USA > Ohio > Brown County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 3
USA > Ohio > Clermont County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 3
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
The antiquity of man is still mysterious. When and where he appeared may never be known; but recent explorations of monumental heaps in the milder climes of the American conti- nents have revealed ruins that rival the oldest of the old world and indicate a higher constructive ability than was found among the Indians hunting by the Chesapeake or fighting across the St. Lawrence. The obvious inference is a decided decadence of one or a double possession by much differing tribes. Either assumption has both supporting and conflict- ing argument. The question is widened by a contention that man must have lived and struggled before the Glacial Age. This contention is based upon the finding of some rudely fash- ioned stone implements or weapons so deeply bedded in gla- cial drift as to preclude the supposition of a less recent origin. Some cave preserved remains are also claimed to indicate a prodigious antiquity. A few of these strange examples im- plying human art have been found in Europe. a few in Amer- ica, and one at Loveland. The last gives a local interest to the wavering discussion. For, these rare and very accidental finds are considered wonderful, but not conclusive proof that man may have shivered before and fled from the cruel glacier which blent his abandoned designs with that tremendous burial.
Upon the new earth succeeding the devastation of that long "Geologic Winter," there is, or was within memory, frequent evidence of a race whose achievement is comprehended by the graphic name of Mound Builders. While what is left of them is widely found wherever extreme cold could be avoided, no other region had more of their favor than the Ohio Valley, in which the parts most populated were toward or by the Missis- sippi, where the Cahokia Mound is the largest of its kind, and
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in Ohio, where over twelve thousand archaic earthworks have been noted. The immense literature about these works and their makers, ranging from material description, through imagined relations, and beyond the verge of Utopian fancy, leaves one confused with the futility of the discussion. While living in and advancing along the middle portions of the tem- perate zone almost from ocean to ocean, the Mound Builders either came in greatest number or made their longest stay in Ohio, where comparison asserts that more than half of all their works have been found. That pre-historic fondness for the plenty and salubrity of this still choicest section should bé a delightful reflection for its present people. Ohio was great among the regions ages before the Anglo Saxon made her greater.
Until recently, the Mound Builder's shelter was uncertain, but now some part of their habits can be stated. They had the secret of getting fire from the friction of dry wood, a problem that few of our time with unaided hands have been able to master. With fire piled around trunks deadened by the bruis- ing of hammering stones, trees were felled and burnt up until spaces were made in the deep shade for light to reach the fer- tile loam and nourish the martial corn, the twining bean, and the lulling tobacco, planted and tilled with hoes made from larger mussel shells drilled through the strongest places for handles fastened with strips of tough bark or tougher hides. As the tillable spaces were widened for larger crops, they knew where well drained pits could be dug in the terraced gravel for the safer keeping of the surplus corn and beans and the dried fruits and berries of the forest, together with the richly flavored walnut, the oily butternut, and the spicy spoils of the shrubby hazel and the lofty hickory. The forceful fight for life utilized much that is disdained by their button wearing successors in the strife. Little, indeed nothing, except by inference, can be told of the herbs that formed their pottage. But we surely know that the fibrous seeds of the plentiful pawpaw were saved from the feasts on their luscious pulp to make the winter days less lean. The mollusk breeding beds of streams were searched for the dumb victims both large and small for great mussel bakes, where the steaming delicacy was lifted from the shells to cool on tines of polished bone. Such and other
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apparently fantastic speculations have become real since the antiquarian spades have dug deep into a hidden record over which our race has stalked, elate with school taught pride in its destiny, and unheeding the awful obliterations buried be- neath.
