Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Anthropology/Indian Remains in Cass County, Illinois
INDIAN REMAINS IN CASS COUNTY, ILLINOIS.
By J. F. Snyder, M. D., of Virginia, Ill.
Cass County fits into the angle formed by the confluence of the Sangamon, flowing from the east, with the Illinois River in its course to the Mississippi, a little west of the center of the State. It is not in the u forks" of the two rivers, but the one sweeps its entire northern border while the other bounds its limits on the west. Its topography is identical in main features with the most part of the great undulating prairie system of the State; and may be briefly described as a scope of open rolling land, studded with groves and furrowed with creeks and rivulets, and fringed all along its northern and western portions with ranges of bluffs which form the boundaries of the river valleys. Extending from the foot of these ranges of bluffs to the rivers lie the rich alluvial "bottoms" varying in width from 2 to 7 miles. Viewed from below the bluffs rise to the height of 150 feet in picturesque grass-covered peaks and ridges separated from each other by deep wooded glens and gorges; and the bottoms, gently declining from the hills for half their width, are smooth as lawns, and now converted into the finest farms in the State, then reaching a lower level as they near the rivers, become heavily timbered and interspersed with numerous lakes and sloughs. Nature was here lavish in its supplies of fish, game, and wild fruits, and every condition necessary for the subsistence and endurance of a large population was present. This beautiful and fertile region, it is evident, was occupied by successive tribes from the earliest times before our history began down to the peaceable expulsion of the last of its dusky tenants, the Sacs and Foxes, during the administration of General Jackson. In testimony of this fact we have the relics of their remains, arts, and methods of life, which time has been powerless to destroy, in great profusion and full of fascinating interest. Of these silent records of a rapidly vanishing race the most important as well as the most legible are the earthen mounds which cover the bones and dust of their dead. They crown all the peaks and ridges of our bluffs, a few rising to considerable proportions, but the greater number are mere swellings of the surface not readily recognized as being of artificial origin. Every gradation of mound structure is here present, from the stately tumulus 30 feet in height to the broad, flat sepulchres so slightly elevated as to be scarcely noticed.
It would be useless labor and waste of time to attempt to locate on a map the situation of each mound or group of mounds in Cass County, and a tedious and unprofitable repetition to detail minutely the examination of each separate mound. For brevity of description they can readily be grouped in two or three classes, and the description of one will answer generally for all of its particular class. While in all of them, so far explored, the inclosed bodies of the dead were deposited on the surface of the ground, we find in some the position and arrangement of the remains to have been different from that found in others; from which we must infer that at times changes and innovations in mortuary customs were introduced, perhaps by different tribes who succeeded each other in occupancy of the country.
Of the first class of mounds, and by far the largest, and no doubt the most ancient, but one has yet been opened, and, unfortunately, no one versed or interested in ethnological study was present at the time to collect and preserve the relics it disclosed, or make any record of them. This mound, which I have before had occasion to mention,[1] formerly stood immediately upon the bank of the Illinois River, within the present limits of the city of Beardstown, 6 miles below the mouth of the Saugamoo. This locality is slightly more elevated than the surrounding river bottoms on either side, and was anciently an island surrounded on one side partly by the Illinois and on the other by a slough through which the river had once passed and yet discharged its surplus water. The island, on account of its peculiarly favorable position, had been for centuries a camping ground and stronghold of the aborigines. Geologically it, as well as most of the bottom, has a basis of loess or drift clay with a superincumbent stratum of sand 5 to 10 feet in thickness. All around the site of the mound the soil to the depth of 20 inches is composed of the débris of old camps, a mixture of ashes, mussel shells, bones of fishes and wild animals, charcoal, broken pottery,&c.; and here hundreds of implements of stone, bone, and shell have been obtained. The big mound is said, by persons who have often seen it before the hand of vandalism desecrated it, to have been more than 30 feet high by 150 feet in diameter at the base. Its summit commanded, an uninterrupted view of the distant bluffs on both sides of the river and of the stream itself for 2 or 3 miles above and below. We can easily imagine the strange scene this great cone presented when it swarmed one autumn day with an eager, startled multitude of wild, half-naked barbarians gazing with astonishment at the sun-burnt, bearded faces and tattered garments of Marquette and Joliet as they wearily paddled their frail canoe up the