Vigo County, Indiana - Chapter 2: Pre-Historic Races in Vigo County, 1891

Dim tradition of some of these connect them with what may be called the more modern peoples, who lived their day upon the earth, grew and flourished and then passed away, leaving only these indistinct marks behind them, concerning which we may only con¬ jecture. We now, by these discoveries, begin to realize that with the lost nations are to be classed the lost arts. Whether these un¬ known people reached a civilization that petrified and thus slowly became extinct, or whether some cataclysm of nature struck them in the zenith of their glory and progress we can not know. There are some evidences that such are the laws of nature that when any portion of the earth's surface reaches a certain point in animal life, that nature relieves itself by destroying all life, and then com¬ mences at the foundations to again build up anew, simply follow¬ ing the inevitable law of change, and evolving that particular vege¬ table and animal life that the changed environments demand.

In the marches of the army, 1861-65, through Tennessee, there were some interesting evidences of the natural order of the changes in vegetable life. Here were forests that may be considered among the oldest on the continent. Atone point a cyclone had cut a swath about 300 yards wide and had mowed down the old and the young nearly as clean as a reaper cuts the wheat. Some of these wind storms had been so long ago that the track of the storm could only be followed by the distinct and different tree growth that had taken the place of the primeval forests, and this was only visible to the close observer.

At other points the early settlers had denuded large sections of the forests, converting them into charcoal for their primitive iron mills. Here none of the old growths of the forest sprouted up, and the young took the places of the old, but in every instance noticed, where had been oaks, elms, walnut and the usual hardwood growths as well as vines, were found pines and different growths of the evergreens as though the ground had been carefully pre¬ pared and these seeds had been sown broadcast.

The processes of nature are slow, but is it not possible that it is ever toward change - the beds of the seas to become mountains and the tall mountain peaks to again become the ocean beds.

The archeologists say that there were races of men on this con¬ tinent before the Indians. This is their general conclusion, yet there are some who insist that the mounds and the discovered forts, battle-grounds and cities, were all the work of the ancient Indians, and when we found them in the thirteenth century they were in the slow processes of decay, and had the white man never come, the Indians would in time have been extinguished. We found in every tribe traditions, but these were the idlest whims and silly figments of the brain as a rule. Their mental horizon was so limited that their imagination could not conceive of any other existence than on this earth, and their future or heaven was the "happy hunting ground " just over the next hill or mountain.

Without entering upon this discussion, it is enough to say that the best authorities tell us that there was a people once here, dis¬ tinct from the Indians, and they called them the " Mound Builders." Exactly what they erected them for is unknown, or at least conject¬ ural.

The chain of mounds, commencing in Canada, run in a south¬ westerly direction into South America. There are evidences, espe¬ cially in the larger ones, of the same methods of construction, and

In nearly all are found human remains, and at one time the con¬ clusion was quite general that they were built for burial purposes. But the fact that the modern Indians found them well adapted for this purpose, they no doubt appropriated them with the same indiffer¬ ence as to the original design that the pioneer farmers plowed over many a one and planted his crops thereon. A lone grave may now be seen on one of the noted mounds west of this place in Illinois, surrounded with a neat white painted picket fence, where the family buried their boy who was killed by a runaway horse a few years ago. And had not this mound become private property in actual possession, there is but little doubt that the early pioneers would have first used it as a burial place for their dead, as the surround¬ ing country at that day was flat and marshy.

Again, there is no sufficient evidence that all the ancient forts, mounds and parallels were constructed by the same people or in the same age. In lower Wisconsin and upper Indiana and Illinois are mounds - generally small however - that were, no doubt, made as de¬ fenses in war by the Indians found here when America was discovered - that is, their ancestors.

The first of these discovered in Vigo county were near Fort Harrison, and are mentioned in Pidgeon's history of the fort. They were soon occupied by the farmers, and being small were plowed down until now the place they occupied can only be pointed out as gentle swells on the surface of the land. People pass and repass over them, wholly unconscious of their ever existing as artificial mounds. These were in the prairie just north of Terre Haute. In Fayette township and along the east line of the county are mounds, and many interesting remains have been found.

The accounts of the Toltecs as found by the Spaniards in Mexico, their customs and manner of the mound building have led some of our archeologists to conclude that originally that was the dominat¬ ing people of the Western Hemisphere, and that from the tropics they made excursions, and finally held possession of the country northeast to the Atlantic. A group of noted mounds in Arkansas, a short distance below Little Rock, on what Avas once the bank of the Arkansas river, but is now several miles from that stream on Horse Shoe lake, is called the Toltec mounds, and the railroad sta¬ tion near it is Toltec. There are two very large mounds as the cen¬ tral figure and clusters of smaller ones about their bases, with dis¬ tinct canal or Avater-way marks enclosing in a circle of seven miles the mounds. All are situated and constructed with due reference to the points of the compass and geometric lines.

works are that they were made by a people of a low grade of civil¬ ization, and that here was once a numerous population mostly sunken in gross ignorance and slavery. These works, representing so much labor to construct, are the evidences that it was all unpaid labor. The same lesson can be read in the pyramids and the spliynx and the more modern Alhambra and the Kremlin, intended to per¬ petuate the immortality and glory of some ruler who was simply a vile usurper and who sacrificed the liberty and lives of the people in order to perpetuate his miserable memory on earth. But time has been more kind to their fame than were the tyrants to themselves. Their huge monuments still standing, it has blotted their names completely from the human mind, and to us they are as insignificant as that of the poorest slave that toiled upon these mounds. That is about all the moral or lesson there is to the most of these great useless works or mausoleums found in the world and so much written and spoken of in modern history. The most of them are the evidences of slave-labor - nothing more - the people sodden in the ignorant be¬ lief that their ruler is such by the divine order and by the same token they are properly slaves. Educated to this hard fate from the cradle, they toil and perish, and educate their descendants as a high religious duty to follow in their footsteps.