The more obvious realities of the Mound Builders had the earliest attention, but a sympathetic view of their homely joys and toils obscure was more slowly gained. Thousands of scat- tered facts consistently arranged by practical skill combine to prove a few conclusions and refute a lot of once popular. fancies. From these conclusions, a few characteristics are safe- ly to be accepted. . Gathered into villages and living in fami- lies, the Mound Builders were sociable, domestic, industrious, obedient, filial and devout. The rude methods by which they gained and saved their harvest required the patient toil that makes a people tame and governable. Notwithstanding the weariness that must have attended their stern, crude struggle largely to live by grain, they found strength to undertake and had the fortitude to finish the strangest and most enduring structures ever accomplished with such deficient means. A conservative estimate claims that their structures in Ohio alone, if joined, would form a continuous line of over three hundred miles.
This line almost entirely gathered from Southern Ohio, when composed for panoramic effect, would challenge the ruins of any race for weird comparison. Curiosity could idly wander from end to end by symmetrical mounds crowding the size of a room or covering the space of a city block and reach- ing from the stature of a man to steeple heights. Zeal rever- ently inclined should longer pause by frequent temple sites within enclosures wrought in geometric forms and set with altars to forgotten gods. And while piously musing on the de- cline and fall of superstitions, dim-eyed pity should follow star- ing surprise, where monstrous effigies heave the turf and prove their faith reached the folly of serpent worship. But most im- . pressive of all to patriotic aspiration should be the long lines of the once lofty walls of their fortifications that have crum- bled and tumbled to receive a slowly thickening soil through which mighty trees have sent the roots of hundreds of annual growths to pierce the mysterious mold of the vanquished builders :- for,
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The secret of their fall has not been won, Unless the best and most in all the past, That time has done, has been in turn undone By time, because it was not fit to last.
Writers have much disputed the motives impelling their stu- pendous and, with our lights, futile sacrifice of human energy. Some have supposed the loftier mounds and those on natural heights were for signal stations by day and beacon lights by night, so that warnings of war could have been flashed from the Muskingum to the Miamis. Out of abundant suggestion, imagination has supplied the machinery of an empire ordered by priestly potentates with shrines to appease wrathful deities, and forts for refuge from invasions. Such notions have been counterbalanced by incredulous disbelief which cares for none of this and asserts that all Indians have a common knowledge of stone implements. A larger conservative opinion, halting between these extremes and encouraged by the exploration of the antiquities of the old world, resolved to undertake a series of thoroughly scientific excavations. In some places the re- sults were disappointing, in others the rewards were beyond expectation.
As trench after trench was advanced through the mounds and across the village sites, much of the people of old was ex- posed as it was near the time of their death. Then some of the once mysterious mounds were found to be simple memo- rial heaps piled with infinite love and labor above the funeral houses or pens, where the dead and what they prized most when living had been stored and lightly covered with ashes and clay-not beneath but above ground-until a grassy dome could be made over the one or many below. The trenches cut smoothly down through the mounds showed the manner of the making by the little piles of differing clays or soils still keep- ing the shapes taken as they fell from aprons or sacks or bas- kets, in which the dirt had been carried from where it had been dug with scooping shells whose broken bits were part of the proof. The lines of excavation through the quondam villages uncovered places in a firmer ground surrounding a looser mold. On carefully removing this mold, found to be of vegetable origin, and on filling the so renewed "post holes" with plaster,
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the casts obtained frequently show the bark on the posts or pickets cut to a length by fires that charred the ends still found as they were when set and tamped, maybe twenty centuries ago. With wider excavations, these casts made in the trenches of the decayed palisade have strangely restored the outlines of their tepees, whereby the kind of homes and the manner of their people may be determined.
For people inclined to quit nomadic ways and to make per- manent abodes in a timbered region, the palisade has afforded the readiest protection from both the pinch of frost and the spite of either man or beast. The enclosures walled with logs fastened in the ground and reaching opposing heights to serve as a refuge for those who fought the battles of the American Wilderness were models of the Mound Builder's tepees, en- larged and improved by axes of steel. Without iron tools, the tepees were roofed with bark or the skins of deer stretched over poles with a funnel like escape from fires that baked the floors beneath. For, they had not learned to make chimneys and their hearth was for a fire, when the chill was worse than the stifling warmth. Such floors were found with broken pot- tery and pipes, with worn or wasted pieces of all they made from flaky flint, from shell or horn, from bone or stone, scat- tered in and about the ashes left undisturbed, since the last occupant fled or was taken to the charnel; except that the blinding dust of time drifting from the hills and mingling with the melancholy mold of the forest had covered all but the mounds beyond the plowman's eager share.
