USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 4
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will be remembered, are to be especially considered in this report.
A section is here appended, taken at Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, which gives the general structure of the Ohio bottom lands more clearly than any exposure met with, strictly within the limits of the county. Beginning at low-water, we find the deposits that make up the river bank arranged in the following order (ascending):
FEET.
6. Brick clay, covered with one to two feet of soil. 6
5. Land, gravel, and loam , 30
4. Ochreous sand.
3. Carbonaceous clay, an ancient soil or forest bed. 7
2. Ochreous sand. 1/2
I. Clean gravel 6
Total 51
The elements of this section will be noted in their order. The first of them, six feet of gravel, is perhaps the least constant of the series, being sometimes substi- tuted by some of the clays of the drift. The gravel of the Ohio differs from that of the Miamis in being largely composed of sandstone pebbles instead of limestone. It is, consequently, less durable than the river or bank gravel of the Miami districts, and this fact, taken in con nection with the difficulty of access, withholds it generally from applications to road-making.
The second, third, and fourth elements need to be taken together, as they are closely connected in their his- tory. The point to be noted in regard to them is the constant occurrence of carbonaceous clay between the seams of ochreous gravel. The clay is quite heavily charged with vegetable matter, much of it in such a state of preservation that it can be readily identified, and often portions again intermingled in a fine state of subdi- vision with the substance of the clay. The minutest roots of trees-some of the latter still in place-twigs and branches, layers of leaves, ripened fruits, grapes, and sedges, are all clearly distinguishable. Several of the species of trees can be determined, some- by their wood, others by their leaves and fruits. Among them may be named the sycamore, the beech, the shellbark hickory, the buckeye, and the red cedar. A cucurbitaceous plant, probably the wild balsam apple, is also shown to have been abundant by its seeds, which are preserved in the clay.
The leaves frequently occur in layers several inches thick, and are very like the accumulations that are now left in eddies of the river by freshets or floods. The de- posits of the river at present always have an elevation of at least twenty feet and sometimes even of forty feet above the bed now under review.
The constant occurrence of vivianite or phosphate of iron in this deposit is to be noticed. Its presence, in- deed, is an invariable characteristic. The mineral is usually found in small grains, but sometimes it replaces twigs and leaves and other vegetable growths. The quantity in some portions of the beds is considerable, amounting, sometimes, to two or three per cent. of the whole deposit. In such cases it imparts its color to the mass, and this justifies the name by which it is known, "blue earth."
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
Several apparently trustworthy accounts have been re- ceived of the discovery of the bones and teeth of the mastodon and mammoth in this deposit; but these and all other mammalian remains are of very rare occurrence. It is possible that the "chips" and "axe-marked" stumps reported at various points in excavations in the drift beds, attest the former presence here of the gigantic beaver now extinct-castoroides Ohioensis. It was certainly a tenant of the State during the general period to which this old forest bed must be referred. That its work upon trees might easily be mistaken for axe marks, will need no proof to any one acquainted with the work of the existing species of beaver.
In a few instances, land and fresh water shells have been found in the clay, sometimes in quantity enough to convert the clay into a shell marl.
This stratum is shown at all points along the valley in which bottom lands occur. Its elevation above low- water varies from five to twenty feet. It is generally covered superficially with the waste of the overlying banks; but even in such cases it reveals its presence by the long lines of willows and other vegetable growths that establish themselves upon its outcrop. Two things con- spire to adapt it especially to the growth of vegetation. In the first place, it is an impervious stratum, and turns out the water that descends through the overlying loams and sandy clays, thus giving to willows and other plants of like requirements a constant supply of moisture; and secondly, this stratum, as has been already intimated, is in reality an ancient soil, having been carried at an earlier day through the processes of amelioration by which beds of sand and clay are fitted to support vegetable growths.
There are, however, many places where the force of the current in high water uncovers these beds, and where consequently good sections are always offered. Excel- lent disclosures of them are found at New Richmond, Clermont county, and also at Point Pleasant, on the Ken- tucky shore. The spring flood of 1872 furnished an un- surpassed exhibition of this formation at the mouth of the Little Miami river. Rafts of tree trunks are shown at all of these points, though the wood generally perishes very quickly when exposed to the air.
