History of the city of Columbus, capital of Ohio, Volume I, Part 4

Author: Lee, Alfred Emory, 1838-; W. W. Munsell & Co
Publication date: 1892
Publisher: New York and Chicago : Munsell & Co.
Number of Pages: 1202

USA > Ohio > Franklin County > Columbus > History of the city of Columbus, capital of Ohio, Volume I > Part 4

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).

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Travels, etc.

34. Journal of a Tour, etc.

35. John Clayton, Rector of Crofton, to the Royal Society, May 12, 1688, on Virginia and what he saw there.

36. American Ornithology, by Alexander Wilson, Philadelphia.

37. Geological Survey Report, 1808-14.

38. History of Ohio.

* A migration of black and gray squirrels did take place in 1857, as predicted.

CHAPTER II.

THE PREHISTORIC RACES.

The antiquity of man in the Ohio Valley is one of the dark and fathomless secrets of the past. Science has endeavored with but faint success to pierce its mystic shadows. Only within the last few years, and then by accident, have the first feeble glimpses been obtained into its remoter mysteries. By these glimpses, vague and unsatisfactory as they are, the eye of science traees the existence of man in this region back to that wondrous period when a vast sheet of ice, descending from the north, lay like a monstrous shield over the greater part of the Ohio basin.

Of the advance and recession of that stupendous continental glacier the record is clear, copious and authentic. Nature has herself written it in cyclopean char. acters, manifest and enduring as the earth itself. "The evidence is conclusive," says Professor Wright, "that, at a comparatively recent period, the northern por- tions of Europe and America were covered with a vast mass of slowly moving ice, pressing down from the north pole towards the warmer latitudes." This prodig- ious sliding mass was doubtless produced, like the glaciers of the Alps, by annual accumulations of snow, under a low temperature, packed and solidified by the influences of wind and sun. East of the Atlantic it covered most of the British Islands, the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula, Northern Germany, and West- ern Russia. On this continent it slid down over the present area of New England and New York until it plunged into and was dissolved by the ocean. "Westward from New York City," says Professor Wright, " I have myself carefully traced in the field the southern boundary of the glaciated regions as far as the Mississippi. Beginning at New York City, and omitting the minor features, the line marking this southern boundary runs northwest to Salamanca, New York, thence south west to the neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, thenee bending north to the upper part of Brown County, Indiana, thence southwest to Carbondale, Illinois, and thence northwest to the neighborhood of St. Louis. To this limit the ice of the glacial period continued in its southern movement, grinding down the elevated surfaces and filling up the depressions of the country, and bringing its vast burden of granite rocks from the north."?

In Ohio the glacial boundary is wonderfully distinct, and has been located with precision. Professor Wright, who explored it during the summer of 1882, declares his belief that he has traced it with " tolerable certainty . . . upon nearly every mile of its course."3 Entering the State from the east at Achor, in Columbiana County, it " continues nearly west to the middle of Stark County, where it turns

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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF COLUMBUS.

more to the sonth, crossing the northern portion of Holmes County to the northeast corner of Knox and Licking Counties, the western part of Perry, turning here so as to pass through Lancaster, in Fairfield County; touching the western edge of Hocking, and entering Ross at Adelphi in the northeast corner. Here it turns to the west, crossing the Scioto Valley a few miles north of Chillicothe, and emerg-

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ing from the county at its southwest corner, proceeding thence through the south- eastern corner of Highland, the northwestern of Adams, reaching the Ohio River in the southern part of Brown County, near Ripley. Cincinnati was completely enveloped by ice during the glacial period, and extensive glacial deposits exist in the northern part of Campbell and Boone Counties, Kentucky, and near Aurora in Dearborn County, Indiana."4

THE PREHISTORIC RACES.

