the filson club history quarterly - The Filson Historical Society

1955] The Moundbuilders 225
n An Osage chief in Missouri told Major Sibley, the Indiana Agent, that his people
had lived at The Falls for some time, and some had had villages nearby. I was told first
of these forts by blr. Theo. Chamberlain, one of the most enthusiastic and learned amateur
archaeologists of The Falls region; and was taken to one of them by his son, Mr. Carlyle
D. Chamberlain.
. *'One of the great mounds opened at the mouth of the Ohio (Wickliffe, Kentucky)
has nothing but infant skeletons. Could these be babes stricken by a pestilence like croup
or the record of the murder of little ones they could not carry with them?
" A distinguished Omaha Indian, Dr. Francis La Flesche, an accomplished ethnologist
of the Smithsonian Institution, graciously gave me helpful interviews on two occasions.
** The myster/ of the bfandans has intrigued all who knew them. They called themselves
People of the Ruffed Grouse a bird of the eastern forest lands not of the western
pla as. Their blond features, traditions, and making glass beads suggest European blood
and craft. In the early Seventeenth century there were sent to Virginia some Germans and
Italians. They disappeared, some notices saying they decamped to the Indians. In Virginia
no Italian and few, if any, German names survive which can be attributed to those
people. Taliaferro is a large Virginia family with an Italian name, but the first one came
in with Sir Thomas Lunsford after the battle of Nasbey, one of his "beef-eaters" at the
Tower of London fleeing Parliamentary wrath. The Minors, another large Virginia family,
descend from a man named Mindert, whose antecedents are not known but are thought
to belong in Holland rather than Germany. The Maodans have aIso been "identified"
with the Welsh who came with Prince Madog.
*7 1 met Sitting Bull once, with thirty or forty of the leading men of his nation, en route
to Washington to see the President. Words cannot describe the impression made by the
magnificent dignity of those men. Great heads, noble countenances, and splendid figures
were characteristics of every one. They were impressive relics of Akan civilization,
descendants of the Moundbuilders. I bought Sitting Bull's pipe, catlinite with totems
carved on its long ash stem.
** The Siouan peoples believed their deities resided in high places. This may be the
motive of the mounds. To the Dakotas, when they went west, the Black Hills were
the home of their gods and they resented their sacrilegious invasion by the gold hunters.
The Aztecs, Toltees, and Mayas built pyramids for the same reason. The aigurats of the
Sumerians, the Tower of Babel, and the Greek Olympus were the same idea; and perhaps
our monuments and mounded graves are its attenuated relics.
Chicago is a Siouan word meaning "the main stream." The little Chicago River was
not a "main" stream but it was the stream which ancient travelers took to go from Lake
Michigan to the main stream, the Mississippi, as the Algonquians called it.
to Bancroft says La Salle saw at Cahokia, twenty years after, "the slain were left to be
rent in pieces by the wolves. Not only had the recent dead [AIgonquian] but in nnheard
of sacrilegious wrath the Iroquois had burst open the pits of past generations [Tamas]
and scattered their bones over the plain."
Arthur went with them to raid the English in Carolina and the Spanish in Florida;
and later against an Akan town in northwestern Kentucky on "a very great river," (Ohio).
He was wounded and captured but treated kindly. He says, "This is a great towne and
a great number of Indians. [The Ashland (Ky.) works.] This river runs northwest
about a day's journey lower [down] where the inhabitants are an innumerable company
of Indians." [The Scioto Valley and Mason and Carter counties, Kentucky, works.]
Arthur's story has been published by Swanton in his ",The History of the Creeks" and
byt illson in "The Kentucky Historical Society Register.'
The great mound on the north bank of the Etowah River near Cartersville, Georgia,
although truncated, is 61 feet high. The diameters of the base are 380 by 330 feet; the
diameters of the top are 170 by 176 feet. It has a road running up one side to within
18 feet of the top. Its shape is very nearly a duplicate of the Cahokia mound. Your
author has visited both Cahokia and Etowah.
u Joliet's map I674. By this date he reports great increase in "castor" (beaver).