Note 1732 — Chapter VI · (continued 2)

Bancroft (Nat. Races, v. 539) thinks they were connected in some obscure way with these southern nations, and in 1875 could write (p. 787) that “most and the best authorities deem it impossible that the moundbuilders were ever the remote ancestors of the Indian tribes.” Dawson (Fossil Men, 55) deems the modern Pueblo Indians to be their representatives. Brasseur supposes the Toltecs came from them. (Cf. also Short, 492; and S. B. Evans, in Kansas City Rev., March, 1882.) John Wells Foster, who had for some years written on the subject, gathered his results in a composite volume, Prehistoric Races of the United States (Chicago, 1873, 1878, 1881, etc.), in which he held to the theory of their migrating south and developing into the civilization of Central America. Cf. his paper in the Trans. Chicago Acad. Nat. Sci., vol. i., and his abstract of it in his Mississippi Valley (1869, p. 415). J. P. MacLean’s Moundbuilders (Cincinnati, 1879) takes similar ground. Morgan (Peab. Mus. Rept., xii. 552) holds that they cannot be classed with any known Indian “stock,” and that the “nearest region from which they could have been derived is New Mexico.” Wills de Haas takes exception to this view in the Trans. Anthropological Soc. of Washington (1881). Cf. R. S. Robertson in Compte Rendu, Congrès des Américanistes (1877), xi. 39.