Coshocton County, Ohio - Chapter with an unread heading (no. 1 of those read), 1909

New Discoveries Touching The Moundbuilders

NEW DISCOVERIES TOUCHING THE MOUNDBUILDERS, THE ~VANISHED. RACE' VIEW; THE: INDIAN amon eeu INCA, POLTEC, -ASIATIC EGYPLIAN MRISH WELSH AND"LOSTeERIBE? SPECULATIONS.

Like a God-created, fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge f:om the inane, haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the inane. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last rear of the host will read traces of the earliest van. But whence? O heaven, whither? Sense knows not, faith knows not, only that it is through mystery to mystery, from God to God.

All the wisdom of the Orient, of Egypt, of Greece and Rome tells us naught of our land or its people in those dim and shadowy ages when the Chinese, Chaldeans, Egyptians and Persians comprised the known population of the world. The secret of those thousands of years is locked in the breast of Nature. Forest after forest has come and gone, rivers have left their ancient shores, plains have come and bottom lands. Against the blue dusk of summer skies and the gray cold of winter clouds, the eyes of Unknown Man lifted to the same old rolling line of hills, those heights eternal, dumb watches of fathomless time looking down on human ages in stormful passage to oblivion.

The vast rivers of melting ice spreading from hillside to hillside in glacial man's day slowly receded in course of ages to their present beds, leaving exposed broad plains and valleys for the use of that Other Man who has baffled our understanding. In his earthworks and stoneworks lies hidden the mystery of ages. What story of human activity, of weird ceremonies, perhaps sacrificial terrors, may belong to these mute symbols of a voiceless past. Weed-grown and brush-covered, some today are but faintly traced in brier-tangled field and wood, while the plow has worn down others until there is left only a dim outline where not many years ago there circled in bold relief a breast-high wall of earth.

From the variety and extent of these earthworks within our county's borders, ranging from circles and huge enclosures to mounds large and small, and from the vast labor necessarily involved, whether the earth was carried in baskets or otherwise, we have sufficient evidence that this was a populous center of that ancient race engaging the attention of the archeological world. Whether or not it was a mighty power that held sway in the primeval forest, a people skilled in arts of peace as well as war, we can only conjecture from the inscrutable character of the ruins that mark the passing of this lost race.

For most of us the vanished race view is still the more plausible despite the weight of testimony adduced by archeological authority in support of the Indian theory of our Moundbuilders' origin. All local knowledge which has come down to us regarding the red men who existed here absolves them readily from the suspicion of undertaking anything so nearly approaching real work as the building of these mounds. Whatever else may be charged to our noble red men during their residence in this region, we hesitate about accusing them of overcoming their haughty disdain for labor to the extent of digging up tons and tons of earth and heaping it into walls and mounds. The Coshocton Indian's popular idea of a wall was a tepee skin or bark of a tree, and for a fortification it was far less troublesome and vastly more to his liking to simply dodge behind a rock.

Of course, any discussion of the Moundbuilder problem is expected to be characterized by reserve. We can only approach the subject by cautiously venturing to inquire without presuming to decide, especially where eminent authorities in the scientific world have so hopelessly disagreed. There are those, we are told, who have written much but added little to real knowledge of the subject; more who have only borrowed from others; some who have made sober observations; some far from sober; and some who have compiled descriptions with worthless comment.

In this region, doubly important among American localities as a prehistoric and historic center, the student has the advantage of personal contact with such evidence as remains. To that extent at least what views are formed may deal with facts, not surmise.

Special attention is drawn to the extensive earthwork on a precipitous ridge of the Winfield Miller estate along the Walhonding near Coshocton. A circle swings around the whole summit of the hill. Through the fringe of woods the view sweeps the valley of the Walhonding. Down the steep hillside is a drop of two hundred feet

W. K. Moorehead, curator of the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, reporting a visit to the circle on this hill a dozen years ago, described it as "some two acres in extent, the embankment low and broad; where preserved by woods it appears to have originally been five feet high."

Continuing the description of the circle the report refers to "a long passage way from the valley leading up to it, and in this respect the place is peculiar. The passage is some fifteen feet wide on the average and walled on either side by natural ledges. We think the enclosure merits future investigation."

Subsequent examination of the road or passage way from the valley leading up to the earthwork convinced local investigators that this rock-walled path is a split in the huge boulders, the split widening to several feet with the slipping of the detached rock from the bulk imbedded in the hillside.

The State survey mentions the hilltop circle as a fortification, and the statement is made that "many citizens of Coshocton claim it to be a French fort, but we would call it decidedly Indian in form." What local supposition may have existed ascribing this earthwork to Frenchmen it is difficult to discern. Certain it is that history is silent regarding the erection of any French fortification in this locality. There has been discussion relating to the Miller hill as the site of Colonel Bouquet's camp when the Indian treaty was made, though the most recent investigation attaches the older and much greater importance to the hilltop circle as the work of more ancient hands than British soldiers. On the spot chosen for their camp the troops threw up four redoubts, according to Colonel Bouquet's own account of it, and between such angular embankments and the circle on the Miller hill there can be no analogy.

On the plowed ground within the circle are many flint chips, while local arrowhead collections include numerous specimens from this hilltop. The presence of Indian relics is a matter of course in a region so long occupied by the red men, but that the hand which drew yesterday's arrow is related to the earthwork any more than the hand on today's plow is not viewed as probable in the light of local evidence.

