USA > Ohio > Cuyahoga County > Cleveland > A history of Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland, (Vol. 1) > Part 5
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A relic alleged to have been taken from the Grave Creek Mound in Ohio in 1838 has been the occasion of much discussion. This consisted of a small piece of sandstone covered on one face with a three line inscrip- tion. It was in the letters of an unknown alphabet. No one at the time seemed to doubt its genuineness. It was studied by scholars of ancient languages in this and other countries but without result. It
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appeared to decide the problem and to settle the question that comes to all minds in reflecting on the subject: Did the Mound Builders have a written language? It was an inscription, that was clear, but it could not be deciphered. It remained as one of the mysteries of this mysterious people.
A few years ago M. C. Reed, of Hudson, Ohio, as one of a com- mittee, appointed for that purpose by the Ohio Historical and Arch- æological Society, began an investigation of this find. His report is inter- esting in many ways but particularly as showing by what processes of reasoning trained archæologists arrive at conclusions. He reported the facts to be as follows :
This stone was picked up from a pile of loose dirt that had been wheeled out from the center of the mound through a tunnel and dumped on the outside. Naturally it was immediately a great object of interest to people who were keen for sensational developments. No one ques- tioned its genuineness and all assumed that it came from the mound and
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Forged inscriptions used by inves- tigators to prove that the Grave Creek inscription was a forgery.
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Inscription, discovered in 1838, alleged to have been taken from the Grave Creek Mound. It was accepted as proof that the Mound Builders had a written language, but linguists could not decipher it.
was dumped with the other material. No one at that time investigated to see whether the markings showed evidence of recent manufacture. They swallowed "hook, line, and sinker." The investigators, headed by Mr. Reed, after getting evidence as to the circumstances under which the stone was found, employed this deductive method :
It is very easy to manufacture a series of arbitrary characters, which would constitute a good alphabet. It is not so easy to forge an inscrip- tion with it, as can be found upon trial. In an inscription the letters will be duplicated and will be repeated in an inverse ratio to the number of characters in the alphabet used. The forger of an inscription will proceed very much as if forging an alphabet, and it will rarely occur to him to double, as will be shown, or repeat his characters. In a forged alphabet, also, a genetic relation will be found between letters and those immediately preceding the one being a modification of the other. In using the same letters in an intelligible inscription this connection will not be broken.
In this investigation four different persons were asked to write each an inscription in arbitrary characters, unlike the letters of any alphabet that they knew, and without being informed as to the purpose of the
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request. These four, a teacher and law student, a school girl, a druggist, and a college professor, complied with the request. By this mode of procedure and the results obtained the forgery of the Grave Creek inscrip- tion will appear to the student observer to be self evident.
In publishing the inscription under discussion and also those of the four persons selected in connection with it the similarity can be observed. In the second cut the Grave Creek inscription is at the bottom and includes all except the last two characters.
"As the investigation now stands," says Mr. Reed in his report, in- cluded in his interesting book on Ohio archaeology, published by the Western Reserve Historical Society, "there is no evidence that the Mound Builders knew or practiced the art of writing."
Mr. Reed in this book also treats of another interesting "find," which had attracted even more attention than the Grave Creek inscription. This seemed to prove not only that the Mound Builders had a written language, but that they were of Hebrew descent.
For some time it was stoutly maintained in many quarters that the ancient peoples of America were "The Lost Tribes of Israel." The book of Mormon traces the Israelites of ancient times here and its followers have connected them quite specifically with the Mound Builders. This book treats of the ancient people of America as a divine history. M. S. Hinman of Cleveland published a book some years ago to prove from prophecy that there was a Hebrew migration to America, that this country was the Promised Land mentioned in the Scriptures. Mr. Hinman will be remembered as journal clerk of the courts for many years, in which position he made an enviable record. He delivered a number of lectures throughout the country on this his favorite topic. Mr. Hinman did not attempt to connect the Israelites directly with the Mount Builders, but others have attempted to do so, including the followers of Mormon. I have digressed so far to show the interest attached to this subject as it applies to this people who occupied Cuyahoga County before the Indian.
One advocate of this theory of an Israelite migration to this country in the early ages was one David Wyrick, who one day went excitedly through the streets of Newark, Ohio, carrying an inscribed tablet, which he exhibited as a wonderful relic from a mound near that town. This find was accepted for years as genuine and sold for a price. A thorough investigation was made in this connection as reported upon by Mr. Reed. This gives us some interesting facts.
Mr. Wyrick's discovery came to light at a time when evidence was much sought after to connect the aboriginal races with the House of Israel. The first find was an inscribed keystone in the form of a Masonic emblem, on which was carved in Hebrew of the twelfth century: "The King of the Earth"-"The Word of the Lord" -- "The Laws of Jehovah"- "The Holy of Holies." In the year following he "found," enclosed in a stone box, a stone tablet having on it an effigy of Moses, in priestly robes, and an epitome of the ten commandments in Hebrew. This could certainly be taken as conclusive evidence of a Hebrew migration to this country.