The force exerted and the effects produced by this resistless ice-current were inconceivable vast. In New England, says Professor Newberry, it was " of such thickness and magnitude as to override all the features of the local topog- raphy except Mt. Washington."5 From its marks on that mountain, which served as a kind of Nilometer to the glacier, Professor Newberry concludes that its upper surface must have been six thousand feet above the level of the sca; "in other words that the ice was three thousand feet thick."6 By the movement and pres- sure of this mass the surface of the earth was prodigiously scoured, furrowed and shaped. Hills were abraded, great valleys and basins scooped out, huge heaps of gravel deposited, terraces now known as ridges heaped up, and enormous quanti- ties of loose rock pushed or earried into the depressions formed. Crossing the original channel of the Ohio twenty-five miles above Cincinnati the ice-barrier arrested and threw back the descending waters, and thus, as it is believed, formed a lake six hundred feet deep in its lower part, and in its upper covering the pres- ent site of Pittsburgh to the depth of three hundred feet. When the ice melted, enormous volumes of water were produced which carried the gravel and silt down into the prodigious groovings of the glacier, filling them in many instances to a depth of more than two hundred feet. Thus the beds of our present watercourses were raised approximately to their present level,7 and the whole surface of the country was submerged or swept by swirling eddies and currents. In the basin of the Great Lakes, excavated by the mighty glacier,8 a fresh-water sea was formed in which pinnacled icebergs floated down from the Canadian highlands, sowing broadeast their monstrous freightage of rocky debris as it fell from their slippery sides under the action of the sun.

Behind it the receding ice-sheet left a surface of boulder clay which seems to have been overgrown, in the lapse of time, with immense forests of coniferous trees.9 This growth continued long enough to form a carbonaceous soil, and in many places beds of peat in which remains of the walrus, the musk-ox, the masto- don and the giant beaver have been found. " When the forest growth had spread over most of the drift area south of the lakes, and had occupied it for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, a submergence of the continent took place which brought the waters of the Gulf of Mexico up the Valley of the Mississippi until this formed an arm of the sea which reached and covered all the lower half of our state."10

The lapse of time which has taken place since the close of the glacial era can be only conjecturally estimated. Judging by the rate of erosion which has been produced by the waters of Niagara and other post-glacial streams, Professor Wright thinks the recession of the ice eannot date farther back than ten or fifteen thousand years. A period of about eleven thousand years seems to have elapsed since " the Niagara began its work at Queenstown."

Whether the existence of man has been coextensive with this period, and reached back to the stupendous but vanishing disorder of the Ice Age, is a question which has been often asked. "To give an answer," says Sir Archibald Geikie, " we must know within what limits the term Ice Age is used, and to what partic- ular country or district the question refers. For it is evident that even to-day man is contemporary with the Ice Age in the Alpine Valleys and in Finnmark. There can be no doubt that he inhabited Europe after the greatest extension of the

HISTORY OF THE CITY OF COLUMBUS.

ice, but while the rivers were still larger than now from the melting snow, and flowed at higher levels."11

That man was contemporary with glacial recession on this eontinent is now one of the most positive conclusions of science. At the time when the iee-front in Ohio extended as far sonth as Cincinnati, says Professor Wright, “ man, in a state of development similar to that of the Eskimo, was hunting the mastodon, and the reindeer, and the walrus in the valley of the Delaware. ... At that time the moose, the caribou, the musk-ox and reindeer ranged through the forests and over the hills of Kentucky."19 Remains of these animals have been found in the peat bogs of the glacial epoch, and while human remains have not been found there, evi- denees have nevertheless been brought to light which clearly indicate the presence of man in the Ohio Valley ten thousand years ago. While digging a eistern at Madisonville, on the Little Miami River, eleven miles northeast of Cincinnati, in the year 1885, Doctor C. L. Metz took out of the glacial gravel, eight feet below the surface, a stone implement "of the true palæolithic type." The stone was black flint " not smoothed, but simply a rudely chipped, pointed weapon about three inches long."13 Subsequently, in the spring of 1887, Doctor Metz found another palæolith in a similar deposit, thirty feet below the surface, at Loveland, Ohio. This second find was an oblong stone about six inches long, and earefully chipped to an edge. Both the Madisonville and the Loveland implement are ob- viously of human manufacture, and must have lain imbedded in the gravel ever since their deposit by the glacial stream. "They show," says Professor Wright, " that in Ohio as well as on the Atlantic coast, man was an inhabitant before the close of the glacial period."14 Simple as these articles are, they furnish proofs dif- ficult to dispute that the Ohio Valley was one of the first portions of the globe to be inhabited by human beings.