The tepees generally had a few nearby and sometimes many surrounding grain pits. Apparently, if one was deemed unfit, another was dug and the old was filled with the refuse of the house. From this refuse-this that was waste-we learn what they had. In some pits lined with woven mats eight and ten rowed ears of corn were neatly stowed. Other pits still held shelled corn with hulled nuts and beans closely massed as if to save space. Such stores grown musty or forgotten or through accident were covered with ashes, where wind strown sparks may have started fires, that charred the perfect forms into lasting coal with sad loss to the owners and much gain to antiquarians.
Whatever little possession they had, and nothing was large,
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HOLLOWED STONE FOR GRINDING GRAIN AND CLAY CUP FOUND IN A MOUND.
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STONE PIPES AND A MODERN TOMAHAWK FIPE.
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was likely to go into the open, catch-all use of the abandoned pits. Awls, drills, knives, balanced arrow points, beautiful spear heads and the blocks of flint from which they were flaked by pieces of elk horn under hammers of stone, all, in every stage, from rejected chips to perfect completion, just as they were left by vanished hands, were found in the rubbish thus assorted by chance. Imperfect specimens broken or unfin- ished, when blemished, show the progressive chipping from a suitable boulder or, splinter of granite to a perfect pestle for pulverizing grain or shredding dried meat. Others prove the process of making a single or double grooved ax equally ex- cellent for braining a foe or for cracking and splitting bones for the marrow thereof. Other heaps disclose the development of the finely proportioned and elegantly polished celts or chisel like implements both useful in tanning and handy as tomahawks. Anything dropped among the refuse in a careless moment or thrown by a heedless child, once within the pits among the bones and littered with ashes, was likely lost until discovered by our curio seeking age.
The bones thus found testify that they ate much of what we call Virginia deer, black bear, elk, squirrel, beaver, otter, fox, wolf, wildcat, panther, mink, muskrat, ground hog and the faithful dog that bore them company. They were familiar with the flavors of the wild turkey, the wild goose and the trumpeter swan, and they did not waste eagles, owls or hawks. They also liked the turtle tribe and made cups and spoons from the pretty boxes of the painted kind. Scrapers, single and double pointed pins, awls, some slender and sharp for piercing leather, and some stouter and blunter as if for han- dling hot meat, and tips for darts or arrows were all made from chosen bones. The toughest bones of birds were used in making fish hooks and needles shaped and polished with flints and sand stone. The skeletons of all, from beak to talon, from tooth to claw, from horn to hoof, were searched for a fancied charm or a grotesque ornament. All this is proved by the refuse rescued from pits and by the relics plundered from tombs where the untutored mind of filial love or paternal grief placed the favorite tools and trinkets of the dead, with pre- cious pottery filled with relished food ready for instant need on the gloomy trail to the spirit land. In thinking of the dan-
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gers that prompted their defensive works it is easy to believe that zeal to learn their mystery has chanced upon much of their little, where the apprenhensive, even in the waste pits, may have heaped and hidden their treasure, with never a thought of those who should find and gather them into cry- stal cases in marble halls.
