Note 64 — Chapter I

Prof. Forshey, in Foster’s Pre-Historic Races, pp. 121, 122, remarks: “There is a class of mounds west of the Mississippi Delta and extending from the Gulf to the Arkansas and above, and westward to the Colorado in Texas, that are to me, after thirty years’ familiarity with them, entirely inexplicable. In my Geological Reconnoissance of Louisiana in 1841–2, I made a pretty thorough report upon them. I afterwards gave a verbal description of their extent and character before the New Orleans Academy of Sciences. These mounds lack every evidence of artificial construction based on implements or other human vestigia. They are nearly all round, none angular, and have an elevation hemispheroidal of one foot to five feet, and a diameter from thirty feet to one hundred and forty feet. They are numbered by millions. In many places, in pine forests and upon the prairies, they are to be seen nearly tangent to each other as far as the eye can reach, thousands being visible from an elevation of a few feet. On the gulf-marsh margin, from the Vermillion to the Colorado, they appear barely visible, often flowing into one another, and only elevated a few inches above the common land. A few miles interior they rise to two and even four feet in height. The largest I ever saw were perhaps one hundred and forty feet in diameter and five feet high. These were in Western Louisiana. Some of them had abrupt sides, though they are nearly all of gentle slopes. There is ample testimony that the pine trees of the present forests antedate these mounds. The material for their construction is like that of the vicinity everywhere, and often there is a depression in close proximity to the elevation.” We can make no conjecture concerning the use of those mounds described by Prof. Forshey, except to suggest that they in all probability served as foundations for dwellings in a low country, which at that time may have been moister and more marshy than at present. If such was the case, the whole region must have presented the appearance of a continuous community instead of the proper proportion of country and village. This crowded state of affairs could have been produced by the pressure from enemies in the north, and the lack of agricultural lands evidently was sufficient alone to cause a migration to the south.