The earliest accounts speak of our mounds being regarded even in the Indian's day as structures of remote antiquity. The missionary, Zeisberger, noted a hundred and thirty-three years ago the numerous signs of an ancient race here. He referred particularly to the cemetery containing thousands of graves near the mound three miles south of Coshocton.

The skeletons, reduced to chalky ashes, were three feet to four and a half feet long, smaller than Indian or mound skeletons. These pygmies have led to much conjecture. Thus far no definite conclusion is recorded in any of the notices of this ancient city of the dead. The bibliography of Ohio earthworks, prepared for the Smithsonian Institution, includes the notice in Howe's Historical Collections, quoted from Dr. Hildreth's description in Silliman's Journal, 1835. This also mentions an ancient cemetery of pygmies near St. Louis. There the skeletons were found in stone sepulchres, while those here seemed to have been in wooden coffins. A discovery of pygmy graves on the Keene-Bethlehem township line is credited to J. C. Milligan.

Hildreth relates that in one of the Coshocton graves was found a skeleton five and a half feet long, with decayed pieces of oak and iron nails. The skull was triangular in shape, much flattened at the sides and back, though not with the slant-brow of flat-head Indians seen in the West. A hole pierced the back of the skull. The bones were displaced, the skull being found with the pelvis, from which it is inferred that the body was dismembered before burial. In the St. Louis cemetery was found among the pygmies one skeleton of rather large development though not taller than the rest. The legs were cut off at the knees and placed alongside the thigh bones.

Mitchener tells of the Nanticoke Indians in Maryland drying the bones of their dead and carrying them in wrappings from place to place as generation after generation sought new hunting grounds, and that eventually these ancestral bones found a final resting place in the valley at Coshocton when the last of the tribe became too weakened by war to move farther. This tradition is credited to a Nanticoke convert who was with Zeisberger, but it meets with that skepticism which has observed the uncertainty of Indian memory and how commonly Indian traditions die out, as for instance those southern tribes who retained no recollection whatever of De Soto's expedition. In this connection also we are reminded of the Coshocton In- dian tradition related to John Heckewelder, the other Moravian missionary here with Zeisberger. The Delawares, accounting for the ancient earthworks in this region, professed to him that their ancestors once occupied the country, but as Justin Winsor, librarian of Harvard University, said, it has been suspected that the worthy missionary was imposed upon.

The long rows of graves of the pygmy race at Coshocton were regularly arranged with heads to the west, a circumstance which has given rise to the theory that these people were sun-worshippers, facing the daily approach of the sun god over the eastern hills. In this respect, however, there is no resemblance to the various positions of skeletons found in our mounds. Acceptance of the sun-worship surmise does not necessarily imply a deduction that this pygmy race may have descended from the river-people of Hindostan or Egypt. Primeval man, wherever found, seems to have been a sun-worshiper.

The iron nails mentioned by Hildreth as found in this ancient cemetery take on added interest in view of the discovery in a mound near Cincinnati, reported by Frederick W. Putnam, curator of thé Peabody Museum. Masses of meteoric iron were found on an altar, with bars of iron and other objects made from the metal.

A statement appears in Graham's History of Coshocton County that a Moravian minister from Pennsylvania visited the ancient cemetery here and remarked a custom among Moravians of burying the old in separate rows from the young. While this would explain the uniform smallness of some Moravian graves, it does not explain the absence from the missionaries' records of any considerable mortality among the younger or even for that matter the elder members of the Moravian mission. Moreover, the mission in this valley comprised but eight families, and they dwelt here only a few years. And finally, the Moravians themselves first spoke of the discovery here of the many pygmy graves.

The plow has long since turned these acres of mystery into cornfields, and obliterated this last vestige of a human population that once flourished within our borders. According to the view formulated from the missionary observations, unfortunately not accompanied by details covering excavations, this primitive people understood the use of the stone ax, the making of pottery, and the division of land areas into squares. Nothing has been found to show whether it was their labor or that of others that erected the chain of earthworks within our county. The thousands of graves point only to the conclusion that the country around was the seat of a large population. The activities of that strange race which peopled the wilderness, the story of elemental life in the shadows of the forest and along the shores of the rivers, until the end in that valley of eternal rest, remains untold.

Near the ancient cemetery is a small mound less than a quarter of a mile from the large one, on the Porteus farm. At one time this sand heap was eight feet high, with a base of thirty-five feet. A few years ago it was less than five feet in height, and the base had spread to fifty feet. The excavation by the State archeologists in 1896 revealed seven skeletons of modern size and lying in various directions. Several arrowheads, many flint chips, and three bear teeth were found. It is recorded that Indians sometimes buried their dead in the monuments of their mysterious predecessors whom they held apparently in awe and reverence. The presence of flaked flints in mounds has also furnished the theory that the Moundbuilder knew the use of the arrowhead, and that the Indian learned it from him.