quiet river at its base. More than thirty years ago the city authorities of Beardstown commenced the destruction of this splendid monument to utilize the clay of which it was composed for covering the sand of their streets, and in a few years the grand structure was totally demolished. The mound was found to have been made, on the sand, of clay taken from the bed of the river at low water or brought from the bluffs and it had been used as a burying ground by people of different eras and races. Just below the surface the shallow graves and well-preserved skeletons of recent Indians, buried with implements of stone and iron and ornaments of glass and brass, were shoveled out; and a little deeper the spades uncovered the remains of a few Europeans, deserters, perhaps, from the commands of Chevalier La Salle or Lieuteuant Tonti, who had found an asylutn and graves among the Indians of this distant wilderness. There was one of them, however, whose mission in this part of the New World was widely different from that of his buried associates: the silver cross still grasped by his skeleton hand, the Venetian beads about his waist that had formed a rosary, and the ghastly skull still encircled by a thin band of polished silver proclaimed that here a self-sacrificing disciple of Loyola had expended life in the hopeless work of converting the heathen. These intrusive burials passed, nothing more was discovered until the original sandy surface of the island was reached, and what was there deposited before the great mass of clay had been piled over it was cast aside by the laborers without notice. From the street commissioner who had the work in charge I gained the following meager account of all that attracted his attention sufficient to impress his memory. Eanged along the middle of the structure was a parapet or wall, as he supposed, of rough tiag-stones 30 inches high by 3 feet in breadth and 25 feet in length, designed apparently by the ancient inhabitants as a breastwork or rampart for the defense of their town from river approaches. But, on removing the stones, it was found that this work of defense was not a solid wall, but a series of crypts or stone graves, constructed by planting broad, flat stones perpendicularly in the sand and covering them with others of the same kind laid across them. These rude tombs were entirely empty. Not a bone or tooth remained; so great was the lapse of time since the bodies of the honored dead had been laid in these secure vaults that not a vestige of them survived but blotches of dark dust upon the yellow sand. On either side of the primitive coffins, but not contiguous to them, were traces of fire, and with ashes and charcoal were noticed calcined bones, small cubes of galena, and broken flints and pottery. The destruction cf the great mound yielded many rare and fine implements and ornaments of stone and shell, which no one thought to preserve; and no one thought to observe whether they had been interred with the dead at the base of the tumulus or with those buried upon its surface. Among the many relics unearthed, one particularly fine axe of polished stone is remembered, having a groove cut around the middle and a cutting edge on each end; also three pestle-shaped objects of beautifully polished porphyry 20 inches long, 2½ or 3 inches in diameter, rounded at one end and pointed at the other.
Seven miles east of Beardstown, up the Sangamon, and quite near it, at Mound Lake, is a conspicuous landmark known as "the Mound;" a ridge-like elevation 40 feet high by 60 yards in width, and 400 feet in length. This mound has never been explored, and may be of artificial origin; but I am strongly inclined to regard it a natural formation (like the great Cahokia mound and other similar elevations in the American Bottom), merely an outlier of the loess or bluff formation left there in the primal erosion of the river valley. It is situated in the edge of the timber, on the bank of a small lake, 3 miles from the bluffs, and in the midst of the finest fishing and hunting district, even in this day, to be found in Illinois. Whether or not the Indians raised this mound is a question to be determined by future investigation, but there is no doubt of their having used it as a place of resort and camping ground for a great length of time. Although it has been in cultivation for many years, traces of camp-fires are yet seen all over it, and its surface and the adjoining fields are yet littered with potsherds, flint chips, and decayed bones and teeth of wild animals. One of the very few entire pieces of pottery ever recovered in this county was plowed up with some human bones on this mound in the early history of its cultivation. It was a globular earthen vessel, 10 or 12 inches in diameter, marked externally as usual with the impression of the fabric in which it was moulded or sustained while drying. A similar vessel, but smaller, was plowed up unbroken in a field a few miles east of this place a few years later. At a point about midway the lake-side base of the mound I discovered, some years ago, the remains of a kiln in which the savages had burned their pottery. It was an excavation in its side, almost circular and 4 feet in diameter, an old-fashioned lime-kiln in miniature, with walls burned as hard as a brick, and the bottom for the depth of a foot filled with ashes, charcoal, and broken pottery.
