use to be found in the fact that bones are found in nearly all of them that have been examined. Still these bones may have belonged to the subsequent race of the red man who, as is supposed, exterminated the former.

These mounds are of different circumferences and of various hights. None that we have seen, save those at Marietta, Ohio, are of any remarkable elevation at the present time. Whether all these works had their origin among the Indians, or are the monumental relics of a lost race, such as the Aztecs, is a historical question which as yet has never been satisfactorily settled.

Looking over those in Vermillion county, and remembering that they may be thousands of years old, one would naturally presume that they had some connection with war or were intended as burial places for the dead.

In his able report of 1870, Prof. John Collett says:

"When first explored by the white race this county was occupied by savage Indians, without fixed habitations, averse to labor, and delighting only in war and the chase. Their misty traditions did not reach back to a previous people or age.

"But numerous earth-works are found in this region, of such extent as to require, for their construction, time and the persistent labor of many people. Situated on the river bluffs, their location combines picturesque scenery, susceptibility of defense, and convenience to transportation, water, and productive lands. These are not requisites in the nomadic life of the red man, and identify the Mound Builders as a more ancient and partially civilized and agricultural people."

Here in Vermillion, these mounds, though not so high as in other parts, may be counted by hundreds.

Prof. Collett says, "that over one hundred of these small mounds, from two to four feet high, may be seen about one mile north-west of Middletown, in Vigo county."

On the Hunt farm, conical knolls of loess have been artificially rounded and used for sepulchral purposes. One of these contained at the summit, seventy feet above its base, a burial vault, three stories high; on each floor from five to seven human skel etons were found.

On Mr. Drake's lands, in the same county, there are two large mounds, one two hundred feet in diameter and eighteen feet high; the other twenty-eight feet high, covering an elliptic base one hundred and eighty feet wide and three hundred feet long. The contents of the two mounds amount to nearly 30,000 cubic yards, and at present contract prices for earth-work would cost five thousand dollars.

"All the mounds which have come under my notice," continues Mr. Collett, "are located so as to secure an out-look toward sunrise, confirming the belief that the fires of the sunworshippers have blazed upon every mound-capped eminence in the great valley of the Continent.”

That these mound-builders were worshippers of the sun is circumstantially probable, and that these mounds in some way were used as cemeteries of the dead is as fully corroborated, as the ashes and mineralized bones of the mound-builders have been found at their base, while near the surface the remains of the more modern red man have been discovered.

The lands of this Western Hemisphere, it seems, have not been left without their inhabitants. Their histories are recorded in the ruined wrecks of their ancient temples as seen in

Central America, and in the mounds and grand earth-works of the plains and terraces of the great North. To their labors and mode of living many attribute the beautiful prairie sceneries of the West. What they did, showed that they were endowed with the intelligence of an honorable enterprise in accordance with their attainments in civilization, and their mysterious disappearance and total extinction tell us that they, like ourselves, were only mortal, and that this life at best is only a temporary

scene.

To look now upon all that is left of these ancient denizens of our country may be mournful and melancholy, but yet it has a lesson in it, as far as it goes, as deep as the philosophy of human life, and as full of the moral of eternal truth as even the stereotyped letters of our present inspired volumes.

THE SAVAGE RED MAN.

Even the record of the red man is wrapped in mystery. Hence his origin, like his own wild spirit, has never been fully or satisfactorily comprehended. A native of the woods, he partook for ages of the savage wildness of the ferocious beasts of the forests, and making his living by hunting the weaker animals than himself-blood became his chief currency of trade, and he grew familiar with barbarity and savage warfare long before the white man crossed his path. What he was in history and in the long genealogy of his tribes, we of the present day can not now tell. It is only in cotemporary history that we read anything of his doings, and therefore we are left to class him in his origin with the mound builders or the Aztecs, whose records are only seen in the dilapidated ruins of the past ages.

With but few exceptions, the settlement of the whites, all

over the continent, has been associated with the conflicts of savage warfare, where neither age nor sex was respected, or the laws of civilized warfare regarded.

Hence, he

The savage claimed the whole boundless continent as his, and so indeed it was, and when the white man came upon his hunting ground he declared him an intruder, and made war upon him—just as we civilized people would do now. But the Indian was a savage, with no knowledge of the arts and sciences and the higher Christian civilizations of the white man. must be driven out in some way-if it even had to be done by war. The improvidence of the Indian, together with his savage barbarities opened the way to apparently justify the white man's attack, and the receding footsteps of the red man have long told the results of the conflict. The light of the western sun directed his retreating footsteps until he lost his vested rights, and now it may be said of him, live where he may, that he is only a "tenant at will." The white man now owns the continent.

When the white man first came to this grand Wabash Valley, he found it everywhere populated with various savage tribes. Here and there were their wigwam villages, while forest and prairie, creeks and rivers, mountains and valleys, constituted their unlimited hunting grounds.

The coming of the white man among them made them fear, for they knew he had fire-arms, powder and lead, while they only had the bow and arrow, the tomahawk and scalping-knife. The white man's weapons they dreaded in open battle, and hence they early adopted the guerrilla mode of warfare, which soon educated the whites to hunt him down and put him to death as if he had been but a wild beast.

The southern portion of this county was occupied, when first

a

visited by the white man, by the Pinka-shaw tribe of the Miami nation; and the northern part by the Kickapoo and Pottawattomies-subdivisions of the same tribe. Their common headquarters or treaty grounds were at the village which the whites called Springfield, south of Eugene. At this point treaties were made with the English and French colonial governors, and even after the county began to be settled old pioneers remember seeing on ordinary occasions a thousand Indians assembled there.

The early French missionaries visited these regions of the Wabash, with the hope and purpose of converting the Indians to Christianity, about the year 1670.

A French trading-post was established at an early day here, called La Chappelle, by Monsieur Laselle, the father of Hon. Charles Laselle, who is now one of the distinguished and worthy lawyers of the city of Logansport, Cass county.

Another trading post was subsequently established on the farm now owned by Hon. John Collett.

In the year 1790, the Indians of this region, while acting only on the defensive, were attacked at their village by Major Hamtramck, who commanded a force from "The Old Post"-Vincennes. Their village was situated on the lands since constituting a part of the farm of the late Colonel Shelby, near where Eugene is now located. The entire Indian village was destroyed and most of the inhabitants indiscriminately massacred. It was not a matter of wonder, therefore, that the Indians of these regions subsequently took part in the battles of Fallen Timber and of Tippecanoe.