Such was the home of the Mound Builders. If there had been no more-if they had lived longer or come later, so that history could have noted the simple life made noble by their singular devotion of incredible exertion to commemorate their mutual dependence, fair science would have frowned less se- verely on their oblivion, and few or none would have cared to vex their deep repose. But, by a strange perversion of fate, the care to keep their ashes always has caused their remains to be sought with an unrelenting purpose to scatter. Yet the most ardent antiquary quick to read the meaning of every de- tail is prone to pity, when his spade uncovers a token that makes all time akin. Recently, an exploring trench came upon two skeletons where a carefully opened grave showed that an aged couple had been decently buried side by side, along with several finely polished implements that were the work of years to make, and may have been their proudest possessions or a rich tribute of respect. And the right arm of the man was under the woman's neck and close by her right shoulder. Thus the semblance of a long life of affection composed by those who knew them well and adored them much had lasted and come through many centuries to prove that love goes on the same, yesterday and forever. If any in the world today and his wife were thus placed with many tears to dream the ages by, the least of realizing thought could have no better wish for their dust than such unbroken rest. Even when gained through breaking precepts that should be kept holy, worthy emotion delights to find charming sentiment in unexpected forms and places. But gray clad meditation, knowing the tire- less haste of time to make the ceaseless waste of change where everything abideth not, will still decry the ruthless havoc of such a tomb to please a learned holiday, as never worth the violence done the voiceless dead.
The explorations most helpful in bringing this lost life to light have been chiefly made in the Scioto and Miami valleys,
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where they left the larger part of their greatest works in the form of either hilltop fortifications, lowland enclosures or effigies. These masterpieces arch to the east, north and west about Old Clermont. As yet, this condition has not been ex- plained by the non-resident writers. A theory based on the known migrations of other animal life presents a philosophy easily understood if not admitted. The dispersion of man is a question that deepens as the search broadens. No odds whence they came, no considerable body of people has long enjoyed a peaceable possession of any desirable land. Notwithstanding the width and fatness of the continents, the vagrant ways of some and the busy schemes of others have wonderfully accom- plished the passage of the seas and brought the most distant races into collision.
As fact follows fact into view, doubts cease and better in- formed judgment admits that migrations by Behring Strait or by the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, even as now seen, were more possible and probable than the well recorded voyages from Norway by Iceland and Greenland to Newfoundland. But much geologic evidence is claimed in proof of a wide and comparatively recent sinking of land in the northern Pacific, which would have made the passage from Asia still less diffi- cult. In this light and among those growing familiar with other incidents in the relation. the wonder is not at the Dis- covery by Columbus in 1492, but that the event so brilliant was so long delayed. Although doubtless occurring at the top moment of Europe's supremest need of a miracle wrought for despairing liberty, there is no adequate reason but mental inertia why the veritable voyaging of the Norsemen to America should have been ignored. When the Europeans came in earnest, their El Dorado was found pre-empted by a people moving from instead of to the west. For, the most proof points to Alaska as the port of some, perhaps, many missing bands who fled by sea rather than face the ills they left on Asian plains. Whatever may be supposed about an extremely antique race on a submerged portion in the Pacific is a prettily ingenious hypothesis that involves a difficult explanation. It seems enough to believe, with sufficient ethnological reasons, that- in man's present epoch, .there were migrations from Asia compelled, most likely, by accident rather than design.
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It may be assumed that such migrations were far apart and with little or no connecting experience ; because America then was a bourne from which no traveler could or would return. Through these castaways the new world was possessed by a people whose common origin was modified into at least two general divisions. Those having what was the ancient extent of Mexico have been called the Toltecan division. The other division is the Appalachian or American, including the eastern Canadian and western tribes. A naming less exact is more easily attained by calling them Northern and Southern In- dians.
They are collectively styled the Red Race, but the real color is brown with coarse, straight, black hair and dark brown eyes. The Appalachians have a large aquiline nose and a spare, straight, muscular form. They are warlike, cruel, revengeful, and averse to civilized restraint. The Toltecans were lower and heavier, with thicker lips, flatter faces, oblique eyes and a gloomy expression. They inclined to agricul- ture rather than war, and, at the Discovery, had made much the most progress toward a fixed mode of living. Otherwise it is easier to trace a likeness than to define the difference, ex- cept that the man with a home was envied and plundered by the less provident and more aggressive. Both were masters of the same weapons, and both were restricted to the art of the Stone Age. But the Toltecans excelled in the constructive designs which can only flourish where labor has a more regu- lar supply of food than can be furnished by the most dextrous flint tipped arrow or spear. That regular food for the arti- sans who constructed the halls that dazzled the mail clad robbers with Cortes and Pizarro was obtained by the tropical Indians through their discovery and cultivation of maize or the corn plant, which has been so long and so thoroughly do- mesticated that botanists are unable to find or identify its wild growth. With this glorious conquest from nature un- marred by wrong, the Southern Indians advanced their gen- tle sway northward into what is the modern "Corn Belt," where their princely grain found its most prolific home. Then the fierce flesh eaters from beyond the Lakes, having tasted Ohio corn and finding that it was good, came to devour the tender green or to ravage the russet harvest. Thenceforth in-
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cessant war was waged until the Greek should cease or Troy fall.