That earlier race, perhaps resembling the present Esquimaux of the distant North, was doubtless the beginning of a series of raees which have since come and gone. Many years ago, says Geikie, the Danish archæologists, taking their cue from the Latin poets, classified the prehistorie races of man as those of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Age of Iron. " There ean be no doubt that on the whole this has been the general order of succession. Men used stone and bone before they discovered the use of metal."15 The primitive Ohio man now appears to have been a user of stone, and an antitype and contemporary of the eave and lake dwellers of Europe. What further traces of him the gravel beds may yield no one can tell, but that further traces await discovery and will in due time come to light seems altogether probable.

Who and of what particular character the paleolithic man's immediate suc- cessors were must be determined, as yet, chiefly by analogy. Everywhere, says Dr. Wilson, man seems to have passed through the same progressive stages : First, that of the savage or purely hunter state wherein he appears as " the savage oeeu- pant of a thinly-peopled continent, warring with seemingly inadequate means against gigantic carnivora, the contemporary existenee of which is known to us only by the diselosures of geologieal strata or ossiferous caves, where also the remains of still more gigantic herbivora confirm the idea of man's exhaustive struggle for existenee"; second, the " pastoral state, with its flocks and herds, its domesticated animals and its ideas of personal property, including in its earlier

THE PREHISTORIC RACES.

stages that of property in man himself"; and third, the agricultural stage, or that of tillers of the soil, "the Aryans, the ploughers and lords of the earth, among whom are developed the elements of settled social life involved in the personal homestead and all the ideas of individual property in land."16

The succession of the earlier races on this continent seems to have followed something like this order of development, except that a savage race has succeeded one of apparently agricultural habits. Whether the more enlightened race degene- rated into the savage one or was displaced by it is an unsolved problem, but that a race or races antecedent and in some respects superior to the Indians dwelt here and spread over a large proportion of our present national area, is not doubtful. The evidence of this is palpable, not speculative, and is spread before us at our very doors. It was not submerged by glacial floods, or buried in glacial débris, but dates from a far more recent period than the Age of Ice. It confronts us on hilltop and plain, and in the depths of the unplowed forest. We see its mani- festation in multitudes of ancient works of earth and stone, erected with immense labor, contrived with superior intelligence, and stored with curious mementoes of a vanished raee.

In the Scioto Valley that ancient people seems to have dwelt "in greater numbers than anywhere else in the Western States.""7 In no other equivalent space are their works so numerous, varied, and interesting. Between Columbus and the Ohio River they strew the valley to the number of perhaps fifteen hundred. About six hundred of these are found within the limits of Ross County. Some memorable specimens once stood within the present corporate limits of Columbus. Manifestly this region was a favorite dwelling-place of these mysterions pioneers of the prehistorie period. It was an attractive seat of population in their day just as it has been since. Whatever has been or can be aseertained about them must therefore have an absorbing interest for their successors in this valley.

The number of these ancient works within the State of Ohio approaches twelve thousand, but the entire area of their discovery embraces a vastly greater field. They do not, so far as known, occur north of the Great Lakes, but they are found in Western New York on the headquarters of the Alleghany, as far east as the county of Onondaga, and along the shores of Lake Ontario to the River St. Lawrence. In Pennsylvania they accompany the Susquehanna as far down as the valley of Wyoming. They are observed along the Mississippi as far north as Wisconsin and Minnesota, and, at wide intervals, on the Upper Missouri and its tributaries. They are scattered through the Gulf States from Texas to Florida, from whence they extend northward into the Carolinas. Their occurrence is frequent in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee.

