History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 5

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp; Williams, L.A. & co., Cleveland, O., pub
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio, L. A. Williams
Number of Pages: 590

USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 5

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

not at all impossible, that their habitations extended so far north, on any line west of the Alleghanies, as the Ohio valley.

THE NAHUAS-THE TOLTECS.

The conclusion is different, however, concerning the race which, many ages after the settlement of the Mayas at their ultimate destination, confronted them there- the Nahuas, notably that tribe or nation of them known as the Toltecs-neighbored, probably, somewhere in the valley of the Mississippi by the conquerors of the latter in the eleventh century of our era. The Chichimecs are believed to be racially, if not identically, the same with our Mound Builders. The Mexican traditions name the Olmecs as the first of Nahua blood to colonize the re- gions north of the Tehuantepec isthmus, where they overcame a race of giants, and found also the Miztecs and Zapotecs, not of Nahua stock, who had built up, in what is now the Mexican State of Oajaca, a civilization rivaling the subsequent splendor of the Aztecs. The Olmecs came in ships or barks from the east, as did their relatives some time after, the Xicalancas. The former tribe settled mainly in the present State of Pueblo, and built the tower or pyramid of Cholula, as a memorial, tra- dition says, of the tower of Babel, whose building the progenitors of the Olmec chiefs witnessed. Other of the Nahua tribes, as the Toltecs, possessed a tradition of the deluge coming close to the Scriptural account. Both of these look to the other side of the continent as afford- ing the points of ingress for the later immigration, which was doubtless originally from Asia, and many think was of Jewish descent. Long before entering Mexico, how- ever, as the story runs, the seven families of similar lan- guage who were the ancestors of the Toltec nation, wan- dered in many lands and across the seas, living in caves and enduring many hardships, through a period of one hundred and four years, when, five hundred and twenty years after the flood, twenty centuries or more before the Christian era, they arrived at and settled in "Hue huc Tlapalan," which has been identified with reasonable probability as the valley of the Mississippi. Here their families grew and multiplied, extending their boundaries far and wide, until about the middle of the sixth century after Christ, when two families of the land revolted, but unsuccessfully, and were driven out, with their numerous followers, and took their way by devious wanderings to Mexico. Here they fixed their capital at Tulancingo, and eighteen years afterward more permanently at Tolean, on the present site of the village of Tula, thirty miles northwest of the city of Mexico.

The character and dates of subsequent Toltec or Mound Builder immigrations, with slight exceptions, has not even the dim light of Mexican tradition to reveal them. The last irruption of the Nahnan tribes is fixed at about 1100 A. D. One of them, and the best known, the famous Aztecs, did not reach Anahuac with their unique and magnificent civilization until near the close of the twelfth century. Previously, however (1062 A. D.), the Toltec capital had been taken and its empire had fallen by the hands of the martial Chichimecs, their for- mer neighbors in the far north, who had followed them

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

to their new home, and upon a son of whom, three and a half centuries before, as a peace offering, they had be- stowed the throne of the Toltec monarchy. The Toltecs now disappear from history, except as amalgamated with their conquerors, and as founding, by many of its fugi- tive noble families and in conjunction with Mayan ele- ments, the Quiche-Cakehiqual monarchy in Guatemala, which was flourishing with some grandeur and power so late as the time of Cortes.

The migrations of the Toltecs from parts of the terri- tory now covered by the United States, are believed to have reached through about a thousand years. Apart from the exile of the princes and their allies, and very likely an exodus now and then compelled by their ene- mies -and ultimate conquerors, the Chichimecs, who, as we have seen, at last followed them to Mexico, the Mound Builders were undoubtedly, in the course of the ages, pressed upon, and finally the last of them-unless the Natchez and Mandan tribes, as some suppose, are to be considered connecting links between the Toltecs and the American Indians-driven out by the red men. The usual opening of the gateways in their works of defence, looking to the east and northeastward, indicates the di- rection from which these enemies were expected. They were, not improbably, the terrible Iroquois and their allies, the first really formidable Indians encountered by the French discoverers and explorers in "New France" in the seventeenth century. A silence as of the grave is upon the history of their wars, doubtless long and bloody, the savages meeting with skilled and determined resistance, but their ferocious and repeated attacks, con_ tinued, mayhap, through several centuries, at last ex- pelling the more civilized people-