Some able archaeologists believe there are indications about the largest of these mounds and earthworks that point at least to three different races of men who have had to do with them. These are in the human remains that have been buried in them. Those of this faith do not believe the Indians or any of that nomadic race had aught to do with their building. The engineering, as well as the tools that must have been used, indicates a degree of civilization never reached by any known tribe. The evidences of patient and persistent labor and the skill in directing it tend to establish the theory that they were made by a sendentary people, with consider¬ able knowledge of agriculture. They believe that at least two of these races of men are pre-liistoric, that they have passed away, total wrecks on the stream of time, without word or script to their successors except the mute story of crania, implements and mounds. Who were they? What were they? And when did they live? Are questions we may ask in vain.

Mammoth and Mastodon. - In nearly all parts of Indiana have been found the remains of the mammoth, the greatest abundance in the central and southern portion. So long has it been since these tropical monsters lived and flourished here that only the most com¬ pact of their bones, such as teeth, jaws and thigh bones are the ones time has not destroyed, although these are all found in marshy and miry places, some of them in peaty ground, and it is wholly owing to this fact that we have any traces at all of these giant land animals. They too, like the most ancient of the Mound Builders, all came after the glacial period. In the stomach of one found recently in Illinois were the evidences that it was a cotemporary of the present flora of this part of the country. The careful exami¬ nation of the contents of what must have been in the animal's stom¬ ach when it died, demonstrated this fact. This animal must have lived long after the others of which we find some of the tusks and teeth much decomposed, as there was found in place several of the laiger bones of the body. Some thirty different animal remains of these monsters have been found in the State. In the close dark clays where these remains were preserved through the long lapse of time are the evidences that the preserving deposit was made in the Lucusti al epoch, which followed the glacial period. At that time the fresh waters covered the greater portions of the continent, and the great sluggish rivers were the channels of the rainfall - far greater then than now - in its course to the ocean - something after the manner of the Amazon as now to be seen in South America. In these great streams were vast eddies and whirlpools, and these de¬ posited the peculiar clays in which were preserved the remains not only of the mammoth, but of the megalonix, bison and the casteroides.

Some of the best preserved teeth of the mammoth were found in Yigo county, the smaller teeth weighing five and six pounds. The position of the remains when found, as well as the boggy soil, plainly indicated that these monsters in their search for water had sunk in the mire and perished.

Animals of such immense proportions - -giants indeed - are of course always comparatively few in number. And then too how general conditions here must have changed from then to now. The great rainfalls and the deep tangled jungles that were necessary to furnish such animals the quantities of food daily necessary for them. If there were no other changes than in the vegetable growths we can well understand with the vegetable world we now have these monsters would soon have perished of hunger. They browsed mostly upon the trees and shrubbery, and with the wet and shaky nature of the soil at that time it must have been true that the earth trembled as they walked upon it.

The remains that we find of these animals are enough for the skilled anatomist to tell us all about their size and their food and habits; even to draw satisfactory pictures of them.

Glaciers. - These slowly flowing rivers or seas of ice were once constant visitors to even Vigo county. Our idea of ice generally is that it is something hard and brittle, with no more flow in its nat¬ ure than there is in a standing tree, house or rock, and yet it is a fact that the glaciers are flowing rivers or oceans of solid ice. The glacial rocks, that is rocks worn and ground into smooth rounded form, are found plentifully in this part of the country. In Mr. Scovill's office I was shown a glacial rock, and inquiring as to the peculiar ridge or undulating form of wear its surface presented, I learned that it was a wall rock. On the prairies are found fre¬ quently large and small specimens of a rounded and worn hard rock, which is the common bowlder. These were seized by the mov¬ ing ice in the northern lake regions and carried to where the south¬ ern sun unlocked them and they were left where found. Some of these rocks have been beneath the vast body of moving ice and pushed along over the country until one-third of the stone has been worn away and presenting a smooth flat surface.

In the northern temperate zone nearly all over the earth is found these glacial rocks. One was found just west of this in Illinois twenty-two and a half feet below the earth's surface. It is proba¬ ble that where it lay was the ground's surface Avhen it was dropped there by the ice.

There are moving glaciers now in Switzerland, and these have been studied with much interest by Prof. Tyndall. He measured the annual flow of one of these and found it moved at the rate of over sixty feet in a year. It is estimated that in some cases the ice was as much as a mile in thickness, and the tremendous power nec¬ essary to move such an immense and resisting body is wholly incal¬ culable. It must have been something like nature's resistless power of expansion and contraction.

These crystal ships were the first that ever came to this part of the world. No commander walked their glittering decks. How their sides gleamed and sparkled in the winter sun, as beautiful as they could be remorseless as they pushed and ground and crushed all iu their way. They literally reformed the face of the earth in their progress, making river beds where once had been the mount¬ ain rocks, and changing the course of rivers. Just across the river west from Terre Haute is the noted gravel bank of the Van road. This has furnished the road ballast nearly from end to end, and the supply is far from being yet exhausted. This was brought from the far north, and at this point the ice melting, the gravel was dropped, and over the great bed is the slowly accumulating soil. This was a part of the cargo of the crystal ship - appropriately enough it may be considered the ship's ballast.