But the distribution of these works is by no means uniform. They keep company with the larger watercourses, and are seldom found among the hills. " The alluvial terraces or ' river bottoms,' as they are popularly termed, were the favorite sites of the builders. The principal monuments are found where these ' bottoms' are most extended, and where the soil is most fertile and easy of eultiva- tion. At the junetion of streams, where the valleys are usually broadest and most favorable for their erection, some of the largest and most singular remains are found. The works at Marietta ; at the junction of the Muskingum with the Ohio ; at the mouth of Grave Creek ; at Portsmouth, the mouth of the Scioto, and at the

waters

HISTORY OF THE CITY OF COLUMBUS.

mouth of the Great Miami, are instances in point. Occasional works are found on the hilltops, overlooking the valleys, or at a little distance from them ; but these are manifestly, in most instances, works of defence or last resort, or in some way connected with warlike purposes. And it is worthy of remark that the sites selected for settlements, towns and cities, by the invading Europeans, are often those which were the especial favorites of the mound builders, and the seats of their heaviest population. Marietta, Newark, Portsmouth, Chillicothe, Circle- ville, and Cincinnati, in Ohio ; Frankfort in Kentucky ; and St. Louis in Missouri, may be mentioned in confirmation of this remark. The centres of population are now where they were at the period when the mysterious race of the mounds flourished.">18

The exploration of these works was undertaken in the year 1845 by Messrs. E. G. Squier, A. M., and E. H. Davis, M. D., of Chillicothe, Ohio. It was the original purpose of these gentlemen to investigate the ancient monuments of the Scioto Valley, but their researches were finally extended to the general field for this class of antiquities in the West. From their admirable report, embodied in the Smithsonian Institution Contributions to Knowledge in 1847, the statements last above quoted are taken. Theirs was by no means the first or the last investigation that has been made, but it was so painstaking and thorough that subsequent dis- coveries have not added very materially to the light which it sheds on the nature and significance of these vestiges of the past.

Technically the word mound signifies a tumulus of earth, but the works of earth and stone from which the so-called Mound Builders have derived that name are by no means all of that character. Messrs. Squier and Davis classify them as mounds and enclosures, which generic orders they subdivide as mounds of sacrifice or worship and sepulture, and enclosures for defense, and for sacred and miscel- laneous purposes. The distribution of these works according to their character is comprehensively stated by General Force :

In the Southern States are most of the great truncated mounds and terraces, while de- fensive are scarcely found, unless the great ditches peculiar to the southern works were of this character. The extraordinary collection of great truncated mounds at Carthage, Alabama, was formerly surrounded by a feeble line of embankment now wholly ploughed away, that once might have been the base of a stockade. The works found on the affluents of the Upper Missouri are massive defensive works. Those found in Wisconsin are almost exclu- sively effigy mounds or isolated conical mounds; and effigy mounds are scarcely found out- side of Wisconsin. Going eastward from the Mississippi we find in Illinois and Indiana many conical mounds, both large and small; in Illinois at Cahokia the giant truncated mound; and in Indiana some, though not many, are elaborate defensive works. In Ohio are found the most important works of defense ; numerous mounds, some quite large ; and a few of them truncated, and several effigy mounds. Besides presenting representatives of every species of work formed elsewhere, Ohio contains some of a character found nowhere else, such as the combinations of great squares and circles, and the altar mounds. South of the Ohio, in Kentucky and Tennessee, there is also a marked prevalence of works of a military character.

An attentive examination discovers more local distinctions. The Scioto Valley, forming a belt running north and south through the middle of Ohio, has for its peculiarity the mounds designated by Squier and Davis as " altar mounds," and also systems of embankments making enclosures of various mathematical figures, mainly the square and the circle. The distinguishing feature of the eastern belt of the state is the truncated mound or terrace so

THE PREHISTORIC RACES.

rare at the north yet found in great perfection at Marietta. The distinguishing feature of the western belt of the state is the great line of strong and naturally supporting works of defense.