"And the Mound Builders vanished from the earth,"

unless, indeed, as the works of learned antiqua- ries assume* and as is assumed above, they afterwards appear in the Mexican story. Many of the remains of the defensive works at the South and across the land to- ward Mexico are of an unfinished type and pretty plainly indicate that the retreat of the Mound Builders was in that direction, and that it was hastened by the re- newed onslaughts of their fierce pursuers or by the dis- covery of a fair and distant land, to which they deter- mined to emigrate in the hope of secure and untroubled homes .¡ Professor Short, however, arguing from the lesser age of trees found upon the. southern works, is "led to think the Gulf coast may have been occupied by the Mound Builders for a conple of centuries after they were driven by their enemies from the country north of the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers." He be- lieves two thousand years is time enough to allow for their total occupation of the country north of the Gulf

of Mexico, "though after all it is but conjecture." He adds: "It seems to us, however, that the time of aban- donment of their works may be more closely approxi- mated. A thousand or two years may have elapsed since they vacated the Ohio valley, and a period em- bracing seven or eight centuries may have passed since they retired from the Gulf coast." The date to which the latter period carries us back, it will be observed, ap- proximates somewhat closely to that fixed by the Mexi- can annalists as the time of the last emigration of a people of Nahua stock from the northward.

THE MOUND BUILDERS' EMPIRE.

Here we base upon firmer ground. The extent and something of the character of this are known. They are tangible and practical realities. We stand upon the mounds, pace off the long lines of the enclosures, collect and handle and muse upon the long-buried relics now in our publie and private museums. The domain of the Mound Builders is well-nigh coterminous with that of the Great Republic. Few States of the Union are wholly without the ancient monuments. Singular to say, how- ever, in view of the huge heaps and barrows of shells left by the aboriginal man along the Atlantic shore, there are no earth or stone mounds or enclosures of the older construction on that coast. Says Professor Short:

No authentic remains of the Mound Builders are found in the New England States, In the former we have an isolated monnd in the valley of the Kennebec, in Maine, and dim outlines of enclosures near Sanborn and Concord, in New Hampshire; but there is no certainty of their being the work of this people.

Mr. Squier pronounces them to be purely the work of Red Indians. Colonel Whittlesey would assign these fort-like struc- tures the enclosures of western New York, and common upon the rivers discharging themselves into Lakes Erie and Ontario from the south, differing from the more southern enclosures, in that they were surrounded by trenches on their outside, while the latter uniformly have the trench on the inside of the enclosure, to a people anterior to the red Indian and perhaps contemporaneous with the Mound Builders, but distinct from either. The more reasonable view is that of Dr. Fos- ter, that they are the frontier works of the Mound Builders, adapted to the purposes of defence against the sudden irruptions of hostile tribes. It is probable that these defences belong to the last period of the Mound Builders' residence on the lakes, and were erected when the more warlike peoples of the north, who drove them from their cities, first made their appearance.

The Builders quarried flint in many places, soapstone in Rhode Island and North Carolina, and in the latter State also the translucent mica found so widely dispersed in their burial mounds in association with the bones of the dead. They mined or made salt, and in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan they got out, with infinite labor, the copper, which was doubtless their most useful and valued metal. The Lower Peninsula of that State is rich in ancient remains, particularly in mounds of sepul- ture; and there are "garden beds" in the valleys of the St. Joseph and the Kalamazoo, in southwestern Michi- gan; but, "excepting ancient copper mines, no known works extend as far north as Lake Superior anywhere in the central region. Farther to the northwest, however, the works of the same people are comparatively numer- ous. Dr. Foster quotes a British Columbia newspaper, without giving either name or date, as authority for the discovery of a large number of mounds, seemingly the

* We have so far relied chiefly upon the very excellent and recent work from the pen of Professor John T. Short, of the State university at Columbus, Ohio, the latest and probably the best authority on "The North Americans of Antiquity" yet in print. Harper & Brothers, 1880. Professor Short must not, however, be held responsible for all the statements, inferences, and conclusions set out in the foregoing paragraphs.

+See, further, Judge M. F. Force's interesting paper on the Builders, Cincinnati, 1872 and 1874.