These ice visitations were no doubt a necessary part of the slow preparation of the earth for the coming of man. But as there are no evidences that they in any of their trips passed south of the Ohio river, the necessary part they performed in the preparatory work is not so manifest. They moved from north to south, and before their coming it is probable that the great rivers mostly flowed east or west. At least the beds of dead rivers so far found are crossed by the present streams at right angles, showing how complete at some time the topography of the country has been changed.

One of the conclusions that follows an investigation of the gla¬ ciers, is, that it not only takes a long time to make and finish off a world, but there is a great deal of work in .the operation from first to last. If we had to hire men to do it, like we make railroads and other things that we consider great works, the task, even when the finishing touches were only left to do, would be quite appalling to man's feeble efforts and abilities. For instance, when a man has a piece of mechanism either in wood or metal, at that stage that the real work is all done, then he proceeds to polish, smooth and finish it. These last deft touches, while they add nothing perhaps really to the value of the thing itself, yet they give its chief beauty to it. Let us suppose the glaciers were the sand paper and pol¬ isher of a completed world in the rough. At this stage our little whirling globe looked at from our nearest neighbor planet, no doubt would have appeared very nice and smooth, and one of us, had we been commissioned to accept or reject the work, and make a final settlement with the contractor, would have found nothing omitted, nothing further required to fit it for man's appearance. &But fort¬ unately there was a Great Architect who knew far better than could we, even with all our books -and education. It was really a very dreary world in fact. For instance, there was, it is said, a geolog¬ ical age, in which it rained all the time. The waters came in cease¬ less torrents, and striking the hot earth, immediately ascended as vapor, and cooling formed again into rain, until it was one unceasing round of vapors going up and rain descending. Men in such a shower would in a few generations at least become web-footed. These rains beat upon the rocks - the first land that was uplifted above the waters, and commenced the work of wearing them down, pulverizing their particles and carrying them off into the waters. This was the way the beginning of the soils now resting upon the earth's rocks had their commencement.

But long after the rains had ceased their constant down-pour, the waters had begun to recede from the land, when the continents had risen dripping from the waters somewhat in the form that we know them on our maps, the land was nearly covered with great sluo-- gisli streams, so immense that our greatest rivers now would be to them as mere rivulets, and immense fresh water lakes and dreary miles of water-covered lagoons were on every hand. It was to change, 01 pei haps better it did change, these conditions and reform the rivers' channels, narrowing and deepening their beds, and accelerating then flow, that was chiefly, no doubt, effected by the operations of the glaciers.

It seems that there was one age of the world that has not been properly separated as a distinct period by the learned investigators. There was a time when the waters and the land seemed to vie with each other in the production of animals of immense size - the levi¬ athans of the deep and the mammoths of the land. As life com¬ menced in its lowest and most ephemeral form, infinitessimal in size but infinite in numbers, it continued in its progress and slowly passed from the water to dry land. This was the order of develop¬ ment. The higher order took to the open air for existence, while the waters continued to experiment and evolve new forms, some to gradually leave the water, and others to reach certain degrees of advance but remain in the water. The earliest forms of life seem to have made up for their insignificance in their rapidly mul¬ tiplying numbers. The waters being by so far the greater portion of the earth's surface, it is but natural to find in them animals of greater size than were ever produced on the land. And yet, as we have seen from the remains found in Vigo county, these land ani¬ mals were of immense size. The one that had tusks nine feet long, for instance, and his smallest teeth weighed five pounds, would, no doubt, if stood up by the side of Barnum's Jumbo, have made that prize monster sink into the comparative insignificance of a yearling calf. And yet, this monster in turn, by some of the sea monsters, would have shrunken about equally to Jumbo in his contest in size.

When the limit in size had been reached, it seems that then nat¬ ure had satisfied itself in this respect and commenced the work of a better and finer animal organization. This improvement must have been in time in the nervous systems given, as the lower we go in animal life the less and less do we find these developed. The nerves were gathered into ganglions and finally they were perfected into the brain, and in time came thought from this brain organization, until we find the perfected animal structure in man - the fruitage of all these ages and ages of the earth's preparation for his recep¬ tion.

The Buffalo. - When our continent was discovered, these were the most important animals found. They seem to have come as a necessary part of the prairies and savannas of the west. They have faded away, much like their congener, the wild Indians, before the ever advancing step of the white man - that busy destroyer as well as builder, with his tireless energies and sleepless vigilance.

One characteristic of the buffalo was its nature to gather in such vast herds in their yearly migrations from the south to the north¬ west and back again. Moving over hill and plain in countless num¬ bers, what a magnificent spectacle they often presented. With heads erect, their strongest bulls bravely leading, knowing their course in their long travels, and nothing could swerve them from their line of march. These leaders never looked back, but knew their trusting legions were closely following, and by their very numbers were as resistless as the angry sea. For some years after the building of the Union Pacific Railroad it was no unusual oc¬ currence for a train to come in contact with one of these migrating herds. As they moved along in solid column, looking neither to the right nor the left, simply following their leaders, the train of cars simply had to stop and give them the right of way, and could again go forward only when the last one had passed the track.