Nine miles farther east, up the Sangamon Valley and near the bluffs, is another large conical inound, 25 feet high, which has never been examined even superficially. These three mounds, assuming the latter two to be the product of human agency, are all of the first class, and of any class worthy the designation of mounds, found upon the river terraces or bottoms in the county.
The next class of mounds comprise those next largest in magnitude, and are more numerous than the first. They are invariably perched upon the peaks of the Sangamon bluffs, rarely exceeding 8 or 10 feet in height by 20 to 30 in diameter, and are more frequently met of much smaller dimensions. This class of mounds differs from all the others in the peculiar disposition of the remains they inclose. Too few in numbers to constitute the sepulchers of a distinct tribe with an exclusive burial custom, we must conclude that they cover the remains of a class of individuals distinguished from the commonalty for superior ability or merit. The mode of inhumation in mounds of this kind consisted in placing the body or bodies (for they contain from one to six or eight each) of the deceased upon the ground in a sitting or squatting posture, with the face to the east, and inclosing them with a rudely-constructed circular wall of rough, undressed stones, which was gradually contracted at the top, and finally covered over with a single broad stone slab, over all of which the earth was heaped. Though I have carefully examined several of these mounds, I have not yet succeeded in securing from them either an entire skull or earthen vessel, as their inclosed cairns are invariably found to have fallen in and crushed the bones and accompanying pottery into a confused mass. Nor have I discovered in them copper implements or pipes of any description, or any object of carved stone; but only a few flint and bone implements, and broken pottery without ornamentation and of very poor quality. Judging from every indication, external and internal, I would conclude that the class of earthworks under consideration were very old were it not for the singular fact that in one of them, a few years ago, the decayed bones of a single individual were found, with a few flint arrow points, a small earthen cup or vase, and an iron gun-barrel very much corroded.
The next class of mounds in this county are so numerous and were obviously constructed with so little care and labor that we must regaid them as the depositories or cemeteries of the common and untitled dead. They are seen on every knob and ridge of the bluffs and on the hills bordering all of our smaller streams. Seldom rising in elevation more than a foot or two above the general surface, they frequently cover a space of 10 or 15 yards in diameter, and we sometimes find eight or ten of them in a row, along the crest of a ridge, separated from each other by intervals of 10 or 15 yards; each containing the bones of a greater or less number of individuals in different states of preservation. Their repose is often rudely disturbed by the plow, and their human remains scattered over the fields with broker pottery and occasionally flint implements, stone axes, bone awls, and other relics. In many mounds of this class the first step taken in the inhumation of the corpse or corpses apparently was to scoop out from the soil a shallow, dish-like excavation in which the body or bodies—generally several together—were deposited, sitting up with limbs flexed upon the breast; they were then probably covered with bark or other perishable material, as no large stones are ever encountered in these graves, and then covered with earth. In some of them the bones of the dead, in extreme stages of decay, are in great confusion and were buried without definite arrangement or system, somewhat as was observed by Mr. Jefferson in a mound which be describes in his "Notes on Virginia," indicating that in those the skeletons of all members of the tribe who had died within a definite period of time had been collected from the tree-scaffolds, or brought from the tribal bone-house, as was witnessed by Bartram, and laid together in bundles and "covered with a great mount." The chalk-like softness of the bones in this class of mounds tends to confirm the first thought impression of high antiquity; but this fact alone cannot be relied on as satisfactory proof of their age when we consider that the covering of earth, perhaps not of great thickness at first, has been washed down and thinned by rains, leaving the animal remains but slightly protected from the decomposing agencies of water and frost. In one instance unquestionable evidence of comparatively recent origin was presented. In cutting down a roadway through one of the Prairie Creek ridges, since known as "Indian