That this very interesting stratum so long escaped ob- servation is probably due to the fact that it could so easily be referred to the agencies that are now at work in the valley. When the trunks of trees and layers of leaves be- longing to it have been noticed in the banks of the river, it has naturally enough been supposed that they are the deposits of earlier floods, agreeing as they do with the materials transported by the floods of our own time. But in describing the Lawrenceburgh section, now under con- sideration, as the general section of the Ohio valley de- posits, it has already been shown, at least by implication, that this explanation is inadmissible. The extension of this sheet of carbonaceous clay under all the various drift deposits of the valley, as is shown by very numerous nat- ural and artificial sections, proves that it is of earlier date than these overlying deposits, and the character of this stratum shows that it has a very different history from that which these higher deposits record.
It is, perhaps, still too early to write out this history in its minuter features, but the facts already given show us that we have in this sheet of blackened clay the bottom lands of the Ohio at an earlier day, and, indeed, under very different conditions from those that now prevail. The river then ran in a channel lower by forty feet, at least, than that which it now holds, and the great valley was then empty of the immense accumulations of sand, clay, loam, and gravel, which constitute its bottom lands and terraces to-day.
The various vegetable growths with which this stratum is filled, are to be regarded as largely the production of the soil on which they are now found. There is no other satisfactory mode of accounting for the particular kinds and enormous amount of vegetable matter traced here.
The ochre seams above and below this ancient soil seem to point to marshy conditions that were brought in with the changing levels of the valley. Of the two, the upper seam is the more constant.
In the Lawrenceburgh section we find thirty-five feet (thirty to fifty in the general section) of sands, gravels, clays and loams, which constitute the Ohio bottoms, as the term is generally used. There is no fixed order in the alternation of these materials, except that the surface portions have, for a few feet in depth, a tolerably uniform character. The soil of the bottom lands is quite homogeneous in constitution, and has obviously been formed by the subjection to atmospheric agencies of just such material as it now covers. Beneath the soil, and extending to a depth of about fifteen feet, beds of yellow clay occur. The proportions of sand mixed with the clay vary somewhat, increasing towards the lower limit named, and below this the beds consist rather of sand than clay. The beds of clay above named furnish an excellent material for brickmaking. The supply of the Cincinnati market is almost entirely derived from this horizon. The great depth of these brick clays, and their entire freedom from pebbles, render a very economical manufacture of brick possible.
Below this limit, sand and gravel and streaks of loam are met, without regularity of arrangement. Of the fif- teen to twenty feet intervening between the bottom of the brick clays and the summit of the buried soil, the larger part consists of gravel. The gravel of this horizon is seldom clean, like that described at the level of low- water, but consists of large-sized sandstone pebbles, four to six inches in diameter, mingled with finer materials.
An equivalent of these beds, but of local occurrence, is the fine-grained clay described in the geological reports as "Springfield clay." It never occurs in extensive sheets, but is quite limited in vertical and horizontal ex- tent. The heaviest accumulation of it observed in Hamilton county is in the city of Cincinnati, on East Pearl street, above Pike. It has a thickness there of more than thirty feet, as has been ascertained in the ex- cavations for the foundations of buildings. It has been turned to account in its different exposures for different purposes-at Miamisburgh, for the manufacture of paint ; at Springfield, for the manufacture of "Milwaukee brick," the clay being rich in lime and poor in oxide, and thus
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
burning white, while a new use has been found for it in Cincinnati. It was successfully employed in preparing the floor of the new reservoir, its fineness of grain and consequent toughness fitting it admirably for this purpose. It must have been accumulated in eddies or protected areas, during the later ages of the period of submergence.
