The History of Genesee, MI, Chapter II, The Mount Builders

THE MOUND BUILDERS.

The earliest explorers of America came illusioned with certain theological conceptions, which dominated all their conclusion as to America and its people. Among these was the belief that the Hebrews were the original people, and that any other people must of necessity be an offshoot of that race. They made no exception in the case of the Indians and attempted to trace this entirely distinct people living in another continent, of a distinct language, of a different and inferior status, without flocks, back to the Hebrews. To do so called for the exercise of great ingenuity. The lost tribes of Israel furnished the basis of many fantastic hypotheses put forth with perfect assurance as to the origins of the Indians. The Indians being of an inferior status, this must be accounted for, and it was assumed that their predecessors in America had been of high civilization. With these basic assumptions, the investigations, as is wont to be the case, resulted in corrobatory evidence of preconceived theories. Linguistics affinities, mostly imaginary, were pointed out. Floor myths were discovered which of course must refer to the story of Noah. And to cap the sheaf, did not the very name of the progenitor of the Hebrew race, Adam, mean red. Adam, mean red? What caviler could ask for more cogent evidence of the fact that the Indians were merely Hebrews transformed into Americans in some manner and fallen from their earlier and higher status of civilization.

The result was that in the larger mounds of the Ohio valley and vicinity they saw the remains of the earlier civilization. The men who built those mounds became the "Mound Builders," and they were endowed with the arts and customs of the civilized status. The illusions did not stop at pseudo-scientific statement. It had a basis of theological misconception and it became the basis of a new theological system. A romancer seized on the explanation of the theological scientific explorers of the mounds, and wove it into a romance of a people who by the command of Yaveh, before the Babylonian captivity, left their home in Judea, and, with their flocks, household goods, families and servants, and under guidance of deity, traveled by land to the sea, where, after building a ship, they set sail and after many days and the hardships of Aeneas, they landed in a new country. Then followed, in archaic language and poor orthography, a tale of the spreading of these favored people of Israel over America, who were thus led to a new world and saved from the impending captivity in Babylon. They separated into two branches, one of which, by departing from the precepts of their God, sank into barbarism. The wars between these two people resulted in the extermination of the more enlightened nation, so America reverted to barbarism, and the ancient civilization of these Hebrews, thus miraculously led to a new world, ceased; and when Columbus came he found the darkness of savagery where once flourished a civilized and advanced race.

Kipling, in his inimitable tale of "Griffin's Debts." tells of the drunken and broken soldier who went among the natives and by a heroic death became to them a god, and who "may in time become a solar myth." The realization of this suggestion could be no more astounding than the fact that this fiction of the romancer, whimsied by the common conception of the Indian's origin, has become a sacred book to a great religious sect, as the Mormon bible.

For many years this mythical people were believed to have held sway over the eastern portion of the United States, and for want of any more definite name were called the "Mound Builders." The school books of earlier days had chapters about them, describing them as a people superior to the Indians; but later investigations, and the credence now given to the Delaware tradition, have relegated them to the category of the hyperboreans and centaurs of the more ancient fables.

As an epithet, the name Mound Builders might be properly applied to a number of tribes, many of which were mound builders to some extent. The mound builders par excellence were probably the Tallegewi of the Ohio valley, supposed to be represented in more recent historic times by the Cherokees, their descendants.

Of the four-kinds of mounds, viz.: the "Effigy Mound," made in imitation of some animal, the burial mound, made as a place of sepulture, the fortification mound, and the plain tumulus, containing no remains of human beings, only two are found within the region of Michigan--the fortification mound and the burial mound. The first of these is generally a circular or elliptical mound, enclosing, with the exception of a gateway, a piece of level ground. The mounds were made by setting up on end a row of small logs as palisades, the lower end being set upon the surface of the ground, and these banked with a buttress of earth piled up against the palisades inside and out. The fort was completed by binding the palisades together with withes or rawhide, and by erecting platforms on the inside to accommodate the warriors, who from this elevated place could throw stones or shoot their arrows down upon an attacking host. It is this kind of fort that Cartier found at Hochelaga. When this fort fell into disuse and the palisades rotted and fell away, the circular ridge of earth remained for many years to tell of the preparedness of some band of forest folk, and the location of such forts marks a frontier; only the fear of attack brought them into being. Their presence helps us accordingly to locate the frontier line separating the hostile tribes and determining the boundaries of their occupancy. The burial mound were made by laying the remains of the dead and piling upon them sufficent earth to cover them, and to raise a mound which became the marker for the place of burial. These two kinds of mounds, both of which are found in the Saginaw country, are distinctively Huron-Iroquois inform, and give added proof of the occupancy of this region by that race. In this limited sense the Iroquois are entitled to be called the Mound Builders of the Saginaw country.