The buffalo was the Indian's pilot to the richest lands and green¬ est pastures, and they furnished him the food for his subsistence, while their hides were his comfortable bedding and clothing. The buffalo, too, was the white man's unerring engineer, pointing to where he was to found his greatest cities and the natural seats of empire. In crossing the mountains it surveyed the natural routes for the conti¬ nental railroads, and in crossing the streams, such were its habits, that it would select always the best place to cross, and reaching this point in their voyaging, if the stream were a large one or swollen, they would stop on its bank and apparently go into camp. They would bathe in the river, and loved to wallow in the mud, much after the fashion of our domestic hogs. A mud bath was a great pleasure to a buffalo, and one of these huge animals would work out his mudhole and roll in it, and finally emerge covered entirely with several inches of the mud plastered over his whole body, except his eyes. This was probably, besides the pleasure to the animal, one way of destroying the parasites on their bodies. Some of the prairies in Texas are known as the hog-wallow prairies, because in traveling over them you are all the time passing from one ancient wallow to an¬ other. They are so numerous they touch each other for many miles uninterruptedly. Some observers think these hog-wallows were, when the prairies were mostly covered with water, buffalo-wallows. On the great streams and lakes it was the habit of buffaloes to gather in vast herds some time before starting on their migration. As remarked, when they reached a river in their course they halted, apparently dreading to make the plunge to cross. In time hunger would compel them to bestir themselves, when a sudden commotion would call them together, and they would commence to move in a circle, the inner ones, every time they came opposite the water, would crowd the outer ones nearer and nearer, until finally, some bolder one, already pushed into the water, would strike out for the opposite shore, when all would unhesitatingly follow. These trysting places, so to speak, as well as the halting places on the banks of the rivers, have in nearly every instance become the eligible points for men to gather and build great cities. The Indian, in order to gain food, learned to follow the buffalo, and his great pow- wows were in time where that animal had bivouacked, and civilized man, in his movements over the continent, learned that his true civil engineer had been the buffalo and the Indian, and seeing these places, he said, "Here I will stick mj Jacob's staff and dwell for¬ ever."

The buffalo, so important to human life at one time on the con¬ tinent, has now practically faded away. The great plains no longer are his, his bleaching bones are being gathered and railroaded to the fertilizing factories. Where the buffalo grazed the tall weedy grasses of the glades gave way to the more nutritious buffalo grass, a far superior growth to the original grasses that he found on his first visits. These native animals then had their mission in pre¬ paring our continent for what it now contains. He has filled that mission, and with little or no protest has gone from the earth. Ex¬ cept in the menageries or zoological gardens, or in the pastures of some of the western ranches, where may be seen some rather scrawny, unkempt and drooping specimens of his kind, there is but little else to remind us of this once important and numerous species of American animals. Even the buffalo robes once so im¬ portant a part of a sleigh ride with Katie and Johnnie, will soon be but a memory, remembered and told over by the fire-side by grandmother Katie in her fondest recollections of the days when Johnnie would a-courting-go. Thus in turn everything has its place and time and mission, and then gives way to the coming changes for which it has helped to prepare the way.

The Prairies. - As these were seen by the earliest pioneers to this part of the world, they, too, like the glaciers, buffalo and Indian are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. The prairies when they were known only to the buffalo and Indian, in the prairie State of Illinois, and also in Indiana have undergone such changes as would make them an unknown land could one of these ancient denizens revisit the glimpses of the moon. They were vast solitudes of beauty and grandeur. In great level stretches, or anon gently rolling, like the lazy ocean's swells, clothed in their tall waving grasses over which ran the wind waves in sportive moods, the gen¬ tle rustling of the dry grass as the happy purring of the kitten ca¬ ressed, with banks of wild flowers rising in ascending parterres , and in the distance a lone tree, as noted in the waste and solitude as the Kock of Gibraltar is to the mariner - the tree a most noted land-mark and guide, by which future comers could direct their course with the same certainty that they were going to their friends in the new country as that that guides the sailor in his course when he looks toward that star that never sets. These prairies are not, as is often done, to be confounded with the glades and savan¬ nas of the south and of South America. The true prairie extends from the Gulf to the northern limit of the United States, pursuing a northerly course along the Mississippi valley. You may ride for days and weeks over where was once the great prairies of Illinois and Indiana without seeing even a spear of the prairie grass that was once their most distinctive mark. Standing upon the highest elevation you can find, and in every direction you may see grasses, shade trees, orchards, fences and houses, villages and towns, mills with their tall chimneys, factories and great railroad trains scream¬ ing in their flight, with the long trail of smoke and steam stream¬ ing out behind. Around you is the busy teeming world, but to your shortened view, where was once the unobstructed expanse is now to be seen nothing of the original prairie land. There was nothing in common in the verdant prairies and the hot and dreary sand deserts of the Old World, where was the quiet of death, save when the sand-storm came with its destroying sweep. In the spring of the year the entrancing vision broke upon the adventurous pioneer. The soft velvet sheen stretching away beyond the vision where it meets the bending horizon; a herd of buffalo in the distance to the left, browsing in picturesque groups ; over there is an immense herd of the fleet and graceful deer, the heads of their outlookers thrown high in the air on seeing the approaching white man, and when he comes too close, and all have satisfied their curiosity, they turn and show their short white tails and gallop away, even more graceful and beautiful now than ever. Their soft and liquid eyes have for the fiist time looked upon the face of their exterminator - the white man. The air is vocal with the loud trumpeting of the flocks of cranes, either sailing in such close military order or holding their annual spiing dance near the borders of the lake, where they court, and mate in such fantastic and even comic manner. The wild geese, the swans, and the innumerable ducks, all clamoring their joy over their return from their far distant southern winter quarters to these beautiful trysting places, or mayhap, when his eyes first beheld the tiue prairie, it was at the hour of one of those witching sunsets so often seen in this western country where all nature seems to be so enlarged and expanded. Of such a sunset the eyes that have ever looked can never forget. The burnished sky and the mottled, fleecy clouds seem to have caught fire with the prairie landscape beauties, and the vast painted curtain of heaven is being slov ly uni oiled, and at the end of the vision the beauties of heaven and the prairies are interwoven and mingled until the beholder is lost in a dream that he would fain have linger on forever.