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

works of the same people who built further east and south. On the Butte prairies of Oregon, Wilkes and his exploring expedition discovered thousands of similar mounds." We condense further from Short :

All the way up the Yellowstone region and on the upper tributaries of the Missouri, mounds are found in profusion. The

Missouri valley seems to liave been one of the most populous branches of the widespread Mound Builder country. The valleys of its affluents, the Platte and Kansas rivers, also furnish evidence that these streams served as the channels into which flowed a part of the tide of popula- tion which either descended or ascended the Missouri. The Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, however, formed the great eentral arteries of the Mound Builder domain. In Wisconsin we find the northern central limit of their works; occasionally on the western shores of Lake Michi- gan, but in great numbers in the southern counties of the State, and es- pecially on the lower Wisconsin river.

The remarkable similarity of one group of works, on a branch of Rock river in the south of this State, to some of the Mexican antiquities led to the christening of the adjacent village as Aztalan-which (or Aztlan), meaning whiteness, was a name of the "most attractive land" somewhere north of Mexico and the sometime home of the Aztee and other Nahua nations. If rightly conjectured as the Mississippi valley, or some part of it, that country may well have included the site of the modern Aztalan.

Across the Mississippi, in Minnesota and Iowa, the predominant type of circular tumuli prevails, extending throughout the latter State to Missouri. There are evidences that the Upper Missouri region was connected with that of the Upper Mississippi by settlements occupying the intervening country. Mounds are found even in the valley of the Red river of the north. Descending to the interior, we find the heart of the Mound Builder country in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It is uncertain whether its vital eenter was in southern Illi- nois or Ohio-probably the former, because of its geographical situa- tion with reference to the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers.

The site of St. Louis was formerly covered with mounds, one of which was thirty-five feet high, while in the American Bottom, on the Illinois side of the river, their number approximates two hundred.

It is pretty well known, we believe, that St. Louis takes its fanciful title of "Mound City" from the former fact.

The multitude of mound works which are scattered over the entire northeastern portion of Missouri indicate that the region was once in- habited by a population so numerous that in comparison its present occupants are only as the scattered pioneers of a new-settled eoun- try. . The same sagacity which chose the neighbor-

hood of St. Louis for these works, covered the site of Cincinnati with an extensive system of circumvallations and mounds. Almost the en- tive space now occupied by the city was utilized by the mysterious Builders in the construction of embankments and tumuli, built upon the most accurate geometrical principles, and evincing keen military foresight. The vast number as well as magnitude of the works found in the State of Ohio, have surprised the most eare- less and indifferent observers. It is estimated by the most conservative, and Messrs. Squier and Davis among them, that the number of tumuli in Ohio equals ten thousand, and the number of enclosures one thou- sand or one thousand five hundred. In Ross county alone one hun- dred enclosures and upwards of five hundred mounds have been exam- ined. The Alleghany mountains, the natural limit of the great Mississippi hasin, appear to have served as the eastern and southeast- ern boundary of the Mound Builder country. In western New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and in all of Kentucky and Ten- nessee, their remains are numerous and in some instances imposing. In Tennessee, especially, the works of the Mound Builders are of the most interesting eharaeter. Colonies of Mound Builders seem to have passed the great natural barrier into North Carolina and left remains in Marion county, while still others penetrated into South Carolina, and built on the Wateree river.

Mounds in Mississippi also have been examined, with interesting results.

On the southern Mississippi, in the area embraced between the ter- mination of the Cumberland mountains, near Florence and Tuscumbia, in Alabama, and the mouth of Big Black river, this people left numer- ous works, many of which were of a remarkable character. The whole region bordering on the tributaries of the Tombigbee, the country through which the Wolf river flows, and that watered by the Yazoo river and its affluents, was densely populated by the same people who built mounds in the Ohio valley. The State of Louis-

iana and the valleys of the Arkansas and Red rivers were not only the most thickly populated wing of the Mound Builder domain, but also furnish us with remains presenting affinities with the great works of Mexico so striking that no doubt can longer exist that the same people were the architeets of both. It is needless to discuss

the fact that the works of the Mound Builders exist in considerable numbers in Texas, extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, es- tablishing an unmistakable relationship as well as actual union between the truncated pyramids of the Mississippi valley and the Toealli of Mexico, and the countries further south.