The State survey of the large mound along the river road on the Porteus farm revealed charcoal traces, a few pottery fragments, flint chips, small bones, a trinket or ceremonial of lead, and a finely chipped spear-head six inches long. This was the extent of the discovery, "to our chagrin," as the archeologist reports, "after exceedingly laborious and dangerous excavation." The report states that no larger force of workmen was ever put on a mound in the Ohio Valley. "Sixteen men were employed day and night for four days in sinking a trench thirty-five feet wide and seventy feet long. The sides were loose and dangerous, and heavy bracing was necessary. No burials were discovered, although tunnels were run several yards on the base line in various directions. This was disappointing, especially after the expenditure of a large sum of money. However, we learn again that it is not always the largest and most imposing monument which contains the greatest treasure. Failure to find anything cannot be charged to imperfect or hasty examination - the whole center of the mound was exposed by the trench and tunnels for a distance of thirty by twenty-five feet. As it was desirable to restore the

Composed entirely of earth and unstratified this mound suggests the question of how much the rains of ages may have reduced the height, possibly from a towering structure to the present pile of twenty-three feet. There is also a query, in connection with mound excavating in general, as to whether or not the practice of digging to the present base line may be stopping short of discoveries farther down.

The Porteus mound crowds the Muskingum bank so closely that the riverside drive has cut the side of the mound. It is one of the very few earthworks found on the last of the river terraces to be reclaimed from the stream, suggesting that it was among the last constructions of the Moundbuilders. Whether intended as a monument in connection with the ancient cemetery it overlooks, or possibly as a signal station, is another Moundbuilder mystery.

As to age, the trees growing upon mounds cannot carry estimates back much beyond six hundred years, while there is never absent the uncertainty of prior growths, whether or not we assume as the scholarly Brinton does that the Moundbuilders planted trees on their earthworks. However, Judge M. F. Force, of Cincinnati, has pointed out the absence from mounds of any little hillocks indicating the uprooting of an older growth of trees, and the inference is drawn that the Moundbuilders flourished till about a thousand years ago.

A sacrificial significance is attached to the charcoal traces of burnt wood or calcined ashes of bones found in our mounds, implying that a religion of fire-worship prevailed here in which human sacrifice and the burning of prisoners may not have been unknown.

So far the attempts to disclose the ethnological relations of the Moundbuilders on cranial evidence lack sufficient data, and have also been embarrassed by inadequate care in distinguishing intrusive burials of a later date. The wide divergence of views is shown in the theory of some connecting the Moundbuilders' skulls with the Pueblos, and the contention of others for similarity to those of Mexico and Peru. A favorite view is that the Moundbuilders north of this region were long heads, with receding foreheads, and those south were short heads, with high foreheads and more brains. The southern Moundbuilders, it is contended, were the most ingenious and industrious, and made the best implements and greatest earthworks, notably that huge effigy, the Serpent Mound; also Fort Ancient, the Alligator Mound, and the elaborate works at Newark. The theory continues that there was war between the north and south Moundbuilders, which would suggest that the opposing forces may have met on this middle ground in our county. But the whole theory is well summed up by Professor E. O. Randall, secretary of the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, when he terms it "largely skull speculation and fanciful imagination." The professor, commenting on the burials of these people, observes the evidence therein that "they had their great chiefs or 'big men,' and the extent and character of their 'buildings' certainly prove that they understood organization and subordination in their social system; that there were 'bosses' in those prehistoric days who directed and controlled the workmen. They may not have been troubled with the question of combined capital, but they surely wrestled with the great question of labor."

A skull pierced in the crown was found in the mound on Frank Maxwell's land up the Walhonding three miles from Coshocton. This recalls the pierced skull reported in the ancient cemetery. The Maxwell mound is described as five feet high and sixty feet in diameter, and located on the second terrace two hundred yards from the river. The State survey removed about all the area originally covered by the mound, and found ten skeletons, some well preserved. Previous digging had disturbed two skeletons in the center, cutting one at the hips, and destroying all of another save the skull. In the eight years since the prior excavation, the bodies near the opening had decayed more than those farther away. All the skeletons were extended upon the base line and lay in various directions. Pottery, arrowheads, and a bone smoothed and sharpened at the edge were found in addition to the skull with the hole in the crown.

The report of field work by the State Archeological Society in 1896 speaks of Walhonding as built over several mounds and a village site, and refers to mounds north on the Johnson farm and the Workman farm. Human teeth were found near the center of the Johnson mound. A few feet lower and on the base line were traces of burnt earth and charcoal. There were a few broken arrowheads and one whole specimen scattered through the soil, and near the teeth

Passing Of The Pioneers, Then Rose Again

The smaller Workman mound contributed more to the State museum. From a five-foot height the plow had worn it down to two feet, barely high enough to trace its outline. Near the bones of a deer was found a stone tube. Resting on slight traces of bone and with edges overlapping was a layer of sixty-seven arrowheads of clear quartz, or chalcedony, all more leaf-shaped than the usual arrowhead. Near these was a pocket of chips that apparently were struck off in flaking the implements. This is the only burial of the kind recorded in this country.

On Colonel Pren Metham's farm a few miles away in Jefferson Township is a deposit of chalcedony, and it is presumed that this quarry furnished the material for the ancient implements found in the Workman mound. On the Metham hill were found batteredlooking rocks, presumably carried up from the river to be hurled against the wall of flint. Likely under the blows of such primitive sledge-hammers the fragments flew. Heaps of flint chips marked the spot as the workshop of the professional arrowmaker. Nicked stones lay among the chips, left by the workers who returned no more. In a sandstone crevice near the Colonel's house was found a cache of flints, some finely finished, and at the spring a fragment of ancient pottery and a layer of broken sandstone. Similar layers in the earth have been noticed elsewhere in the county, always adjacent to springs.