These three belts, corresponding with three valleys - the valley of the Miamis to the west, the Scioto Valley in the eentre. and the Muskingum Valley to the east - appear by these local peculiarities to have been the homes of three different though kindred tribes. They appear, moreover, to have lived in the valleys as fixed abodes long enough to have learned to borrow from each other. For one small truneated mound or terrace is formed in the Scioto Valley, and a few of the mathematical figures that abound in the Scioto Valley are found, but not so perfectly constructed, in the valley of the Miamis. The pipe of peculiar form, called by Squier and Davis " the pipe of the Moundhuilders " seems to be a specialty of the tribe of Moundbuilders who lived in the Scioto Valley.19

The topographical relations of the different works in the same valley or sec- tion are such as to indicate some general design. Touching this subject General Force says :

Three great works on the Great Miami-one at its month, one at Colerain and one at Hamilton, with subsidiary defensive works extending along the river at Hamilton ; several advanced works to the north and west of Hamilton, and streams flowing into the Great Miami ; and other similar defenses farther up the river at Dayton and Piqua, all put in com- munication with each other by signal mounds erected at conspicuous points, constitute together a connected line of defense along the Miami River. Fort Ancient on the Little Miami stands as a citadel in rear of the centre of this line. A mound at Norwood, back of Cincinnati, commands a view through a depression of the hills at Redbank eastwardly to a mound in the valley of the Little Miami; northwardly through the valley of Mill Creek and the depression in the lands thence to Hamilton, with the works at Hamilton ; and by a series of mounds (two of which in Cincinnati and its suburbs have been removed) westwardly to the fort at the mouth of the Great Miami. So a series of signal mounds along the Scioto from the northern boundary of Franklin County to the Ohio River, a distance of over one bundred miles, could transmit by signals an alarm from the little work north of Worthington through the entire length of the valley to the works at Portsmouth.20

Further proof of general design is seen in the arrangement of the mounds, which seem to form in each valley a chain of signal stations like the cairns of the ancient Celts. Squier and Davis remark that "ranges of these mounds may be observed extending along the valleys for many miles. Between Chillicothe and Columbus, on the eastern border of the Scioto Valley, not far from twenty may be selected so placed in respect to each other that it is believed, if the country were cleared of forests, signals of fire might be transmitted in a few minutes along the whole line. On a hill opposite Chillicothe, nearly six hundred feet in height. the loftiest in the entire region, one of these mounds is placed. . . . A fire built upon it would be distinctly visible for fifteen or twenty miles up and an cqual distance down the valley, (including in its range the Circleville works, twenty miles dis- tant), as also for a long way up the broad valleys of the two Paint Creeks, - both of which abound in remains, and seem to have been especial favorites with the moundbuilders. . .. Upon a hill three hundred feet in height overlooking the Colerain work and commanding an extensive view of the [Miami] valley, are placed two mounds which exhibit -in connection with other circumstances not entirely consistent with the conclusion that they were simple signal-stations- strong marks of fire on and around them. Similar mounds occur, at intervals. along the Wabash and Illinois Rivers, as also on the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Miamis and the Scioto. On the high hills overlooking the Portsmouth and

HISTORY OF THE CITY OF COLUMBUS.

Marietta works mounds of stone are situated ; those at the former place exhibit evident marks of fire."

An enthusiastic student of these antiquities, Colonel W. M. Anderson, of Circle- ville, " has demonstrated by actual survey, made at his own expense," says one of our local historians, "that these signal posts or watch towers which occur in the Scioto Valley, formed a regular chain or system, and that by means of fires npon them signals could be sent up or down the country, to give warning of the approach of an enemy or to convey other intelligence." To which the writer adds this interesting comment :

It is by no means improbable that eenturies ago stirring information of danger, of defeat, or of vietory may have been flashed from station to station by means of beacon fires. the whole length of the Seioto and that messages of vast import may have been almost as quickly sent by this means in the prehistorie age as they now are by electricity. It is an astounding but in every respect reasonable eonelusion that before the discovery of America by Columbus or by the Norse adventurers intelligence may have been sent from the Ohio River to the interior of what is now the State of Ohio with at least as great rapidity as in the present age by the steam-driven mail train that sweeps up the valley from Portsmouth to the Capital.21

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History of the city of Columbus, capital of Ohio, Volume I, Part 4

Author: Lee, Alfred Emory, 1838-; W. W. Munsell & Co Publication date: 1892 Publisher: New York and Chicago : Munsell & Co. Number of Pages: 1202

Author: Lee, Alfred Emory, 1838-; W. W. Munsell & Co
Publication date: 1892
Publisher: New York and Chicago : Munsell & Co.
Number of Pages: 1202