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. Our Ice Folk who dropped their stone axes in
the river banks may have passed away with the Ice Age, or they
may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take on some
faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that
they stayed; but Ohio must always have been a pleasant place to
live in after the great thaw, and it seems reasonable that the
Ice Folk lingered, in part at least, and changed with the
changing climate, and became at last the people who left the
signs of their presence in almost every part of the state."
(footnote Howell's History of Ohio.)
The great masterpiece of the Mound Builders is known as Fort
Ancient. Its colossal size, ingenuity in design and perfection
in construction give it first rack in interest among all
prehistoric fortifications, and it represents the highest point
attained by this lost race in their earth-work structures.