Fifty-four years ago a stone mound was opened on a hilltop near the Colonel's house. A rock pile, eighteen feet square and five feet deep, composed of sandstone layers, was removed, revealing a sepulchre floored with a large, flat sandstone, and walled with sandstone slabs. On the floor lay part of a skull, a thigh bone, teeth and a few other fragments of a skeleton. The thigh bone indicated the dead to have been of unusual height, more than seven feet. In addition to a few flint darts several stone pendants were found in the sepulchre. These "plum bob" or shuttle shaped stones recall those found in Scioto Valley earthworks which have been variously regarded as ceremonial, or ornamental, or mayhap used as charm stones, or as weights to keep the thread taut in weaving.

Crowning a hilltop on the Darling farm across the river, a crescent-shaped wall of stone attracted attention in the early days as the work of ancient people. The wall, breast-high, extended thirty feet. It was built of large flat stones.

At best we have but a meagre record of ruins in this region, ruins found under circumstances which seemingly assign to them very remote antiquity belonging not only to a moundbuilding period but to a stone age also. It is much regretted that more information has not come to us from early observers of earthworks and stoneworks which afterward perished under the march of agriculture. Something about plowing up ashes and charcoal would have added fully as much mound testimony as careful measurements of feet high and feet wide, and done archzologic science just as immeasureable service.

In addition to the detailed report of Coshocton County mound exploration by the State, as mentioned herein, the survey tabulates half a hundred or so prehistoric earth and stone remains according to townships. Following is a revised exhibit:

Ancient Earthworks And Stoneworks

The foregoing does not include several vanished earthworks reported years ago in various parts of the county. On the plains of Linton Township, at the cross roads half a mile southwest of Plain- field, there was once a square of several acres which, it is related, was enclosed by four embankments six feet high, now plowed down. There was an entrance at each corner. Several miles down Wills Creek there was a circle. About seventy years ago a small mound near Plainfield was opened by J. D. Workman, who found stone relics. Another mound two miles below was reported opened by Wesley Patrick, who found a skull and thigh exceptionally large.

Other vanished earthworks were mounds of Virginia Township near the Muskingum; a circle in White Eyes Township, breast-high and enclosing an acre on a bluff overlooking White Eyes Creek, half a mile south of Chili. Stone axes and flints were reported found in this circle. West of Roscoe a dozen years ago, according to Andrew Fisher, surveyor, traces of a belt of red soil were still seen, thirty feet wide, circling a hilltop. The circle was three hundred feet in diameter.

Among the mounds plowed down years ago was one in Oxford Township thirty feet wide. A circle enclosing three acres north of West Lafayette and several mounds of Lafayette Township were obliterated by the plow, one on the Shaw estate, one cut away by the railroad on the Ferguson farm, and another leveled on the Higbee place. Seventy years ago the river road in Franklin Township leveled a mound containing half a dozen skeletons arranged like the radii of a circle, with heads toward the center.

In Coshocton, where Fourth and Locust streets cross, the finding of skeletons was associated with early reports regarding a mound there, though later identified as an Indian burying ground. In Tiverton Township it is told there was a circle enclosing three acres, while excavation along the Walhonding Canal revealed scattered skeletons " and sitting skeletons, ashes, stone axes, flint and pestles; and on a hilltop overlooking the Mohican a stone wall, breast-high, extended one hundred and thirty-two feet. In Keene Township the stone was hauled away from a hilltop stone mound, but the only record that survives is the inevitable measurement of twelve feet across and three feet high.

On Howard Miller's farm in Keene Township, a few miles from Coshocton, is a circle that has excited much interest in recent examination of this county's ancient earthworks. Although cut down by the plow in earlier years, its location in an orchard.has somewhat preserved its outline. There is an opening in the circle, and the plow, usually the mound destroyer, was in this instance a discoverer; for it came upon a path of red stone leading from this opening in the circle down to the spring now used by the Avon kennels.

The blood-red path has the appearance of burnt stone, according to some observers, but it is not unlike the red sandstone found elsewhere in the county. There-have been no skeletons found in this circle to indicate' the sepulchral function belonging to the burial mounds of this region, neither does its size classify this circle among our ancient works of military significance, nor can it be even faintly likened to an effigy mound, of which none for that matter is recorded in this county.

It is related that a "race-track" fad prevailed among some pioneer settlers, and that here a ring may have been laid out, but the wild impossibility of putting speed into horses within this garden ring is equaled only by the desperate hopelessness of getting any speed out of them. On this farm in 1816 Nicholas Miller erected a mill which was burned, but no connection is shown between that and today's ruin.

The layer of broken sandstone found in the earth here is similar to layers discovered near springs in New Castle Township and Jefferson Township. Whether or not the red path from the circle to the spring illustrates some rite or custom of the ancient people who dwelt here only the future archeology may chronicle.

A short distance from this circle, across the road, is a knob of earth standing in the valley like an island hill. On top is a chain of pits, variously associated with reported finding of mica, also with ancient smelting, and even an Indian tradition of gold. An explanation has been advanced that the uprooting of trees left these holes as well as several others on a nearby hillside, but in each place the number of pits in such close proximity is submitted in contradiction of the tree belief.

All the exploration of earthworks and stoneworks in our county has revealed no clue to the language which the Moundbuilders spoke - a mere mumbling perhaps, or such picturesque speech as the Indian hat survives in our local nomenclature of Walhonding, Tuscarawas, Muskingum, Coshocton, Mohican, and so on.