The gravel terraces occupy a higher level than the formations already described. The terrace on which Cincinnati stands, may be taken as a fair example of them all. Its altitude above low-water varies from one hundred to one hundred and twenty feet, the average elevation being one hundred and eight feet. It is com- posed of distinctly stratified gravel and sand of varying degrees of fineness and purity. The gravel stones are all water-worn. In weight they seldom reach ten pounds. The upper tributaries of the Ohio supply the materials in part, but a much larger proportion in the vicinity of Cin- cinnati is derived from the limestone rocks of western Ohio and the crystalline beds of Canada. The propor- tion here to be noted among the smaller-sized pebbles is, of ten feet, five of Upper Silurian and Devonian lime- stones, three of Lower Silurian, least worn, one foot of granitic, and one of sandstones, etc., of the Upper Ohio.
Occasional seams of clay loam occur, but seldom of extent or tenacity enough to constitute reliable water- bearers. Less frequently met, but still constituting a noteworthy feature of the gravel terraces, are seams of bituminous coal, in small water-worn fragments.
The terraces overlie, as will be seen, the formation previously described. Few sections are carried deep enough to reveal the lower beds, but the leaves and wood of the buried soil are occasionally met at considerable depth, and usually, on this account, they attract attention. The following general order of materials will be observed in passing from the surface of the terrace to low-water.
FEET.
Soil 2- 5 Gravel and sand, with seams of loam -4060
Brick clay, with sand and loam .20-30
Buried soil, with trees, leaves, etc 5-10
Gravel and clay 5-10
72.115
The leading facts in the structure of the terraces show that their history is not to be explained by the present conditions of the continent. They must have been formed under water at a time when the face of the coun- try held a lower level than it now does, by one hundred or more feet. They thus bear direct testimony to two of the most surprising conclusions which the study of the Drift period has furnished to us, viz: That the continent sank, during the latter stages of this period, considerably below its present level, and that it was afterwards re-ele- vated.
There is one other line of facts in connection with the drift beds of the county that must not be omitted here. It is the great depth which some of these deposits have been found to hold below the present drainage of the country. The series of facts obtained by Timothy Kirby, esq., in boring a deep well in Mill Creek valley, at Cum- minsville, now within the corporate limits of Cincinnati, proves very interesting in this as well as in other respects.
Beginning at an elevation of ninety feet above low-water of the Ohio, a succession of drift deposits was penetra- ted until a depth of sixty feet below low-water was reached, the bedded rock being first struck at a depth of one hundred and fifty-one feet below the point of begin- ning. The deposits included, in descending order, twelve feet of soil and brick clay, four of sand, thirty-four of blue clay with gravel, nineteen of gravel, three of coarse sand, eleven of sand with fragments of bituminous coal, nine of blue clay with gravel (at the bottom of this the level of low-water in the Ohio was reached), sixteen of blue clay and fine sand and sprinkled with coal, and forty-three of sand, water-worn gravel, and blue clay, with occasional fragments of bituminous coal, below which, at the depth of one hundred and fifty-one feet from the surface, were the shales of the Blue Limestone group. Several remarkable facts are to be observed in this section, the most striking of which is the great depth to which the excavation of Mill Creek valley was formerly carried. The bed of the stream that occupies the valley to-day is at a higher level by one hundred and twenty feet than that of the ancient channel. It is easy to see that this erosion could not have been effected under existing con- ditions. It can only be explained by a higher altitude of the continent, and is thus referred to the opening division of the glacial period. It has not been demon- strated that continuous channels exist at this great depth ; but the rocky barriers that fringe the streams do not at best disprove this theory, as there is always room for a deeper channel on one side or the other of the great valleys.
Another interesting fact is the occurrence of water- worn fragments of bituminous coal, quite similar to those found in the terraces already noticed. They occur at various depths, the lowest at one hundred and fifty feet below the surface and the highest at eighty feet below. These facts, so far as known, stand by themselves, and no explanation is proposed. It is hard to see how the waste of Ohio coal-fields should find its way in quantity into Mill Creek valley, and there is certainly no other obvious source of supply.
The well from which these facts were obtained was carried to a depth of five hundred and forty-one feet be- low the surface. Analysis of the chips and borings brought up and preserved reveal the character of the strata underlying Ohio to a depth greater by about four hundred feet than any other rocks exposed within the limits of the State. The shales of the blue limestone series appear to continue to a depth of four hundred feet from the point of beginning.