Mr. Wyrick was known as somewhat eccentric but of scholarly attain- ments. The investigators observed that Mr. Wyrick's published account of these remarkable relics was largely devoted to an attempt to prove that they could not have been forged, and that upon his death there was found in his working room a Hebrew Bible, which could have aided him much in finding Hebrew inscriptions.
These holy relics were sold to David M. Johnson of Coshocton, Ohio, who, in 1867, employed laborers for several days in exploring a mound
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from which one of the inscribed stones was said to have been taken by Mr. Wyrick. This search brought to light a small stone, found in a human skull, on which was a Hebrew inscription.
Mr. Reed, in closing his report of this investigation, says: "No arch- æologist of fair standing today can be found to advocate the genuineness of this last inscription or that of the Wyrick 'finds.'"
As an archæological study, the same investigation was made in regard to the Book of Mormon, which assumed to be a record of ancient people in America, written on golden plates, abridged by the prophet Mormon, and discovered by Joseph Smith at Cumorah (Western New York) and translated by him.
By anti-Mormons this book is regarded as taken from a romance, written in 1811 by Solomon Spaulding, whose manuscript was used by Smith and Rigden. After investigation, Mr. Reed refers to the Book of Mormon as the "greatest forgery of the century." Says it was written soon after the controversy between Masonry and anti-Masonry was at its height and is decidedly anti-Masonic. It was written during or very soon after the controversy over pedo-baptism, the salvation of infants, a paid priesthood, election and free will was raging, all of which ques- tions it attempts to settle. It was written while the native races here were believed to be Israelites and worshippers of the Great Spirit, and while it was popularly believed that the linguistic peculiarities of our Bible were wholly characteristic of the language in which it was originally written and not of the English language at the time of its translation.
Mr. Reed therefore fixes the date as inconsistent with the facts claimed by Joseph Smith.
All of these episodes show the interest attached to this vanished people and the striving to obtain reliable information about them.
Of this ancient people, whose empire was co-extensive with a great part of the Mississippi Valley, Ohio seems to have been the nucleus and Cuyahoga County close to the scene of their final extermination. Ten thousand mounds have been located in Ohio and many explored. Some are extensive. Fort Ancient in Warren County, now the property of the state, but in charge of the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, has a total length of walls of over ten miles with seventy gateways, and within its enclosures more than 35,000 people could have been harbored at one time.
In 1890 Warren K. Moorehead published a volume descriptive of this remarkable monument left by this ancient people. This location has been mentioned as the capitol of this ancient empire, and here, as has been said, some of the great battles of the world may have been fought, though not recorded in history.
Naturally there is much speculation from those who have given but slight study to the subject and much catching at straws to sustain adopted theories but since 1875, when the Archæological Society was formed at the home of General Brinkerhoff at Mansfield, Ohio, extensive and sys- tematic work has been done. Indeed, C. C. Baldwin, at one time president of the Western Reserve Historical Society, made this statement :
"As years have flown and knowledge from many investigators is added up, it is time that archæology shall begin to be a certain science."
We know from all the evidence revealed, disclosing the rude attempts of this primitive man to provide for his ever-increasing wants, some uncontroverted facts. The extensive prehistoric copper mines of Lake Superior, described by Colonel Whittlesey, are works of the Mound Builders, and the source from which they obtained the greater part of the material for their copper implements and ornaments, some however
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THE CITY OF CLEVELAND
obtained from the Drift. These mines were opened by means of rude tools, wooden shovels being used to remove waste material. The rock enclosing the copper was subjected to fire and broken up by stone hammers and mauls. Pieces from the mass too large to handle were with much labor cut or pounded off with their stone axes, and pieces too large to be handled in any other way were slowly raised to the surface by prying the alternate sides, placing small timbers beneath, and building them up under the load in the form of a log house. The copper thus obtained was sometimes worked up into implements in the neighborhood of the mines, as important finds in that neighborhood show. Colonel Whittlesey collected nearly a thousand copper relics in Ohio and nearly all taken from the mounds. There were so few elsewhere that it is assumed that the manufacture of copper implements was confined to the Mound Builders.
They used it as a malleable stone only, without melting or casting, but hammered it into the desired form. This mode of working it devel- oped a quality which has puzzled many students of archæology. It gives to the metal a hardness which it never attains under the present mode of working with modern methods, except by alloy with other metals.
The great abundance of mica found in the mounds shows that the builders made long journeys to engage in mica mining or that they maintained a system of traffic with those who worked the mines. This mineral was held in high esteem and was obtained in large quantities. Skeletons have been exhumed entirely covered with it.