Much has been written by prominent supporters of the theory that Indians built the mounds, and this belief has been strengthened by the conclusions reached by field workers of the Bureau of Ethnology. Cyrus Thomas maintains that the defensive enclosures are the work of Iroquois-Huron tribes, and he affirms that the habits of Moundbuilders correspond to historic habits of the Cherokees. Notwithstanding, evidence is still lacking that any Indians in this region ever possessed the military energy to construct the works there.

There is the theory that the Moundbuilders were in some way connected with the Pueblo Indians, or the Aztecs, or the Peruvians, either coming from them or migrating south and erecting works there. This is questioned, however, by the wide dissimilarity between the mounds here and the works in southern lands. There is nothing about the ancient remains in our county that even remotely suggests the Pueblo cliff dwellings, or the majestic ruins of the Aztecs and Toltecs of Mexico, or the Inca temples of Peru.

Inquiry into the origin of our Moundbuilders has led many into the Asiatic belief, although a people like the Chinese or Japanese who might have populated this land would presumably have left as characteristic records here as those which stamp their own Orient. As for the much-discussed Chinese account of Buddhist priests discovering the strange land of Fusang, whatever part of America that may have or may not have been, we get nothing in that description to explain the ancestry of our Moundbuilders.

The elaborate expositions of the belief that the American aborigines were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel relate principally to linguistic resemblances between the Hebrew and the Indian, and this throws no light on the Moundbuilder question. While the Jewish migration theory is recognized in the Mormon bible, and even western mounds have been made to yield Hebrew inscriptions, this belief is not corroborated by collateral proofs from the mounds of, Coshocton County.

Similarly the theory has been advanced that our early inhabitants came from Wales in view of reported traces of Welsh in the speech of the Tuscaroras and other Indians, and someone has pointed out that our mounds resemble mounds in Wales. However, with due regard to the discussions of the learned men in the seventeenth century and others since then, the opinion most generally accepted today is that the Welsh view, while possible, is by no means probable. We are reminded that nothing is slenderer than incautious linguistic inferences carried to fanciful extent by confident enthusiasm.

Contentions that the mounds were built by Egyptians and by Finns and by the Irish and by descendants of the Canaanites expelled by Joshua show a tendency to a facility rather than felicity in presenting theories on the subject. In seeing a resemblance between our mounds and the ancient monumental architecture of Egypt and other lands there is danger of seeing overmuch.

The attempt to prove by similarity of remains that our Moundbuilders came from an early race in Europe, possibly the whitebearded men spoken of in Mexican tradition, is met by E. G. Squier's comment that the monumental resemblances referred to indicate similar conditions of life rather than ethnic connections.

The historical verity of pre-Columbian visits to this land by Irish colonists or by Norsemen depends upon accepting as genuine chronicles the romantic sagas of unbridled fancy, the embellished stories of the fireside variously re-told for centuries by mouth and finally told on skin. The sagas bear the general character of popular traditions to such a degree that much more trustworthy evidence is needed in determining the origin of our Moundbuilders.

As for considering him a distinct product of America, unrelated to the old world, this view is ably upheld by Louis Agassiz, but attacked both by theologians holding fast to orthodox interpretation of Genesis, and by evolutionists including Darwin. However, those holding the autochthonous view are at least on an equal footing with other theorists in the one particular that it is not safe for any of them to dogmatize.

Out of the silence of centuries this primitive life came; into silence it has gone. What wonderful drama may have developed in these forest wilds, what weird scenes may have been enacted in strange worship of strange gods, what dreaded spirits were appeased by blazing fires, only these ruins and ashes remain to tell. And in them, too, rests the everyday story of this ancient life, its habits, industries, arts, customs, migrations, and physical characterizations. It is assumed our Moundbuilders knew agriculture, and turned hunters with the coming of game into these valleys. Their pottery is evidence that, while the potter's wheel may have been unknown to.them, they at least understood some sort of mechanical process, giving a revolving motion to their clay. Their implements and ornaments disclose their art in stone, and by the same token illustrate their migrations and intertribal traffic.

Theirs was a life of peace and war until the climax was reached and the tragedy culminated in devastation and ruin. After that, an appalling stillness with the fall of the curtain, to rise again on this stage where the tragedies of the red man awakened the forest echoes once more with terrifying voice.

And Something Of Savage Romance Within Our Borders

THE INDIAN LIFE AND CHARACTER: SCENES ILLUSTRATING TRIBAL SOCIETY, CUSTOMS, AMUSEMENTS, INDUSTRIES, LINGUISTICS, WARFARE, AND SOMETHING OF SAVAGE ROMANCE WITHIN OUR BORDERS.

The red man's hour on this stage is traced in something more than his flaked flints and stone implements. His real story lives in the notebooks of those missionaries and travelers who came to this region in the twilight of Indian power. It is these Coshocton records that are spread upon pages of American history.

They give us an Indian picture that is part savage, part human, a glimpse of the primitive life in its real colors: the sensual dance; the fiendish scalp song, aw-oh, aw-oh, in mockery of shrieking victims; the warriors' chant, he-uh, he-uh, in the hideous war dance with brandishing tomahawks and spears; the practical labor of the cornfield; the feasting from kettles crusted with former banquets. It is no idealized myth of romance; only naked truth with a dash of dramatic interest in the scenes that marked the gradual retreat of the red men before the advancing hosts of whites.