o wizaid of the pencil has ever painted the primitive prairie. He nevei saw them in their pristine grandeur, and surely never saw added thereto a grand sunset. If he did he turned away awe¬ struck and heartbroken, because here was nature that defied him,, mocked him in even his highest efforts.

Utilitarian man came, and with ruthless hand destroyed these incomparable beauties of nature. He has not, of course, interfered with the sunsets, but such was the primitive prairie that its beauties stretched out in such expanse that they met in the vision the bend¬ ing heavens, and herein was destroyed a large part of the finest effects of the old-time sunsets of the west.

Fires. - In respect to the old-time prairie fires, there is the same complete change that there has been in the general face of these richly carpeted landscapes, of which modern people will, or perjiaps have, lost all accurate knowledge.

Judge Beckwith, in his history of the Wabash valley, under¬ takes to say that the most of the accounts of the terrors of these fires is fiction, or rather exaggerations ; that the fires, as a rule, were tame affairs, and if a man had plowed around his field, or there was a beaten, bare road about it, the fire was about as harm¬ less as a political torchlight procession. A good deal of this is true after the native grasses had gone and the short grasses had taken their place, and at the same time there were no strong winds prevailing to send the great sheets of ragged flame scurrying over the tops of the grass, and every moment were adding force to the crackling, roaring furies.

I was an eye-witness to the second great Chicago fire - 1874. I have also seen prairie fires in Illinois and in Kansas. Here was the burning of a great city on one hand, all its horrors intensified by the presence of thousands of people fleeing there in motley crowds, bearing on their backs such of their effects as they could snatch up as they ran, but far more horrible still were others caught in the tops of tall buildings and the eager flames rushing upon them, more pittiless even than dancing devils - the cries of distress shrieked out above the din and roar - the weeping mothers parted in the rush from their children, angry men struggling and trampling upon the weaker, the wild and the drunken, the slums and the sewers, the thugs and the thieves, the refined and delicate, all emptied into the streets together to fight for life or to add to the horrors of the moment. A burning city is indeed a grewsome sight. I was riding with a friend in a buggy near the town of Wellington, Kas., on a beautiful sunny day in the fall of 1879. The usual southwest Kansas zephyrs were racing over that prairie State at something like about the pace of fifty or more miles an hour. In that region of the country, for days and weeks and months, with a clear, brassy sky, the winds do "blow and crack their cheeks." At the time spoken of above it was doing probably a little better than usual, and the sear and yellow grasses were ready for the fiery sacrifice. We noticed two men plowing and burning cornstalks or rubbish in a small field we were passing, when my friend observed that it was dangerously windy to be using fire in the open air. But between the fire and the grass was plowed ground of nearly a hundred yards in width, and then came the road, which at that point was very wide, at least 200 feet. We had hardly passed when a blazing shuck had burned loose from the stock, and caught up by the wind was carried to the grass, which caught instantly. The man saw it, and unhitching one of the plow horses, without even taking time to put on a saddle, he mounted and at full speed started for his neighbor toward whom he knew the fire was moving. It was a race between the man and the horse and the scudding great flame tongue that was licking and blackening the face of the earth. When the man reached his nearest neighbor, about a mile distant, the fire had just leaped up the sides of his neighbor's grain stacks, and soon everything, excepting the cabin containing the family, was a part of the blackened ashes in the fire's course. The wide space of bare ground around the house enabled the family to save themselves and some of their domestic animals.

But a few miles from where I saw this prairie fire start I was shown, just below the northern line of the Indian Territory, where a prairie fire had surrounded a large drove of horses, and all per¬ ished in the holocaust. The topography of the country, the varia¬ tions of the winds and the course of the streams, would shape the action of the fires often. In cases like that mentioned, the spot where the fire starts, a long tongue of flame seems to shoot out like a race-horse at the tap of the bell, but this more slowly widens at the base, and where it burns against the wind it is very slow in its movements, and hence the great conflagration in one place is speed¬ ing away like a fiery rocket; in the other it may lazily smoulder or flare up here and there, but everywhere it is gathering energy, circling and winding as the winds may compel, and sometimes a wide circle is thus formed that all at once will flare up like angry fire demons and rush together at a common center with a roar and anger be¬ neath whose hot breath nothing can live a moment.