Masses of galena have been found in Ohio mines too large to have been obtained in the state, and which were the product of galena mining. Lead is so easily obtained from the galena that it would be simple for these people to discover a method of reducing it, but it would have been of little use to them. After the advent of powder guns, this metal was much used by the Indians.
The Mound Builders manufactured salt from natural brine springs. In the oil territory of Trumbull County are prehistoric wells, which were sunk for petroleum. It does not appear in evidence whether these were the work of the Mound Builders or the more recent Indians, who, it is known, used this product as a medicine and prized it highly.
The Mound Builders had no metal tools of size or character, no beasts of burden or draft, and yet they builded. Hoes they had, but made of large shells with wooden handles. They carried in baskets the earth for the great system of earthworks referred to, some of which are of immense volume.
Unlike the savages, who were here when the white man came, they had fixed habitations. They built for defense as did the cliff-dwellers of the Southwest. They were an agricultural people. Their circular mounds were the walls of villages. They had a system of wide expanse. They formed an empire of people of a milder type than the Red Man, who swept over the country from no one knows where, driving to war and finally to extermination. Some writers have endeavored to connect them with the modern Indian as identical people, but an Indian village presents a very poor picture of prehistoric times, as we can conceive of those times from an investigation of the evidence left to us.
A multitude of books have been written of these vanished people, including a novel entitled "The Vanished Empire," which lacks the thrill of "The Last Days of Pompeii," and though in our libraries, is little read. Many of these books are merely speculative, while others adhere to close investigation and offer few conclusions.
There is a glamour that envelopes us as we study of these early inhabi-
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tants that appeals to the poetic sentiment. Bryant's lines, in the great poet's best style, give expression to thoughts that will arise, as we look back toward that dim period from the world of today :
As o'er the verdant waste I guide my steed Among the high rank grass that sweeps his side The hollow beating of his footsteps seems
A sacrilegious sound. I think of those Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here The dead of other days ?- and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds, That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them; a disciplined and populous race Heaped with long toil the carth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, And bowed his manéd shoulder to the yoke. All day this region murmured with their toils Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked and wooed In a forgotten language, and old tunes, From instruments of unremembered form, Gave the soft winds a voice. The Red Man came The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound builders vanished from the earth. The solitude of centuries untold
Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie wolf Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh dug den Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground Where stood their smiling cities. All is gone All-save the piles of earth that hold their bones, The platforms, where they worshipped unknown gods, The barriers, which they builded from the soil To keep the foe at bay-till o'er the walls The wild beleaguers broke, and, one by one The strongholds of the plain were forced And heaped with corpses.
This picture implies that these people had advanced to a higher degree in human progress than investigation seems to warrant but it was written while systematic study of their remains had not progressed into the form- ing of fixed conclusions.
In the world's history, successive waves of population have swept away others, from time to time, either by destruction or assimilation or a combination of both methods.
Perhaps no finer picture of the assimilation of a people after war had done its work has been given than the following from The Prairie, by Bryant, from which production the preceding picture was also taken :
Haply some solitary fugitive Lurking in marsh or forest, till the sense
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THE CITY OF CLEVELAND
Of desolation and of fear became Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die. Man's better nature triumphed then. Kind words Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors Seated the captives with their chiefs ; he chose A bride among their maidens, and at length Seemed to forget-yet ne'er forgot-the wife Of his first love, and her sweet little ones, Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race. Thus change the forms of being.
In Cuyahoga County a number of the mounds of the Vanished Empire have been found, many of which have been designated as earth forts. Some years ago Col. Charles Whittlesey published a book on the earth works of the Cuyahoga Valley, but most of those in and near Cleveland have been destroyed. One at the corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, now graded away, was explored in 1820 by Dr. T. Garloch and interesting relics taken out, consisting of copper and stone imple- ments, fragments of pottery, copper and shell beads and other articles. Another mound was on Sawtell Avenue. From a mound in Chagrin Falls twelve skeletons were taken out. There are mounds in Independence, Dover, Orange, Newburgh, Euclid and other parts of the Cuyahoga Valley.
There is a mound in Brecksville, in the valley of the Chippewa Creek, which has many evidences of being man made. Below it and on every side is a rich bottom land, such as the Mound Builders selected for sites. This mound is located on the lands of the Glen Valley Club and is now covered with trees. It is composed almost wholly of dirt, there being an absence of rock, the presence of which might account for the formation by the natural erosion of the valley by the stream. Some years ago President King of Oberlin College visited this mound and expressed the opinion that it was of artificial formation. As it has not been listed in the books on Ohio archæology we give a picture as it appears today.
"Nothing can be more plain," says one writer, who has given much study to the subject, "than that most of the mounds in Northern Ohio, particularly those on the Cuyahoga River, are military works."