Such, in a general way, was the geographical dis- tribution of the Mound Builders within and near the ter- ritory now occupied by the United States.

THE WORKS.

They are-such of them as are left to our day-gener- ally of earth, occasionally of stone, and more rarely of earth and stone intermixed. Dried bricks, in some ins- tances, are found in the walls and angles of the best pyramids of the Lower Mississippi valley. Often, especi- ally for the works devoted to religious purposes, the earth has not been taken from the surrounding soil, but has been transported from a distance, probably from some locality regarded as sacred. They are further divided into enclosures and mounds or tumuli. The classifica- tion of these by Squier & Davis, in their great work on "The Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," published by the Smithsonian Institution thirty-two years ago, has not yet been superseded. It is as follows:

I. Enclosures-For Defence, Sacred, Miscellaneous.

II. Mounds-Of Sacrifice, or Temple-Sites, of Sep- ulture, of Observation.

To these may properly be added the Animal or Effigy (emblematie or symbolical) Mounds, and some would add Mounds for Residence. The Garden-Beds, if true remains of the Builders, may also be considered a sepa- rate class; likewise mines and roads, and there is some reason to believe that canals may be added.

In the treatment of these classes, briefly, we shall fol- low in places the chapter on this subject in our History of Franklin and Pickaway counties, Ohio.

I. ENCLOSURES FOR DEFENCE. A large and interest- ing class of the works is of such a nature that the object for which they were thrown up is unmistakable. The "forts," as they are popularly called, are found through- out the length and breadth of the Mississippi valley, from the Alleghanies to the Rocky mountains. The rivers of this vast basin have worn their valleys deep in the original plain, leaving broad terraces leading like gigantie steps up to the general level of the country. The sides of the terraces are often steep and difficult of access, and sometimes quite inaccessible. Such locations would naturally be selected as the site of defensive works, and there, as a matter of fact, the strong and complica- ted embankments of the Mound Builders are found. The points have evidently been chosen with great care, and are such as would, in most cases, be approved by

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

modern military engineers. They are usually on the higher ground, and are seldom commanded from posi- tions sufficiently near to make them untenable through the use of the short-range weapons of the Builders, and, while rugged and steep on some of their sides, have one or more points of easy approach, in the protection of which great skill and labor seem to have been expended. They are never found, nor, in general, any other remains of the Builders, upon the lowest or latest-formed river terraces or bottoms. They are of irregular shape, con- forming to the nature of the ground, and are often strengthened by extensive ditches. The usual defence is a simple embankment thrown up along and a little below the brow of the hill, varying in height and thickness ac- cording to the defensive advantage given by the natural declivity. "The walls generally wind around the borders of the elevations they occupy, and when the nature of the ground renders some points more accessible than others, the height of the wall and the depth of the ditch at those weak points are proportionally increased. The gateways are narrow and few in number, and well guarded by embankments of earth placed a few yards in- side of the openings or gateways and parallel with them, and projecting somewhat beyond them at each end, thus fully covering the entrances, which, in some cases, are still further protected by projecting walls on either side of them. These works are somewhat numerous, and in- dicate a clear appreciation of the elements, at least, of fortification, and unmistakably point out the purpose for which they were constructed. A large number of these defensive works consist of a line of ditch and embank- ments, or several lines carried across the neck of penin- sulas or bluff headlands, formed within the bends of streams-an easy and obvious mode of fortification, com- mon to all rude peoples."* Upon the side where a pe- ninsula or promontory merges into the mainland of the terrace or plateau, the enclosure is usually guarded by double or overlapping walls, or a series of them, having sometimes an accompanying mound, probably designed, like many of the mounds apart from the enclosures, as a lookout station, corresponding in this respect to the bar- bican of our British ancestors in the Middle Ages. As natural strongholds the positions they occupy could hardly be excelled, and the labor and skill expended to strengthen them artificially rarely fail to awake the admi- ration and surprise the student of our antiquities. Some of the works are enclosed by miles of embankment still ten to fifteen feet high, as measured from the bottom of the ditch. In some cases the number of openings in the walls is so large as to lead to the conclusion that certain of them were not used as gateways, but were occupied by bastions or block-houses long ago decayed. This is a marked peculiarity of the great work known as "Fort Ancient," on the Little Miami river and railroad, in War- ren county. Some of the forts have very large or smaller "dug-holes" inside, seemingly designed as reservoirs for use in a state of siege. Occasionally parallel earth-walls, of lower height than the embankments of the main work,

called "covered ways," are found adjacent to enclosures, and at times connecting separate works, and seeming to be intended for the protection of those passing to and fro within them. These are considered by some antiqua - ries, however, as belonging to the sacred enclosures.