Carburetted hydrogen gas escaped from the well in considerable quantity from a depth of two hundred and eighty feet downwards, but no large accumulations of petroleum compounds were indicated.
.
2I
HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
CHAPTER III. THE ABORIGINAL AMERICAN.
Are they here- The dead of other days ?- and did the dust Of these fair solitudes onee 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 earth, 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 maned shoulder to the yoke.
The red man came,
The roaming hunter-tribes, warlike and fierce, And the Mound Builders vanished from the earth. -W. C. BRYANT, "The-Prairies."
THE AMERICAN ABORIGINE.
The red men whom Columbus found upon this conti- nent, and whom he mistakenly calls Indians, were not its aborigines. The Western, not the Eastern hemisphere is the Old World. Agassiz finely said:
First-born among the continents, though so much later in culture and civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line from Nova Scotia to the Far West.
Great, learned, and eloquent as was Agassiz, however, his doctrine of the separate creation of the races of hu- manity-that men must have originated in nations, as the bees have originated in swarms, and as the different social plants have covered the extensive tracts over which they have naturally spread-has failed to obtain general acceptance among the scientists. Later investigations tend to return anthropology and ethnology to their an- cient basis, upon the principle sounded forth by Paul in the scholarly air of Mars Hill: "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." America, old world as it is, is not a cradle-land. Her native physiognomies, the manners and customs of the races found by Europeans upon her soil, their traditions, and something in their architecture, point toward the historic regions of the far east. The travellers who see Kalmuck Tartars upon the Asiatic steppes, with almost the precise face and figure of the American Indian, catch thus a hint of the far-away past of emigration to and colonization of this continent. Not only across the tract now occupied by Behring's Straits,-very likely dry land in the period of exodus from Asia,-but also across the Atlantic sea, storm-driven or pushed by adventurous souls who never returned to tell their tale, the wave of immigration may have come. Quite certain it is now, the time of man's appearance upon American soil dates long back among the ages pre- vious to the advent of Christ. Before the Indians were, as dwellers here; before the Mound Builders; before Aztec and Nahuan and Mayan civilizations, was still, in all probability, the pre-historic man of millenniums ago.
So long since, in the study of our antiquities, as 1839, Dr. McGuire, in the Transactions of the Boston Society of Natural History, brought forward evidence, from dis- coveries recently made in the improvement of the High Rock spring at Saratoga, to show the presence of human beings there fifty-five hundred years before. The find of a human bone near Natchez, in association with the remains of the mastodon and the megalonyx; the human skeleton dug from an excavation at New Orleans, at a depth of sixteen feet, and beneath four successive buried forests of cypress; the matting and pottery found on Petit Anse Island, Louisiana, fifteen to twenty feet below the surface, underneath the fossil bones of the elephant and the mastodon; the mastodon found in his miry grave on the bottom lands of the Bourbense river, in Missouri, with every token about his remains that he had been hunted and killed by savages there; the skeletons found under some depth of soil and accumulations of bones in caves at Louisville, Kentucky, and Elyria, Ohio ;- all, with other facts developing from time to time, seem to point a high antiquity for the aboriginal American. Col- onel Whittlesey, of Cleveland, in his Evidences of the Antiquity of Man in the United States, argues from the find in the Elyria cave, that, "judging from the appear- ance of the bones and the depth of accumulations over them, two thousand years may have elapsed since the hu- man skeletons were laid on the floor of this cave." The arguments from other finds multiply this number to sev- eral scores of centuries. In a later and very recent pamphlet Colonel Whittlesey says:
Man may have existed in Ohio with the mastodon, elephant, rhinoc- eros, musk ox, horse, beaver, and tapir of the drift period, as he did in Europe; but to decide such a question the proof should be indisputable. There is some reason to conclude that there were people on this territory prior to the builders of the mounds. Our cave shelters have not been much explored, but as far as they have been examined the relics lying at the bottom of the accumulations indicate a very rude people. I anticipate that we shall find here, as in other countries, that the most ancient race were the rudest and were cave-dwellers. I have seen at Portsmouth, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio river, fire-hearths more ancient than the earthworks at that place. Whoever the people were who made these fires, they must have had arrow-points, war-clubs, and stone axes or manls. But we have at this time no evidence to connect such a primeval race with the human effigies scattered profusely through- out Ohio. These effigies present no uniformity of type, and, therefore, cannot represent race features. They approach nearer to the North Amer- ican savage than any other people, but are so uncouth that they are of little or no ethnological value. There was no school of art among either the cave-dwellers, the builders of the mounds, or the more recent Nor- thern Indians, which was capable of a correct representation of the human face. These effigies must have been the result of the fancies of idle hours, produced under no system and with no uniformity of pur- pose. They thus have no meaning which the historian or antiquarian can lay hold of to advance his knowledge of the pre-historic races.