Of the half dozen Indian villages scattered through this wilderness in the eighteenth century the largest extended along the riverside, now Water Street, Coshocton. There were the typical surroundings pictured in Longfellow's lines -

The brown hands of the squaws and their daughters built the double row of huts and wigwams, wove the mats of grass upon which their lordly braves reclined, dressed the skins of deer and buffalo, and toiled over the cornfields. To woman also fell the lot of "blessing" the corn after planting; and on a dark night when sleep hung over the village some "Laughing Water," unclad and unabashed, stole from her lodge to walk around the cornfield -

No one but the Midnight only Saw her beauty in the darkness, No one but the Wawonaissa Heard the panting of her bosom; Guskewau, the darkness, wrapped her Closely in his sacred mantle, So that none might see her beauty, So that none might boast, "I saw her!"

And thus her footprints marked a charmed line over which neither insect nor worm was supposed to creep, thereby insuring a good crop: - eloquent proof that in our ancient agriculture there was at least more poetry if less overalls than in our modern art.

Madam of the Indian home led the busy life within the village while her lord and master went hunting and fishing. Nor did she complain; rather was it her pride to labor thus for him who provided meat and clothed her in fur by the chase, and defended their home against their enemies.

So she went on devotedly pounding the corn into flour, and baking the dough on ashes, and serving it for bread. She rose to banquet heights with a boiled dinner of corn, pumpkins, beans, chestnuts and meat, sweetened with maple sugar, and all cooked together in one pot, with its deposits and incrustations from previous banquets. There was one merciful feature about it: they had only two meals a day. The menu was varied with fish, game, potatoes, cabbage, turnips, cucumbers, squash, melons, roots, fruits and berries - not bad for light housekeeping with one pot.

Madam's accomplishments did not stop there. With thread from the rind of the wild hemp and nettles she wove the feathers of turkeys and geese into blankets. She also made blankets of beaver and coon skin, and shirts and petticoats, leggings and moccasins of deer and bear skin, the fur being worn next to the body in winter, and outside in summer. Sometimes the fur was scraped off with rib bones of the elk and buffalo.

So in the peaceful days the Indian life lolled along: some easy tramping over mossy trails, some drifting in canoes, some village handiwork, and much squatting around on blankets, with the everpresent pipe of uppowoc, the while many voices filled the camp; for among themselves the Indians were talkative enough. And theirs was a marvelously picturesque talk, a language of nature, of the forest, the clouds, the sun, the moon, the water. If talking of swiftness their word for it was the deer; strength to them was symbolized by the bear; fury they likened unto the wind; and thus throughout a vocabulary of wonderful expressiveness.

They were polite in their way, not offering to speak until another had finished. They gave few compliments and fewer titles of honor. Some war exploit or some eminent wisdom raised a brave to the place of chief, with his own town, his hunting and fishing grounds.

Great respect was shown to age. Children were disciplined by ducking. Of sickness and its treatment among the Indians in this region little has been recorded. When death came to a chief's wife the moans and cries of the women filled the village. The.dead was painted with vermillion. In the head of the coffin was a hole for her soul to pass out to the kingdom of Ponemah. At the grave they entreated her to rise and stay with the living. A red pole was erected as a monument. For three weeks a kettle of food was carried every evening to the grave.

The painting practice was always in evidence. Wives painted themselves with vermillion, the scarlet women deeply scarlet. Men, after plucking whiskers with tweezers of shells, put in hours painting the face, breast and legs for a night frolic.

In courtship the girl usually made the advances, although the man was not always lacking in that particular. This was seen in their courtship dance. It started with some one shaking a gourd or dry shell of a squash in which pebbles rattled a sort of measured beat, and the dancing line of painted braves and the dancing line of painted belles smilingly advanced to amorous meeting, singing, much like our fa sol la, with a deal of Indian coquetry, while the dancers stooped until their heads touched, then straightened with a wild "Lulliloo!'' and retreated to do it all over again and again, for hours of passionate abandonment. Through the singing, as their heads touched, they exchanged what confidences they pleased, and the stooping maid who smiled "yes" over her coaxing suitor's two fingers, suggestively placed together to look like one, completed all there was to the marriage ceremony.

Nor had they any feeling of something horribly illegal somewhere. No doubt they considered it vastly fine, a ceremony that held just as thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live" from the altar rails centuries later, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" lifting the roof off, as Kipling says.

And about as fatally easy as Indian marriage was Indian separation. The trial marriage was their cult. If dissatisfied they simply looked around for a new mate and let the other go.

This is told in the journal of Christopher Gist, the friend whom George Washington sent to look into Coshocton lands. As the Indians danced into matrimony, so they danced out of it - then into it again. It was made the occasion of a regular feast. For three days, from early breakfast they danced till evening, feasted, then danced into the night. The men danced while the women watchfully judged; then the women in their turn danced around the fires, as many as three score of them, moving in the figure 8, singing defiance to their former husbands and chanting their intention to choose what man_ they pleased. And the prospective benedicts critically observed the graces in the dancing line that passed before them in this Indian world of beauty and fashion.

In the evening of the third day the men, a hundred in all, danced in a long string, sometimes in the figure 8, around the whole place, and in and out of the council house. The squaws stood in line for a final scrutiny of the matrimonial eligibles dancing by. When some favored one came along, she who preferred him glided in and joined in the step, talking hold of the man's blanket, and continuing in the dance until the rest of the waiting charmers made their choice, and the dance ended. Thus a new assortment of marriages was made, if not in heaven, at least in Indian style.