Hill," in the southwestern part of the county, a broad, low mound was removed and the skeletons of several individuals exposed. With the mingled mass of bones thrown out were found broken pottery, a few stone and bone implements, together with a quantity of glass beads and brass rings of European manufacture. Besting in what remained of the hand of one of the female skeletons was a beautiful pipe of polished serpentine in the perfect form of a squatting frog, of life size, but instead of the usual flat, carved base of the so-called 44 mound pipes," it had an aperture drilled to connect with the bowl for the insertion of a cane or wooden stem. Some time afterward, at the foot of this ridge, the plow turned up a single skeleton from a mound so small as to have escaped previous notice; and so far advanced in decay were the bones that it was with difficulty I succeeded in partially restoring, by the aid of glue and plaster, the skull and facial bones. The only relics found with this individual, which I judged to have been a female, were a stone frog, probably unfinished, larger than the natural maximum size, without perforations of any kind, and a pipe, representing the head of a fox, both rudely cut out of soft, coarse, yellow sandstone.
In all the interments I have heretofore mentioned the bodies of the dead, so far as I could ascertain, had been primarily placed upon the surface of the ground, or in shallow saucer-like depressions, in a sitting or doubled-up posture 5 or the dry bones, after decomposition of the flesh, had been gathered in bundles and placed on the ground in piles, and the earth heaped over them in a conical mound of greater or less magnitude. But in some, judging from the better state of preservation of the inclosed remains to be of most recent construction, a different arrangement is observed. The buried skeletons are found on the surface of the ground, but laid at full length on their backs, and surrounded or inclosed with thin broad stones or sheets of bituminous shale, stuck into the ground upright, and probably at the time of interment covered over with poles or bark before the earth was thrown on. This change in disposing of the corpse for burial was, in my opinion, a consequent innovation of the first contact with Europeans; and we have convincing reasons for believing that the old practice of burying the dead above ground in mounds of earth or stone prevailed generally among our Indians down to their acquaintance with the whites. Here, as elsewhere, we occasionally find the remains of Indians extended full length in graves below the surface of the ground, unmarked by mound or monument of any kind. These comparatively modern graves, copied after those of the white intruders, are, like the mounds, invariably on the high lands 5 and in many instances the crumbling chalk-like bones can only be identified as belonging to the red race by the implements of stone or shell ornaments associated with them.
Upon the open prairies of Cass County neither mounds nor graves of the pre-historic dead are ever found, and but few of their relics excepting flint weapons of the chase. The Indians no doubt hunted the deer and buffalo and elk on our prairies, but neither lived nor buried their dead there. Their camping-grounds and villages were in the groves along the streams and near springs, and they located their cemeteries upon the adjacent bluffs.
The southern Hue of this country in its entire length coincides very nearly with a small stream, called Indian Creek, which drains the prairies of a portion of Sangamon County, and, running almost directly west, joins the Illinois ten miles below Beardstown. This creek, too, was the resort of the hunter tribes, and along its banks are still traces of many of their camps and relics of their home life; and on the hills overlooking its valley are the low mound graves of their dead. On a high terrace sloping down to the water of this little stream I discovered, some time ago, the location of an ancient workshop for the manufacture of flint implements. The ground for a considerable space was littered with chips and nodules of flint and broken and unfinished arrow and spear points; and scattered here and there were several water-worn bowlders of granite and greenstone, brought from the drift clay of the hills for use by the early artisans as anvils. In this débris a beautiful polished celt of hematite and a few complete flint weapons have been recovered, together with bone punches and awls, and quantities of broken pottery, ashes, charcoal, and fragments of shells, bones, and antlers of deer and elk. Only a few of the Indian Creek mounds have been critically examined, but there is no reason for believing that they differ in any essential characteristic with those of the Sangamon bluffs.