Among the early settlers in the prairie country, every family, in the dangerous seasons of the year from prairie fires, stood guard and watch for this destroying angel. They made roads, and also plowed about their farms. These roads and furroAvs were chiefly valuable, when the warning came, as a base from Avliich to fight fire with fire. One party, with a wisp of burning grass, would set fire to the grass on the side of the furrow toward the coming fire, while others, with wisps of hazel-brush, generally, would follow to beat out any of the fire that was not burning toAvard the wind. At those points, too, where the fire was not running straight before the wind, the people, with boards or brush wisps, could often fight out the fire and prevent it from slowly working around to a point of vant- age, where it could again start with the wind and go seething and roaring away like mad demons. The prairie fire-serpent, as though filled with devilish cunning, is full of deceit and deceptions in its various movements.

The " burnt prairie" were spots frequently designated in the oldtime descriptions of the country. A prairie burned somewhat late in the spring was the chosen pasture-ground of the domestic stock and the deer, and where but a few weeks ago was such blackened and desolate ruin, the warm spring rains have washed away, and the earth's surface is fretted with multitudinous sprouting of the velvet sheen that is again to cover and beautify nature. How mother nat¬ ure binds up the ugly wounds of war and covers the fire-ruins, and the dews, the sun and the winds kiss again and again the new life in the new and beautiful world.

Waters stood upon the broad prairies - wide expanses, covered by the rainfall and a wide, sluggish, shallow stream at the roots of the grass, could be only noticed by the traveler by the different grass-growths. Ponds of standing water of wide extent, and on the hillsides sipes (pronounced "seeps") were frequent. Some¬ times in the wet spring you could walk on the tough sod, and by jumping on it could shake the apparently floating surface for many feet around. As civilization mastered the wild nature of the coun¬ try, a natural drainage was formed, and the prairies have continually become more and more dry and free of standing water. The most of the ponds are gone, and places where now old men were wont when boys to fish and swim - taking the plow-horses sometimes, and muddying the waters and thus catching the fish, are now plowed over and crops are grown. In the conditions they were found by the first settlers they were supposed and were uninhabitable. Their value as feeding grounds for domestic animals was well understood, but for men, these old fellows wanted dry land. The change that was soon brought by occupation invited the experiment of the bold¬ est to venture out upon them and commence their little improve¬ ments - sometimes in sod houses and often with sod fences. The people dreaded the winter winds on these unsheltered prairie seas, and at first they probably supposed that an ordinary house would not protect their families. They soon learned better, and the little " clearings " that were the marks of the earliest comers were soon deserted for the prairie farms.

The great pests of the prairies were the air-darkening swarms of "greenheads" - a terrible blood-sucking parasitic fly, that at certain seasons would rise up from the grass and in great numbers light upon a horse or cow brute, and in a few hours kill it unless the animal could reach the timber, where they would not follow. These flies, with their bright green heads, were not much larger than a honey bee - a little longer, though not so heavy. They did not fly after sundown, and never in the morning until the dew was gone. Travelers often would have to camp in the edge of the tim¬ ber and wait for night before they could attempt to cross the wide prairie that was before them.

Origin of the Prairies. - As to the origin or cause of the prai¬ ries there is a divided opinion, one side holding that the fires had driven back the timber growth, and as firing the grass was one of the favorite modes of hunting by the Indians and the first white hunters and trappers, this theory has much of good reason to back it. On the other hand, for it seems the better reason, it is held that it was the waters and not the fire that made the prai¬ ries. It was natural that these beautiful meadow lands should excite much curiosity, and in time speculation as to their producing causes. The famous "old ranger," Gov. Reynolds, and Chief Jus¬ tice Caton, both of Illinois, and early settlers and close observers, espoused the cause of fire, while on the other side was the more scientific and able investigator, Prof. Lesquereux. The latter gave much time and travel to his investigation of the subject, and in his published works he sums up as follows: " All the prairies of the Mississippi valley have been formed by the slow recessions of waters of various extent; first transformed into swamps and in the process of time drained and dried, and that the high rolling prai¬ ries and those of the bottoms along the rivers as well are all the result of the same cause and form one whole, indivisible system." The professor maintained that the ulmic acid in the prairie soil prevented the timber from ever encroaching on the prairie bound¬ aries, even after the fires had long ceased to play their part; that a flowing stream of water is always higher in the center than at the edges and this would cause the coarse particles in the water to be deposited at the sides and this coarse material favored tree growth ; that the immediate banks of a stream are usually higher ground than that back a short distance and these two causes readily account for tree growth along the banks of the streams. He found prairies along the northern Mississippi and confluent streams in every stage of formation, and could easily trace out every step of the slow proc¬ ess; that all this part of the world is a recent appearance above the waters, and from being all prairie at one time the appearance of timber growths always commenced along the higher banks of the river amid the coarser deposits and extended from there, first in the form of stiff and woody grasses and vines and then the small shrubs and the hazel and the sumac; that while it is true the transplanted trees will all flourish in the prairies, yet simply to plant the seed there without disturbing the soil, they could not grow; that in the undisturbed peaty prairie soil the roots of the tree could get no air and would smother. I was born on the edge of one of the great Illi¬ nois prairies more than fifty years ago, and I knew of no locality where in the natural operation the timber has perceptibly en¬ croached upon the prairie domain. My recollection and observa¬ tion do not tally with those of Gov. Reynolds or Judge Caton en¬ tirely, and yet I can remember where the hazel thickets have spread under heavy pasturage by domestic animals. Possibly these in time would develop the true timber growths. After following both sides and calling up my own recollection, I would incline to the judgment that there may be truth on both sides, and that nature so bountiful in all she does, may have used both methods in perfecting her marvelous works. It is not at all necessary that because one theory may be true that the other must perforce be false. Nature apparently in most things wastes her forces as well as resources, but this is evidently only apparent to our imperfect understanding.