Into this primitive life in the cycle of time came the first paleface, a trader from the Allegheny frontier to which the white settlements of the East had already extended. His packhorse was loaded with metal kettles, knives, hatchets, blankets, firearms, ribbons, beads, spangles, and "fire water." These were welcomed by the natives, while the trader returned East with a precious load of fur.

He came again. Other traders came. Some were English; others were French, who by friendly temperament and tolerant policy, fraternized the more easily with the natives. The rivalry between

Frenchmen and Englishmen for the Indian fur trade was an incident in the chronic hostility between France and England. The tempting and fluctuating offers for pelts made by the traders started dissensions which were the first mutterings of the stormy years to come when the English were to fight the French and Indians for the land.

The French would threaten the Indians with the loss of their favor if they continued trading with the English. When Christopher Gist was sent to check the French scheme, he complained strongly that some traders and their British convict attendants were demoralized and demoralizing." Of a different sort, however, was the English officer, George Croghan, acting as messenger and interpreter in constant travels through the wilderness to win the savages to the English side.

Croghan was early on the scene in this region. He was especially qualified for the dangerous diplomacy of the day. He exerted personal influence over the Indian mind, won their confidence by fair and generous treatment, by hospitality, by assimilating with their habits even in dress, and by mastering Indian oratory. In this Englishman the red men saw none of the customary contemptuous hauteur.

Croghan had the English colors flying from the house of the Indian chief as well as from his own when on that December day, 1750, Christopher Gist arrived here. The surveyor represented the newlyformed Ohio Company organized by a dozen Virginians, including George Washington. They had a grant from the King of England for half a million acres along the Ohio. The King had acquired possession under a deed obtained by Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland from some Iroquois chiefs for all the land beyond the mountains - one of those characteristic deeds which for terms that were dark and tricks that were vain showed the heathen mind as somewhat peculiar. The Indian idea of a deed was not a surrender of territory, but an agreement to occupy jointly with the white man.

But to go on with Gist and Croghan: The Friday of the surveyor's arrival in Coshocton he found that, notwithstanding the English flag hoisted on the chief's house, the several hundred Indians of the village were divided in their preference, some siding with the English, some with the French.

passers and taken to Canada as prisoners. Croghan dispatched runners to warn English traders in towns farther down the Muskingum, and to summon them to a meeting in Coshocton. The Indians talked of holding a general council.

Two English traders appeared and reported that ten others had been captured by forty Frenchmen and half as many Indians; that the English captives along with their horses and loads of fur were taken to a French fort near Lake Erie.

The week passed in Coshocton with Gist "talking much of a regulation of trade" and his business with the Indians. On Christmas day he intended to read prayers. A few whites, disinclined and of various persuasions, refused to attend, though urged to do so by Thomas Burney, a blacksmith. Several Indians came, invited by Andrew Montour, a noted guide whose mother was the attractive wife of an Indian chief in the East. The red men of Coshocton, hearkening to Gist, seemed impressed with the white man's religious belief, his explanation of the Christian marriage, and baptism of children. And, the chronicle quaintly continues, they said they would never desire to return to the French, or suffer them to come near; for they loved the English, but had seen little religion among them.

This Christmas there was an incident vividly calculated to emphasize the need for missionary work. A squaw, long held as a prisoner, had escaped, been retaken, and submitted to the typically refined cruelty of these red savages. They turned her loose and when she started running for her life she was pursued and struck down with a blow on the head and an arrow that pierced her to the heart. Her scalp was thrown into the river, and then her head cut off. As that seemed about as far as heathen hatred could go, Barney Curran, a trader who later was with George Washington, obtained from the sullen savages their permission to give the dead a decent burial, which he, his men, and - be it recorded - some Indians, did as darkness mercifully blotted out a day of horror.

recorded. Little remains to us descriptive of the picturesque assembly in the council house of Coshocton, and that little is in Gist's notebook. He says Croghan and Montour as interpreters presented four strings of wampum to the chief and council, and informed them that their father had sent under the care of their brother, the governor of Virginia, a large present of goods now landed safe in Virginia, and that the governor had sent Gist to invite them to come and see him and partake of their father's charity to all his children.

A chief laid aside his pipe and slowly rising drew himself erect with the dignity that was purely Indian. He said they thanked their brother, the governor of Virginia, for his care, and Gist for bringing the news, but that they could not give an answer until they had a general council of the several Indian nations next Spring. The chief and council shook hands with Gist, and the next day the surveyor went five miles to a small town on the Walhonding, which is Indian for White Woman.

There Gist met the white woman. She was the squaw of Eagle Feather, and mother of several children. She remembered her name as Mary Harris, and that she was stolen from her home in New England by Indians when she was little. So much had she become a part of Indian life that nothing of her civilized childhood remained save a recollection that man in New England seemed religious, while out here she wondered at the wickedness of white men that she saw in these woods.

Her wanderings had been those of the tribe of Custaloga, retreating before white frontiersmen until they found new hunting grounds here. She would follow Eagle Feather to buffalo, elk and bear hunts, and when he went off with a war party she mixed his paint and laid it on and plumed him, and put up dried venison and parched corn for his journey. As one narrative relates, she was especially careful to polish with soapstone Eagle Feather's little hatchet, admonishing him not to return without some good longhaired scalps for wigwam parlor ornaments.