The remains of Indian art found in this country differ but little from similar objects found in all parts of the Mississippi Valley. The race inhabiting this locality before us left no specimen of their work indicating any expression of genius, or any marked degree of skill or proficiency in the common arts of life. The pot-sherds seen in profusion about their old camps and mounds are composed in the main of clay and lime (calcined muscle-shells), but a large proportion were molded from clay alone, and apparently formed parts of small rude ill-shaped and poorly burned vases and cups. The best specimens are ornamented with impressions of coarsely woven fabrics and bark of trees, curved lines, nobs, and indentations, and the marks of finger-nails. In no instance has there been noticed the slightest attempt to produce upon any piece of pottery the representation of the human face or figure, or of any bird or animal. But few of their earthen vessels have survived to the present time; besides the two pots found unbroken, which I have before described, not half a dozen have been secured entire in the whole county.
I have not yet heard of an implement or ornament of copper having been found among the mound remains of the county, and of hematite only the small celt before mentioned; two or three so-called "plummets" several "paint rocks" (or burnt pieces), and some rough blocks of the ore, constitute all of the relics of this material so far known. Occasionally with the bones of the dead are noticed small cubes of galena; and in our collection is a ball of this ore, taken from a mound, weighing a pound and two ounces, which probably did service, enveloped in raw hide, as some form of weapon. No lead, however, has here ever been discovered with any of the aboriginal remains. It is passing strange that the Illinois Indians, so well acquainted with lead ore as we know them to have been, should have never gained the knowledge of its fusibility and ready reduction to metal. Plates of mica are of comparatively common occurrence in our mounds, and in many instances are found to have been deposited upon the breast of the corpse. In one of the small ridge mounds of the Sangamon bluffs a skeleton was uncovered having upon the decayed sternum ten plates of mica uniformly cut to the dimensions of 9 inches in length and 4 wide, with the corners neatly rounded. This mineral is not found in situ in Illinois, and of course must have been imported from a considerably remote distance.
Of marine shells no entire specimen of the conch, or Cassis, or Lycotypus, has been seen in the old graves of our country; but small ornaments and beads made of the columellas and broken pieces of large sea-shells are quite frequently found. In our collection is a necklace comprising 178 pieces of conch shell—each perforated in the center and presenting all stages of finish, from the rough angular sections two or more inches square, to the round polished complete disc two or three lines in thickness and from half an inch to an inch in diameter—which a short time ago was turned out of a low mound by the plow, with the skull and cervical vertebrae of a female skeleton. In another low mound on the bluffs the plow threw out, with a mass of chalky bones, a pint of small sea-shells (Marginella opicina), each pierced at the shoulder for the reception of a string to suspend them about the neck or hair. These beautiful little shells are often found in our mounds, and must have been in general use for personal adornment, oras a medium of exchange in the primitive system of commerce and trade. The valves of several species of fresh-water mollusks, especially of the Unios and Anodontas, were utilized as spoons and knives, and used for digging in sandy soil. Rarely we meet with ornaments cut from them. The hypothesis that our river mollusks constituted a part of the food-supply of the Illinois Indiana is not sustained by the presence on our streams of shell heaps of any extent. Fish and game were abundant enough for subsistence at all times, and muscles were in this latitude evidently not considered a luxury.
The long bones of the deer, turkey, &c., were here as elsewhere fashioned into awls, needles, fish hooks, and punches, and made to do service as handles for stone-tools and domestic utensils. The only ornament of bone (if it was an ornament) the county has yet produced is a broad, flat rib from the carapace of a very large snapping turtle, perforated at each end and ground smooth and polished all over.