THE PRIMITIVE OHIOAN.
We are thus brought to consider the peoples who, pos- sibly later, but still anciently, dwelt in the valley of the Ohio. They left no literature, no inscriptions as yet de- cipherable, if any, no monuments except the long forest- covered earth- and stone-works. No traditions of them, by common consent of all the tribes, were left to the North American Indian. As races, they have vanished utterly in the darkness of the past. But the compara- tively slight traces they have left tend to conclusions of deep interest and importance, not only highly probable,
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
but rapidly approaching certainty. «Correspondences in the manufacture of pottery and in the rude sculptures found, the common use of the serpent-symbol, the likeli- hood that all were sun-worshippers and practiced the horrid rite of human sacrifice, and the tokens of com- mercial intercourse manifest by the presence of Mexican porphyry and obsidian in the Ohio Valley mounds, to- gether with certain statements of the Mexican annalists, satisfactorily demonstrate, in the judgment of many anti- quaries, the racial alliance, if not the identity, of our Mound Builders with the ancient Mexicans, whose de- scendants, with their remarkable civilization, were found in the country when Cortes entered it in the second dec- ade of the sixteenth century.
THE MAYAS.
It is not improbable that the first marks of Mayan civ- ilization upon the continent are to be found among the relics of the Mound Builders, particularly in the South- ern States. The great Maya race, the first of which Mexican story bears record, inhabited Yucatan and the adjacent districts as early as 1000 B. C., when Nachan, the "city of the serpents," afterwards Palenque, the seat of re- markable ruins to this day, was founded as their capital. It is accounted to have been among the most civilized of the American aboriginal nations. It possessed an alpha- bet and so a literature, engaged in manufactures and trade, cultivated the ground, sailed the waters, built great temples and other edifices, and executed sculptures which remain, the wonder of antiquaries, at Palenque, Copan, Uxmal, and other ancient capitals and centers of population. It was, undoubtedly, the oldest civilization in the Western Hemisphere; and so permanent was its influence, and so numerous did the race enjoying it be- come, that no less than fifteen languages or dialects of Central America, north and south of the Tehauntepec sthmus, are found related to the Mayan tongue. It was already ancient and perhaps decaying when the Nahuas pressed upon it from the northward, partially adopted it, carried it on, and gave it fresh life and vigor.
The legends of the Maya people indicate an origin in the Mediterranean countries of Europe or Asia. It is supposed, accordingly, that their home here was upon the Atlantic coast, and that thence they emigrated to Cuba, and in due time into Yucatan and the region south of the Tehauntepec isthmus, whence they spread in both direc- tions, reaching finally as high as Vera Cruz at the north- ward. Their story, as still found in the manuscripts, is that their ancestors went into the country from the direc- tion of Florida, which was long afterwards the general name of the country traversed by De Soto (who gave the name), from the present Florida coast to the Mississippi. It seems quite within the limits of probability, then, that some of the more ancient of the remains in the east and south of the United States, particularly the immense shell-heaps on the Atlantic seaboard, found all the way from Nova Scotia to the Floridian peninsula, along the Gulf shores, and up the southern river valleys, were left by the Mayas in their advance on the final home in Central America. It is hardly probable, however, though
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