The Indians. - Almost identically with the spot occupied by Terre Haute was once a Wea Indian village. These were here in 1811 when Gen. Harrison came with his army of occupation, and probably this fact determined the location of Fort Harrison.

The Indian knew nothing definite of his remote ancestors. He had his traditions and wild, crude legends, and some of them he perhaps believed himself and others he cherished chiefly as we do epic poems. They were the exploits of great hunters and scalpers, something, no doubt, of the crude idea of our school boys in their Friday afternoon piping declamations about " Alexander's paw! " - as they would gather up their pudgy fists and beat the air in the belief that that man-slayer went at his bloody work with bare fists. The In¬ dians were merely wild children, their history was unwritten, and was but dreams of fighting and killing their fellow-man. Their highest pleasures were in the prolonged and most exquisite torture, not necessarily of their enemies, but of their captives - simply be¬ cause they had them in their power, and after the victim was tor¬ tured to death, then to eat him was the crowning privilege. Their women were mere slaves and drudges, somewhat lower in their es¬ timation than their mangy dogs. These Indians that stand so patiently in front of tobacco shops are much cleaner and more in¬ telligent looking than the originals as found running wild all over this country when the white man came.

All over the habitable world are evidences of the coming and passing away of nations. Birth, growth and final decay it seems is much the history of peoples as it is of the individual. All roads once led to Rome. And although this was in comparatively modern times, yet now these great works, paved highways and stone bridges are but wrecks and broken remains of that once powerful nation. The angel of death, it seems, extended his shadowing wings and the " mistress of the world " bowed to fate, and the owls beat upon the casements of their palaces, and the wild beasts lick their cubs where once was only the busy feet of men. In the sweep of time the nations come and go as the ripples chase each other on the resting waters. Birth and death and a little short in¬ tervening struggle for existence is the be all and the end all, until existence itself is but change.

The numerous as well as powerful tribes of red savages found in possession of the continent have practically gone forever. The original wild Indian is now a memory. He has not passed out from his wild state and beep civilized into a changed and higher exist¬ ence, but before the pale faces he has been pushed from the Atlan¬ tic to the Pacific and has sung his death song and laid down to die. Some few miserable remnants of once great and dominating tribes have mingled their blood with the strange white races, and after being driven from place to place are now in the Indian Territory - the nation's wards and dependants. Those that clung to their clouts and blankets and refused the clothes and fashions of civilization were driven to the lava beds of the western mountain fastnesses and shot down like dangerous wild beasts or hemmed in and starved to death.

What a numerous race of Indians was here but a century or two ago. How little will soon remain to mark their ever having existed ! The white man met their cunning warriors in the track¬ less woods and slew them. When the last miserable, dirty beggar of them has departed what will there remain, except the words of the historian, to perpetuate his memory? Nothing. As a people they had petrified in their ignorant savagery. He could neither lift himself up, nor could his nature be elevated to that higher plane where lives a nobler humanity. He has left behind no thought, no invention and no work of any value to the world or that deserves preservation. He was nothing, and therefore has left nothing. Ignorant, cunning, cruel and excessively filthy, he was neither useful nor beautiful. His wild nature could not be re¬ claimed, except by adulteration of his blood with other races. Born in the wild wood, rocked on the wave, his one redeeming trait was his unconquerable love of liberty. He loved his wild liberty far better than life. He would not be a slave. Had he preferred existence and slavery to death, he might have lived on in peace with the white man. Indeed, he might now have had the ballot in his hand and enjoyed the fawning of our demagogues, a very hero indeed about election times, instead of the wandering beggar in rags as we see him. But this was not his nature. He would be free as the eagle of the crags, and in his choice between slavery and extinction he never halted. He met his fate with an unequaled stoicism, and his death song rose in his throat as the caroling of the forest birds. Herein was the strong individuality of the Indian, the redeeming quality of his nature.