Of objects carved in stone but few, besides the specimens I have specifically mentioned, have come to light in this county. Of pipes, a small "mound" pipe from Beardstown and the frog (of serpertine) are the only fine specimens known. In our collection are the fox-head pipe and several coarse, heavy affairs, without beauty or symmetry, which were undoubtedly used for smoking tobacco; and pipes made of clay and burnt are not uncommon. These latter objects were perhaps manufactured after the arts of the whites had been learned, as they are fashioned in the exact shape of common English clay pipes; at any rate, their resemblance to the imported article is so striking as to place their claim to high antiquity in serious doubt. As a rule, the objects carved in stone by the stone-age denizens of this region, exhibit such flagrant deficiency of taste or talent in design, and such low order of skill in execution, that we must conclude the few elaborate and finely-finished specimens now and then discovered here are importations from a distance, secured either by barter or reprisals in war, and were made by a people of higher intelligence and advancements in the arts. Of these exotic relics the porphyry "pestles," the "mound," and serpentine pipes, the perforated weapon of ribbon slate, a discoidal stone of milky quartz, and one of those beautiful perforated "ceremonial" stones of rosy, variegated, translucent quartz now in our collection, constitute all of that class known within the limits of the county. Agricultural flint implements, comprising spades and hoes, are not uncommon in the rich loamy terraces of our rivers, but are generally inferior in size and workmanship to those met with in that portion of Saint Clair and Madison counties known as the American Bottom. The spades are smaller and ruler, and the hoes are plain and without notches for fastening them to handles. The broad hornstone disks, discovered some years ago buried in the sand a short distance above the large Beardstown mound, and which I have described in a previous paper,[2] are supposed by some archæologists to have been intended for agricultural tools, though never introduced in general use. Of this however we have no positive evidence, and until our knowledge of this class of relics is increased, we must regard that strange deposit as an unsolved mystery.
Celts and grooved axes of granite and various augitic rocks, of all sizes and many patterns, have been, and still are, abundant here. The largest grooved ax in our collection weighs twelve and a half pounds; the smallest, one and a half ounces. Our largest celt, cut from a coarse-grained diorite, weighs eleven pounds; and the smallest, obviously a child's toy, weighs scarcely half an ounce. Flint arrow and spear points, knives, scrapers, and hatchets of the usual forms have been collected in Cass County in great profusion. Hammer-stones, nut-stones, discoidal stones, perforated "talismans" or "arrow straighteners" of ribbon-slate, of basalt, and of fossil wood; stone-balls, plain and grooved; in short, all of the ordinary types of rough and polished stone implements in use by the pre-metal Indian tribes have been and still are often found about our streams and bluffs.
The archæological remains of which I have so far briefly treated are not peculiar to this county or to any circumscribed locality, but are common in all those portions of Illinois and of almost all of the Western, Middle, and Southern States contiguous to water-courses, where the aborigines, with identical habits of life and by identical methods, obtained, with little effort, their food-supplies. And the comprehensive generalization which I have attempted of the antiquities observed here will, with trifling variations and additions, apply equally well to those of other counties and States.
I have yet to mention, however, one object recently discovered in this vicinity, of rare occurrence in the prehistoric remains of this State, belonging to a class so suggestive of savage, ethnic characteristics as to incite interest and thoughtful study. On the crest of one of the highest and most prominent points of the Sangamon bluffs, jutting out from the range into the valley, a promontory, conspicuous for many miles in all directions, was one of the common oval swellings of the surface, usually known here as an "Indian grave," but so overgrown with bushes and weeds and tall grass as to have required close inspection to distinguish it from the natural contour of the hill. The owner of the land, having occasion to build a pasture-fence over this point, set a laborer to digging holes for the fence-posts; but when the work had progressed as far as the "grave," the spade barely penetrated the sod at its edge, when it came in contact with a stone, which proved, on removing the soil covering it, to be a rough, flat sandstone flag, nearly square, 3 inches thick and 18 or 20 inches broad. It was thrown aside, and the fence completed. Some time afterwards, on learning that such a stone was found on this point, I concluded to explore the place with the hope of securing a skull or other relic of interest which it may have covered. Investigation soon convinced me that it had not formed any part of the covering of a grave, but had been