound-buildery are traditionally repre. sented to have worshiped the Moon, which they regarded as " the elysium for the departed spirits of obedient females, where they might indulge at ease the passion of curiosity, in a ceaseless Jour- ney about the world."-Traditions of Da-Coo-Dah, p. 261.

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Mound-builders, is the discovery in one of our caverns of some bones which are the remains of a peccari, or Mexican hog-an animal native only to Mex- ico and the countries of the South. It may be noted, too, as a suggestive fact, that the buskins, caps, and head-gear of the mummies entered into a costume which, in these particulars, bore a striking resemblance to the primitive -"mode" of the ancient Mexicans. The descriptions which we have of the physical characteristics of the ancient Mound-builder have given rise to a question which has been made the basis of some bold ethnological speculation. The question is this: Did the Mound-builder have red hair ? "The scalp, with small exceptions," says Mr. Mitchell, somewhat vaguely, "is covered with sor- rel or fox hair." "The color of the hair," says the writer, on page 159, Vol. II, under Edmonson County, "was a dark red; " and Bradford, describing the mummies found on the Cumberland river in Tennessee, and in the Mammoth Cave and other caverns of Kentucky, says that the hair was "generally of a color varying from brown to vellow and red." This testimony would seem to be conclusive as to the prevailing tint of Aboriginal hair, and might be hastily accepted as confirmatory of the theory which ascribes to the Mound-builders a European origin. But we must reflect that, whilst human hair is known to be singularly superior to the ordinary influences of decay, the readiness with which it changes hue under chemical reagents shows it to be, in the matter of color, exceedingly penetrable stuff; and it is by no means improbable that the hair of the mummies has been changed by chemic influences of the at- mosphere from a hue originally dark to a varying shade of red-just as, through the subtle agencies of the coiffeur's art, tresses of midnight are some- times brightened with the tints of dawn. Nor is this presumed transmutation of color peculiar to the mummies of Kentucky and Tennessee. Human re- mains from the sepulchres of Peru, examined by the Spaniards in 1790, "con- tained bodies in an entire condition, but withered and dried, and the hair of a red color ;" and the results of a similar transmutation (according to a writer on Egyptian antiquities) "have sometimes been observed in the appearance of the Egyptian mummies, the hair having been changed in color from black to red." *

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Collins historical sketches of Kentucky. History of Kentucky: Vol. I, Part 76

Author: Collins, Lewis, 1797-1870. cn; Collins, Richard H., 1824-1889. cn Publication date: 1874 Publisher: Covington, Ky., Collins & Co. Number of Pages: 1452

Author: Collins, Lewis, 1797-1870. cn; Collins, Richard H., 1824-1889. cn
Publication date: 1874
Publisher: Covington, Ky., Collins & Co.
Number of Pages: 1452