I have sought it. I have killed
many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I
rejoice at the beams of peace, yet do not harbor the thought
that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not
turn on his heel to save his life. Who is thereto mourn for
Logan? Not one."
CHAPTER II
THE MOUND BUILDERS
Thou unrelenting Past!
Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,
And fetters sure and fast
Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.
Far in thy realm, withdrawn
Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom;
And glorious ages gone,
Lie deep within the shadows of thy womb.
Full many a mighty name
Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevered.
With thee are silent fame,
Forgotten arts, and wisdom.
- W. C. Bryant.
"Who can read the history of the past? Who is there who can tell
the story of creation's morn? It is not written in history,
neither does it live in tradition. There is mystery here, but it
is hid by the darkness of bygone ages."
"There is a true history here, but we have not learned well the
alphabet used. Here are doubtless wondrous scenes, but our
standpoint is removed by time so vast that only the rude
outlines can be determined. The delicate tracery, the body of
the picture, are hidden from our eye. The question as to the
antiquity and primitive history of man is full of interest in
proportion as the solution is set with difficulties. We question
the past, but only here and there a response is heard. Surely
bold is he who would attempt, from the few data at hand, to
reconstruct the history of times and people so far removed. We
quickly become convinced that many centuries and tens of
centuries have rolled away since man's first appearance on the
earth. We become impressed with the fact that multitudes of
people have moved over the surface of the earth and sunk into
the night of oblivion without leaving a trace of their
existence, without a memorial through which we might have at
least learned their names."
"In Egypt we find the seat of an ancient civilization which was
in its power many centuries before Christ. The changes that have
passed over the earth are far more wonderful than any ascribed
to the wand of the magician. Nations have come and gone, and the
land of the Pharaohs has become an inheritance for strangers;
new sciences have enriched human life, and the fair structure
has arisen on the ruins of the past. Many centuries, with their
burden of human hopes and fears, have sped away into the past,
since 'Hundred-gated Thebes' sheltered her teeming population,
where now are but a mournful group of ruins. Yet today, far
below the remorseless sands of her desert, we find the rude
flint-flakes that require us to carry back the time of man's
first appearance in Egypt to a past so remote that her stately
ruins become a thing of yesterday in comparison to them."
(footnote Von Hellwald: Smithsonian Report, 1836.)
Europe, in the minds of some travelers, seems to have a monopoly
on all fair landscapes and ancient civilization, to hear their
overdrawn descriptions gleaned from many books of travel. But,
in the socalled New World we find mysterious mounds and gigantic
earthworks, also deserted mines, where we can trace the sites of
ancient camps and fortifications, showing that the Indians of
America's unbounded primeval forests and vast flowery prairies
were intruders on an earlier, fairer civilization. Here we find
evidence of a teeming population. No one viewing the imposing
ruins scattered about the Mississippi valley and especially the
wonderful work of Fort Ancient can help but marvel at these
crumbling walls of an ancient, forgotten race.
One writer has stated that America has no hoary legends or
traditions that lend an ever-increasing interest to the scenes
of other lands. It will never have any ancient history, nor any
old institutions. This writer surely never stood on those
ancient mounds of Ohio and elsewhere which tell us that there
were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers began
to melt and the land became inhabitable once more. "Even before
the ice came creeping southwestwardly from the region of Niagara
and passed over two-thirds of our state, from Lake Erie to the
Ohio River there were people here of an older race than the
hills, as the hills now are; for the glaciers ground away the
hills as they once were and made new ones, with new valleys
between them, and new channels for the streams to run where
there had never been water courses before. The earliest Ohioans
must have been the same as the Ohioans of the Ice Age, and when
they fled southward before the glaciers they mast have followed
the retreat of the melting ice, back into Ohio again. No one
knows how long they dwelt here along its edges in a climate like
that of Greenland, where the glaciers are now to be seen as they
once were in the region of Cincinnati. But it is believed that
these Ice Folk, as we may call them, were of the race which
still roams the Arctic snows.
"All they have left to prove that they were able to cope with
the fierce brute life and terrible climate of their day are axes
of chipped stone and similar tools and weapons dropped on the
gravelly banks of new rivers which the glaciers upheaved. Such
an ax was dug up out of the glacier terrace, as the bank of this
drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas in Mississippi.
"For the next four or five thousand years the early Ohio men
kept very quiet; but we need not suppose for that reason that
there were none.