laid flat on the bare ground. Carefully removing the bushes and earth in which they grew, other similar stones were uncovered, forming together a rude floor or pavement 12 feet in length by 8 in width, somewhat dish-shaped, the center being gradually depressed 10 inches below the edges. The stone first discovered had formed one of the corners of this curious structure. The long axis of the work coincided with the strike of the ridge, exactly north and south; and the flags of which it was made had been carried up from an outcrop of carboniferous sandstone a mile and a half distant, and were rough and uncut, but fitted together with surprising accuracy. They were reddened and cracked, apparently by long continued heat, and the interstices between them were compactly filled with fine ashes. Upon this pavement or "altar" was a mass of ashes, perhaps a foot thick in the middle, and a little more than filling to a level its basin-like concavity. On the surface of this ash bed I collected fragments of charred bones, constituting parts of three adult human skeletons, among which were considerable portions of three lower jaws, with teeth intact, large pieces of six femurs and pelvic bones, the occipital protuberances of three crania, some bodies of vertebræ, and many small pieces so burned as to be unrecognizable. The fire which consumed these three skeletons had been smothered before it was exhausted, and while yet glowing, as many large pieces of charcoal were mingled with the bones, and the superincumbent earth in contact with the fire was reddened and partially baked. Interspersed throughout the mass of ashes filling the basin were many small pieces of bone and teeth converted into animal charcoal, and bits of flint, perhaps weapons, shivered and broken by the fierce heat of the pyre. I also observed many minute scales of burnt mica and shell, but found no part of any pipe or other object carved in stone, or of pottery. The mound inclosing this weird "sacrificial altar," after the washing of rains and beating of storms for centuries unnumbered, measured but little more than 2 feet high by 20 in diameter. The cracked and fire-scarred stones and great quantity of ashes without charcoal, mingled throughout with fragments of calcined bones, considered in connection with the prominent situation of the "altar," in full view of the valley below and of the highlands around for miles, seem to support the inference that here, at stated times, for a long period, had been practiced the burning of human bodies; or that the remains of a great number of individuals had at one time been consumed until, with the three last victims, the fire was suddenly extinguished by heaping over the seething mass the earth that was to keep the story for the coming of another race. We are warranted in believing that all tribes of Indians inhabiting this great valley, from the remotest times, executed by burning certain captives taken in battle; but we have no evidence that dish-shaped platforms of stone were constructed especially for that purpose. The simpler method of securing the doomed wretch to a stake or tree and there slowly roasting him amidst the wild jeers and exultations of the captors is far more consonant with well-known Indian nature and usages. But for the absence of collateral testimony the hypothesis that so-called "altars" of this class were made for the purpose of incinerating, at stated periods, the remains of the dead of the entire tribe, collected for such disposal from tree-scaffolds or bone-houses, would present many elements of plausibility. It is possible that a single tribe may have so cremated the skeletons of their deceased kinsmen before making their voluntary or compulsory exodus from this locality; but observed facts fail to sustain the idea that such a mortuary custom prevailed here generally at any time or among any people. We have the authority of La Hontan that the Indians of the Lower Mississippi "burnt their dead, keeping the bodies until they had accumulated" sufficiently in numbers for the grand ceremony, which was performed in certain places remote from their villages. But Du Pratz, whose opportunities for observation and sources of information were equal if not superior to his, positively asserts that "none of the nations of Louisiana were acquainted with the custom of burning their dead." Had this custom been in vogue to any considerable extent or for any considerable period of time it is plain that cinerary altars would be numerous and sepulchral mounds exceptional. In Cass County and the State of Illinois, so far as my knowledge extends, this strange monument is unique and without parallel among thousands of Indian mound-graves, a mystic expression, it may be, of religious fervor or superstitious frenzy.
The intrinsic evidence of many prehistoric remains of this county sustains their claim to extreme antiquity, but no work or specimen of art of a former race has yet been found here above the capacity or achievement of the typical North American Indian. And in studying the life, habits, and burial customs indicated by these relics, I can see no necessity for ascribing them to the agency of a distinct or superior race, when they express so unmistakably the known status of Indian intellect.