These mounds, designated as military, form a line, a complete cordon from Conneaut to Toledo, and in the opinion of investigators, palisades were planted upon them. This gives evidence not only of the purpose of their construction but of the fact that they were built by a people composed not of scattered tribes but of a far-flung dominion. They give evidence of intelligent direction and of a large plan and scope, similar to the Hindenberg line of the World war.
It is not unreasonable to assume that these forts were built to protect from the advance of a foe landing from the lake and moving south for conquest, or they were a line of resistance for a people inhabiting these shores and pressed upon by their southern neighbors.
It has long been a cherished opinion of the writer that the Eries, of whose existence we know only by tradition, were in fact the Mound Builders. From the annals of the early French missionaries we learn that a tribe, known as the Eries, owned and occupied the southern shore of the lake which derived its name from them. The word Erie means cat and is said to have been applied to them because wild cats were so numerous in this section. These animals must have been endowed with the proverbial nine lives, like the felines of civilized times, for when the settlers came they were numerous, while the race of men, who took their name had long been extinct.
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In 1845, the Buffalo Commercial, of Buffalo, published an interview with Blacksnake, a Seneca chief, who lived on a reservation near that city. Blacksnake in a long and detailed story related the destruction of the Eries by the Five Nations, called by the French the Iriquois Nation. This story was colored, no doubt, to glorify the nation of which Black- snake was a descendant. After his account had been corroborated by other chiefs, it was published and has since found a place in local histories.
If the whole story could be correctly told, might it not, from all the evidence we have, read like this :
The Mound Builders occupied, forming a great empire of busy people, having in Ohio alone hundreds of villages, this county a part of a vast empire of the paleolithic age. Centuries elapsed, the Red Man came, a virile warrior savage, and began the destruction of this people. The struggle finally resolved itself into a survival of the strongest, bravest and most resourceful. Pressed upon all sides and thinned by conquest the great empire became one great tribe, that had learned the arts of war. The Red Man, the roamer, with no fixed habitation, had learned from his contact with them, in their best estate, the advantage of united action, and so was formed the confederation of the five tribes, the Senecas, the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas and the Cayugas, called by the French the Iroquois, against this tribe, now known as the Eries, which they destroyed.
We can employ poetic if not historic license to assume that the destruc- tion of the Eries, which Blacksnake so graphically described, was a portrayal of the last stand of the empire, whose remains are still in evidence all about us. And more, they have left a name to our lake, to a city east of us, and a county west of us.
In interesting relation to the attempt to establish the identity of the Mound Builders is a tradition of the Delaware Indians about a people, who made strong fortifications of earth, and defended them with great bravery. A tradition current among the Sioux Indians, who once occupied this territory, but were driven westward by the Chippewas, gives a con- trary opinion of the character of these people. They say that in going westward they came to a race of people, who lived in mounds which they piled up. These people were large and strong but cowardly. To use their expression, "if they had been as brave as they were big, between them and the Chippewas we would have been destroyed, but they were great cowards and we easily drove them away."
Cuyahoga County, then, was peopled first by the Glacial man, who hunted the caribou and the mammoth and left crude evidences of his occupation, to be followed by the Mound Builders, those human ants, whose works excite our wonder and whose handicraft arouses our admiration.
Then came the Indian
With looks like patient Job's eschewing evil, With motions graceful as a bird in air, And yet, withal, the veriest devil That e'er clinched fingers in a captive's hair.
The Settler came, the sturdy pioneer, who built the first fires of civilization, attacked the forest, harnessed the streams to labor and aroused the soil to productive activity, established law and order as the first essential of prosperity, and taught the dignity of labor, and practiced what he preached.
CHAPTER III THE CUYAHOGA RIVER
This historic stream, that rises in a sugar bush in Geauga County, north of its mouth, and, in its northern course divides the County of Cuyahoga into nearly equal parts, embodies in its history much of interest. In a history of the county which bears the same name it plays a leading role. Not a hundred miles in length, it winds its tortuous course in an apparent effort to make as much of the distance as possible.
An old authority says the Indians called it Cuyahoga Uk, meaning in our language Lake River. The generally accepted interpretation is that the Indian name, Cuyahoga, means Crooked River. Here is a little bit of Caleb Atwater's description of the river: "Rising in Geauga County on the summit, it proceeds along on the second level above the Erie in doubt whether to unite its waves with the Mississippi or the St. Lawrence, until it wends its way cautiously along across Portage County to the falls, which are about thirty miles, in a direct line, from the lake, where, having determined which way to go, it leaps exultingly from rock to rock 125 feet in one mile, pouring along its channel, even in a dry time, 5,000 cubic feet of water in a minute, creating the very best water power in the state in so short a distance. These are the Cuyahoga Falls. Turning abruptly here the Cuyahoga runs eagerly and rapidly to join Lake Erie, falling on an average of eleven feet in a mile."
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