Joliet, Marquette and Hennepin, the first white men to visit the Indians of the west, have left much authentic information of the conditions in which they found them. The pure and gentle Mar¬ quette was carrying to these wild children of the plains the cross of Christ, and receiving the tender in return of the calumet and wampum. These men discovered northern Indiana and met the Miamis. They discovered the Illinois and the upper Mississippi rivers, and traveled south from the lakes via the rivers to Arkansas Post, Ark. They agree that the northern Indians were inferior to those found in the south in their knowledge of the simplest of the arts. The Natchez were found to possess some little idea of the use of iron or copper, while their northern brothers knew nothing of it, and used only stone. On the borders of streams or lakes they had their scattered villages. Their wigwams being the rudest and simplest structures. All seemed to be nomadic in their habits. Each tribe having its chief, with no certain authority except to com¬ mand hunting and warring expeditions. The men performed no manual labor, this being done by the women or squaws. In the timber they built their wigwams of bark chiefly. This was laid on poles that were brought to a center, and here a hole was left for the smoke to escape. On the prairies these were made of grass mat¬ ting, that is, the covering was of that material, and was made and fastened together so neatly that it would readily turn the rains that beat upon them. The latter were so light that in their migrations the matting was rolled and carried from place to place. If very hungry they ate the game captured raw. The most of their cooking was over the fire or in the hot coals ; they would boil water by heat¬ ing stones and dropping into the water in their crude stone vessels. Their best cooks would but poorly compare with our French chefs in some of our fine hostelries. Their mode, for instance, of cook¬ ing a turkey was to pull a few of the largest feathers and then cook it just as it was. This they regarded as not only saving labor, but saving all that part of the turkey that we throw away - a double economy. Their marital relations were loose and illy defined. Poligamy was often practiced, but not universally, as the bucks bought their wives, paying in a pony or game or pelts, or whatever else that was the current of the realm. Wives were bought often for stated periods, when they would return and be in the marriage market again without bothering the divorce courts. It was only such dusky maidens as mated without being paid for that were discredited in the first circles of Indian society. The female chil¬ dren, in case of separation by virtue of the terms of the contract, went with the mother and the males belonged to the father. With these impediments in his way it may be assumed that he would as soon as possible get another squaw to support " the old man and the boys." Sometimes as many as sixty persons would compose one family, and altogether these would live in one wigwam - larger than the simple round ones. They slept upon the bare ground or on the skins of animals, and all their clothing in the rigors of the winter were also of the skins of animals. In the long winters their places of abode would be indescribably filthy. The numerous family and the dogs were huddled together in the smoke and the horrid air of their worse than kennels. While it was cold weather they never bathed, and they changed their clothes only by their wearing out and falling off. In the warm weather all took to the water daily like ducks, but when they came out would smear them¬ selves with horrid rancid grease, mixed often with certain kind of clays. This seemed to be the only part of their toilet that thev were at all particular to attend to.

The food of the Indian consisted of all the varieties of game, eating nearly everything except the rattlesnake. They called this reptile "grandfather," and believed that he had the soul of their dead ancestor, and they held it sacred. When the hunters would find a snake of this kind they would surround it, carefully keeping out of striking distance, and they would light their pipes and blow the smoke at it, calling it by endearing names, and pray to it to guard their families and help them in their expedition, whether war or hunting. In a rude way they cultivated corn, melons and squashes. From the corn they made their "sagamite," parched and pounded the corn, mixed it with water, bran and all, and roasted the mass in the hot ashes. Sometimes they mixed in the meal ground gourds or beans.

They had three kinds of canoes, and these they made and handled dexterously. Having only stone axes they would burn down the tree, chopping away the charred part. They would chop it off at any required length in the same way, dropping water at the points that they did not want to burn. The heavy wood canoes were burned out in a similar way, and with slow fires they could shape and fashion them exactly as wanted, and smooth and polish with stone. A pirogue was made by fastening two or more canoes together abreast by poles reaching across on the top. These would carry great weight, and were not liable to upset. Their most com¬ mon canoe was made of bark, elm or birch. The elm-bark canoes were very frail, and not used for long voyages. To make a canoe of the elm they would select the trunk of a tree very smooth, and at a time when the sap was up. They would cut around, above and below the length wanted, and then remove the whole in one piece, shaving off the roughest of the bark, making this side the inside of the canoe; fastening the ends of the bark together, the sides of the canoe were held apart by bows that would be fastened about two feet apart. They would sew up the two ends with strips of other elm bark, and in such a way as to cause the two ends to rise, with a swell in the middle. Any chinks they sewed together and covered with a gum they would chew. It may be that this is where our girls got the fashion of gum chewing without inheriting any knowledge of making bark canoes. They would add a mast, and on this use their blankets or skins for sails. All the passengers in such a craft sat upon their heels. There was much art and perfect balancing required to ride without turning over. It is supposed that one of our ordinary mouse or bug-squealing girls could upset one of these vessels in a few seconds - at least by the time it had reached deep water. The chief merit of the elm-bark canoe was its lightness. A squaw could shoulder one with ease and carry it along or over any portage. In ascending streams these people knew the road so well that frequently by crossing a great bend, and by going overland a mile or two, would save many miles around to the same spot.

Canoes made of birch bark were stronger and heavier, and looked more artistic in finish. The frames of these were of strips of cedar wood, which is light and flexible. This frame was made complete and was then covered with birch bark, which would be sewed together like skins. The seams were covered with chewed gum. Cross bars were put in to hold the sides apart, and these made seats for the passengers.

The French fur traders were the only white men who adopted the Indian's mode of making canoes, or had the skill to use them after the Indian fashion. Some of these canoes of the traders would carry as much as 3,000 pounds, and in the hands of an expert they would shoot along the water with great swiftness.

As already said, the Indians were cannibals, though human flesh was only eaten at war feasts. They would torture a prisoner to death; in this the women and children were peculiarly delighted, and the body would then be thrown into "the war kettle" and greedily devoured after a partial cooking. An early traveler among the savages, Joseph Barrow, says he saw Pottawatoihies and Miamis, with hands and limbs, both of white men and also of other tribes of Indians. The privileges of this feast were confined to the noted and foremost warriors.

They would bury their dead with great care and ceremony. Joutel says: " They pay great respect to their dead. Some of the tribes would prepare the grave carefully and then for days weep and wail about it; others Avould dance and sing for twenty-four hours. These dancers would hang their calabashes or gourds about their bodies, filled partially with dry beans and pebbles, and these would rattle and assist the mourners greatly in expressing their inconsolable grief. The heirs of the deceased were not forced by fashion to dissimulate their joy in the form of grief, because when the old man died they buried his fortune with him, and had to throw in something of their own to help him along the journey to the happy hunting ground.