As the birds flew or the herds roamed between the cool of northern summers and the warmth of southern winters, so the lines of attack and retreat must have been as they were in an age long to come, when our own fathers sought to build happy homes in the pleasant land. In crossing the otherwise forbid- ding barrier of the Great Lakes, the chasm or the narrows we call Niagara or Detroit were the passes for the bands to de- stroy all who dared to hinder the trails of the savage hunters from the north. Of these or any other trail, the quickest ap- proach and the surest retreat was by Detroit. Through this natural gate from the north, everything within reach to the east, west or south was liable to invasion. Even with slight perception of the continuous danger sufficient reason is found for the, to them, prodigious defense made by those who wished to plant for plenty and live in peace.
Twenty-four towns in nearly as many states from Texas to Maine and Oregon have the significant word "Mound" as a whole or part of their names. Beside these, many others have a similar allusion, like Circleville or Grave Creek and more of Indian form and equivalent meaning. Wherever the artificial hillocks cluster, some trace of a defensive work is not far away. A proof that the danger prompting a defense came from the north is the increasing percentage of ceremonial works and the lighter fortifications or none southward in Ken- tucky and Tennessee. All that was different on the north side of the Ohio, where safety was sought through a series of forts made more obvious by longer study. A reader delighting in the repetitions of history, while regretting the consequent ef- facement, is pleased to learn that civilization in placing our principal towns has largely approved the judgment which lo- cated the busiest scenes of primeval life. St. Louis was once called the Mound City. Cincinnati from Third street to the hills and from Deer creek to Mill creek was a maze of earth- works rather centrally topped by a signal height that gave name to Mound street. The extent and elegance of the de- signs at Marietta indicate that it was a concourse or parade ground for that region. The much wasted ruins by Newark were not exceeded by anything of their kind. The Scioto from
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mouth to sources was a succession of settlements rivaling the numbers of today, whose odd glory made perfect and then de- stroyed at Circleville is still the regret of archaeologists, how- ever much the worth of the modern town, that might and should have been elsewhere, far enough at least for a public park in which the preserved square, circle and mounds restored to pristine symmetry would attract 'visitors from all the world.
But as there is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon, so did the majesty of their plans along the Miami exceed them all. For there, "in the imminent deadly breach" of their dominion, Fort Ancient still stands preserved and re- stored for all the ages to come to prove that its contrivers were worthy heroes of the mythic time, and to refute the dec- laration that would class them with the wandering wild men of the northern wilderness of four hundred years ago. Whether or not the lowland enclosures included a military purpose is still mooted. As first found or restored, they seem as surely planned for scenic effect as that their ornaments were polished for artistic satisfaction. The necessity greater than all law may have been the prevailing motive, and the piling of dirt against both sides of an upright row of logs to hold them firm makes a quick but not lasting defense. Yet a conflict in the larger settlements narrowed to the extremity of fighting in their sanctuaries would soon be decisive. A row or streak of black dirt found along the ridges of a large en- closure near Oxford, in Butler county, and in some other places has been deemed the result of a burnt palisade, but such a condition generally passes before the experts have a chance for inspection. Only very few have any candid doubt about the purpose of the hilltop works of which the largest and in fact the pivot of the line was Fort Ancient.
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