This class of works abound in Ohio. Squier and Davis express the opinion that "there seems to have been a system of defences extending from the sources of the Susquehanna and Alleghany, in western New York, diagonally across the country through central and north- ern Ohio to the Wabash. Within this range the works that are regarded as defensive are largest and most nu- merous." The most notable, however, of the works usually assigned to this class in this State is in southern Ohio, and not very far from the boundaries of Hamilton county, being only forty-two miles northeast of Cincin- nati. It is the "Fort Ancient" already mentioned. This is situated upon a terrace on the left bank of the river, two hundred and thirty feet above the Little Miami, and occupies a peninsula defended by two ravines, while the river itself, with a high, precipitous bank, defends the western side. The walls are between four and five miles long, and ten to twenty feet high, according to the natural strength of the line to be protected. A resemblance has been traccd in the walls of the lower enclosure "to the form of two massive serpents, which are apparently con- tending with one another. Their heads are the mounds, which are separated from the bodies by the opening, which resembles a ring around the neck. They bend in and out, and rise and fall, and appear like two massive green serpents rolling along the summit of this high hill. Their appearance under the overhanging forest trees is very impressive."* Others have found a resemblance in the form of the whole work to a rude outline of the con- tinent of North and South America.

Another fortified eminence, enclosing sixteen and three- tenths acres, is found in the present Butler county, once within the old county of Hamilton. The entrance to this enclosure is guarded by a complicated system of covered ways. Another, and a very remarkable work, as having walls of stone, constructed in their place at the top of a steep and lofty hill with infinite toil and difficulty, is near the village of Bourneville, Ross county, on Spruce hill, a height commanding the beautiful valley of Paint creek. The wall is two and a quarter miles long, and encloses one hundred and forty acres, in the center of which was an artificial lake. Many enclosures of the kind have been surveyed and described in other counties of the State.

II. SACRED ENCLOSURES .- Regularity of form is the characteristic of these. They are not, however, of inva- riable shape, but are found in various geometrical figures, as circles, squares, hexagons, octagons, ellipses, parallelo- grams, and others, either singly or in combination. How- ever large, they were laid out with astounding accuracy, and show that the Builders had some scientific knowl- edge, a scale of measurement, and the means of com- puting areas and determining angles. They are often in

* American Cyclopædia, article "American Antiquities."

*Rev, S. D. Peet, in the American Antiquarian for April, 1878.

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

groups, but also often isolated. Most of them are of small size, two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet in diameter, with one gateway usually opening to the east, as if for the worship of the sun, and the ditch invariably on the inside. These are frequently inside enclosures of a different character, particularly military works. A sac- rificial mound was commonly erected in the center of them. The larger circles are oftenest found in connec- tion with squares; some of them embrace as many as fifty acres. They seldom have a ditch, but when they do, it is inside the wall. The rectangular works with which they are combined are believed never to have a ditch. In this State a combined work of a square with two circles is often found, usually agreeing in this remarkable fact, that each side of the rectangle measures exactly one thousand and eighty feet, and the circles respectively are seventeen hundred and eight hundred feet in diameter. The frequency and wide prevalence of this uniformity demonstrate that it could not have been accidental. The square enclosures almost invariably have eight gateways at the angles and midway between, upon each side, all of which are covered or defended by small mounds. The parallels before mentioned are sometimes found in connection with this class of works. From the Hope- town work, near Chillicothe, a "covered way" led to the Scioto river, many hundred feet distant.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 5

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp; Williams, L.A. & co., Cleveland, O., pub Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio, L. A. Williams Number of Pages: 590

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp; Williams, L.A. & co., Cleveland, O., pub
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio, L. A. Williams
Number of Pages: 590