In after years it is told that Eagle Feather returned from afar one day, bringing with him another white woman, the "newcomer," as the jealous Mary named ther. In the night the sleeping Eagle Feather was tomahawked. Mary screamed the newcomer did it, and the newcomer fled, with warriors in hot pursuit. Miles away they overtook her and tomahawked her, and the scene of the tragedy has been memorialized in the name of Newcomerstown to this day. Mary Harris took the trail to Sandusky and was heard from no more.

There is a legend of the Walhonding, the tradition of White Woman Rock, and the heroine of it may have been some captive maiden among the hundreds of eastern prisoners in the hands of savages passing through this region on their way to the West. Held in a red beast's arms the struggling beauty suddenly broke from him and flew like an arrow through the forest, tearing through thickets, and leaping over fallen timber, the yelping pursuer fast gaining upon her. Just before her through the trees she saw the river. An instant she hesitated. Better death in the water than a living death in horrible captivity. She could hear him coming nearer. If she could only find a hiding place! She did not want to die. There, looming high on the river's edge, her frantic eyes sighted a huge rock. Its great wall seemed to beckon her to safety. With all her remaining strength she drew herself from ledge to ledge to the topmost height, and lay there prone, panting, trembling, exhausted. The protecting arm of a tree spread its foliage overhead. Beneath flowed the silent river. A stillness suddenly hung over everything. The listening girl, straining to hear the least sound, fearful lest she might be tracked to her refuge, held her hand to her breast to still the wild beating of her heart. Silently the moccasined feet drew nearer, stealthily they crept toward the rock, and the painted face looking upward saw the quarry only partly concealed by the overhanging branches. He dashed up with a yell. Hunter and hunted faced each other for a terrible instant, the prayer froze on her lips, and then before his outstretched hand could seize her she threw herself from the brink into the waters that closed over her forever.

But we left Gist on his tour of this region to locate the best lands and pave the way toward establishing his company's claims to them by following the line of least resistance on the part of the red occupants. From the White Woman his tour extended southward to the Ohio. His effort to get lands for the Ohio Company aroused the French, and thus his trip through these Coshocton valleys was a forerunner of the war that a few years later lost France her principal possessions in America - the whole Ohio and Mississippi wilderness that she had claimed a hundred years since La Salle's explorations;

The Ohio Company's claim to this region rested on a deed from the Iroquois, but Gist found other Indians here to reckon with - the Delawares, once the powerful tribe of Wa-be-nugh-ka that had dwelt on the shores of the Delaware and welcomed William Penn to the new world. For that hospitality to the white man the Delawares were to suffer at the hands of their red brothers. While Penn breathed grateful prayer at sight of the Delawares burying the hatchet, and while the peace belt was scarcely laid across the shoulders of the peacemakers, the Iroquois warriors sneered at the Delawares, contemptuously called them "women," and tomahawks became red with Delaware blood. The sight of ships bringing in more and more white men, premonitions of the coming of the Great Spirit, distracted the Delawares from wreaking vengeance on the Iroquois. The haughty Iroquois posed as the superior nation, and the Atlantic colontes believed. The Delawares were forbidden by the Iroquois to sell land. Soured and embittered against their conquerors the Delawares left their old hunting grounds and drifted westward through the wilderness until they came here.

Even then, deep down in some of those savage hearts, there was likely a growing bitterness toward the English whose colonies were overrunning hunting grounds from the coast to the Alleghenies, a bitterness masked by stolid, impassive countenance in the council at Coshocton as they listened to Gist talk of presents from the white brother in Virginia - presents of the white man who wanted their land.

Something like suspicion in their mind is indicated in the play for time when they told Gist there would be no answer until a general council in the Spring. They held this as their land. The chiefs had in their possession documents and vouchers in writing, and strings and belts of wampum, of all transactions that had taken place between their ancestors and the government of Pennsylvania from the time of William Penn. Once a year had they met in the forest to refresh their memories and to instruct the most promising of their young men in memorizing those records. There would be no surrender of this land without a struggle. And the struggle came with the outbreak of the smouldering fire of hatred toward the English colonists that claimed this land by virtue of cession from the Iroquois who on their part had gained it by conquest. The Delawares and the neighboring Shawanees, having at last recuperated their courage and vigor, denied that the hated Iroquois had any right by conquest or otherwise to deed the land to the English.

So in the end the Delawares joined the tribes that allied with the French in the fight against the English. The prize at stake was the continent, but little the savages at first knew how hopeless to them was the war of the white men whose conflicting schemes, jealousies, intrigues, passions and religious hatreds of the old world burned in the wilderness warfare of the new. For the red men it was to be but a question of under which king.

Through the Indian world in this forest wild the music of the war dance beat like a muffled drum, the weird "he-uh, he-uh" of chanting savages timed to the tatto of the drum-stick. The warriors crouched a few paces, straightened with a hideous yell, stretched their tomahawks towards Virginia, shrieked their hate again, the lust of blood in their painted faces, then wheeled and danced back.

One at a time, with brandishing tomahawk, howled and writhed through his war song to the weird chant of the others - ''He-uh, he-uh." As the warrior ended his song he crashed his tomahawk into a post, shouted his war exploits and what he would now do, while the rest howled approval. When they filed away, trailing behind the leader, his traveling song came faintly to the listening squaws, maids and old men long after the breech-clouted figures had disappeared in the forest -