|
HISTORY CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES CHAPTER I. GEOLOGIC. The Purpose of this Work—The Teaching of the Rocks—A Local Application of the Nebular Hypothesis—Chaotic Confusion—The Laurentian Land—World Making—The First Oceanic Floor—The Silurian Sea—The First Promenade of Life and March of Death—Geologic Upheavals—Heat, the Compelling Agent of Change—The Silurian Island—The Kingdom of Siluria—The Devonian System—The Creation a Process of Purification—When Coal was Made—The Age of Monsters—The Glacial Age in Old Clermont—The Land Finished for Man—The Destruction of a Hundred Years. The purpose of this work is to trace the events, note the incidents and remember the people combined in the change of a long deserted wilderness into a region notable for lofty example. No one out of love for the curious should explore the past or try to interpret the oracles of experience without faith in man and hope for his improvement. For, without glorious glimpses through the gloom, it is better to seek no message of despair. But the tale of "Old Clermont" is full with an inspiration that pervades the fairest lands and obtains the choicest sympathy of the earth. Even the rocks rolling from ledge hills or strewn by fretting brooks have a magical charm for such as heed their wonderful teaching. The lessons learned are not reams of idle lore, but something more stupendous far than all the sounding tales by teeming fancy wrought. For, in the structure of those rocks, star-eyed Science has found not the lot of empires, nor the fate of races, 18 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES but some of the most convincing pages in the record of a ceaseless purpose through a relentless sweep of eternal change. To read that record aright is the consummation of human effort to comprehend the Infinite. That effort including the classified observation and comparison of every truth discovered by the discerning, from the first star gazer to the latest biologist, has resulted in a conclusive theory of the mechanism of the creation. Of that creation, religion and learning agree in declaring that the beginning was without form and void. All that preceded the appearance of organic life is neither more nor less baffling than what has followed, only, that the record must be sought along the flaming walls of the universe. There, guided by the unerring mathematical discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton and aided by the profound speculation of many sages, La Place perceived the suggestions from which he proposed the Nebular Hypothesis that with every added fact has become the accepted theory of the formation and growth of worlds. While our feeble sense shrinks from imagining that the rock-ribbed earth and the stable stars were once vapors voluminous and vast throughout the extent of space, our time fettered spirits are conscious that the god-like mind has reasoned well. The shape, proportions and motions of the earth have been brought, to a school boy's perception. The achievements and predictions of astronomy command intelligent admiration. With spectroscopic analysis, the glasses of the observatory have declared that the elements revealed by the alembics of the laboratory are the familiar constituents alike of the twinkling planet and the wondering child. Through this revelation, knowledge certainly includes the fact that the elements of our world are as omnipresent as the universe, and that the laws of their combinations are equally omnipotent. The most beautiful and the most beneficent of these laws is the ordered love whereby every molecule shuns a foe and seeks an affinity. Yet, the most terrific scene of human experience has but lambent likeness to the chaotic contention for the elemental harmony that began with what may fittingly be called the peace of the rocks. For, the chemists and the geologists agree that the granitic or lowest of all foundations passed through a prodigious fusion. With decreasing heat CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 19 and under the same impulsions that shapes a drop of rain or hail, the shrinking gases grew into a globular mass. With a faint perception of the commotion when that cosmic chaos was utterly compressed by an ever accelerating gravitation, and repeatedly rent by the explosive hate of hostile elements, we can open the records of the creation, here at home, with much geologic satisfaction. When the liquids condensing from the darkness of the thick clouds lingered on a cooling crust and helped to dissipate the melting heat, then the waters were divided from the waters and a dry land appeared. The most ancient appearance of land that has been traced marks the courses of the Mackenzie and St. Lawrence rivers. Because of a greater extent in that direction, this earliest shore has been called the Laurentian Land. Some island peaks of the same formation show the primal trend of the Cordillera and Appalachian ranges. Upon these smoldering slopes of granite and upon other forms of the blending fusion that may have worn away or sunk beyond recall, the furious rain from an incessant steaming fell with a shattering violence that "overturned mountains by the roots" and made a mortar for the foundations of a different world to come. How long the deep was wrapped in the gloom of The congealing of the nebula into a whirling but coherent globe, or how long since that gloom yielded to a life sustaining degree of light and coolness is a question more mooted than settled. Except that we would "give understanding to the heart" and learn "the ordinances of heaven" and "set their dominion in the earth," a few or many million years more or less matters neither much nor little in the eternal plan, where there has been neither haste nor rest amid all the fiery changes of world making. And, except for learned proof that other stellar orbs here and there within and beyond the circuits of our sun are showing, not in one but among many, the various phenomena of hazy, gleaming, blazing, glowing, dimming, dying and frozen worlds, the conclusions of scientific inquiry, might be scoffed as the brilliant dreams of an aspiration that spurns a mortal state and claims a kindred with the stars. For a trained observer, the drift along a bank sweet with violets or eglantine is a more recent but not a more certain 20 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES token of watery action than the deposits, when the heat destructive to all organic structures was passing in storms away and was permitting calmer currents to flow where the sediments fell upon the first oceanic floor. Although many thousand thousands of the largest spaces of time as comprehended by humanity have spent their forces since that floor was begun or broken, infrequent sections can still be traced from the upper Mississippi to the Hudson and across Northern Europe ; and wherever found, even fragmentary ledges are so strewn with peculiar proofs of their origin that whoever has learned never doubts their signifance. Yet, art was slow, but very cunning at last, in finding the key to the wonderful cipher of the hand that therein first wrought the miracle of life and left the record of its beautiful forms in a perfection of preservation never excelled. For, only some eighty years ago, Sir :Roderick Murchison made his name. famous by publishing his conclusions on Early Life, wherein he set forth that The new ocean was peopled with tiny creatures that through a special property of those lime laden waters passed from a pulpy life to a petrified perpetuity beyond all that man may dare to promise. In Murchison's magical contemplations, such fossil forms in Wales, where the Romans called a tribe the Silures, and where he studied most, are the products of once whelming waters that he therefore named the Silurian Sea. The name has been made to include the same formations wherever found, and we now know that the Silurian Sea, the first and widest of oceans, laved the Laurentian Land. During countless aeons of which naught remains of aught that breathed or grew on land, the beds of this vaster but shallower ocean were filling at first with rudimentary forms and then with more and more complicate structures that tell a glowing tale of enlarging purpose. Much of that life is scarcely perceptible until magnified, and even the largest of the largest species do not exceed the clutch of a child. Yet, under the microscope, the petrifaction of every detail is so complete and the ornamentation of the various species so elaborately distinct, that the classification of Murchison supplemented by others is perhaps more satisfactory than could have been accomplished when the clouded billows surged over all but the sterility of the first eruptive rocks. Though CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 21 the variety of that life was only a hint of the bewildering diversity of the subsequent world, when we consider either the magnitude or the semi-eternal continuance and after preservation of the Silurian formation, the abundance of its organic remains is amazing. An average of about three and one-half miles is given as the approximate thickness of the usually closely fitting Silurian ledges, in which the characteristic fossils of each period of progression hold true, wherever found. And wherever found, the vast incumbent mass declares a grand promenade of life and records a solemn march of death. The magnitude of that record is not manifest in anyone locality, but from many, and can only be dimly inferred after much observation, where the dead are so densely packed, throughout those mighty ledges that earth seems too small a tomb. Science is the harmonized facts of observation. Whether from nebular, chemical or solar sources, separate or combined, heat is a change compelling agent. When a little more intense, no life could be ; and, after another cooling cycle; all life must cease. Within well .known degrees, the expansive nature of heat and the converse is a simple and luminous fact. An accepted estimate for the shrinkage in the earth's diameter while changing from a liquid to the present condition is about one' hundred and ninety miles. While the cooling crust was sinking and crumpling because of that Shrinking of which there is abundant proof, the heat imprisoned within, raging against restraint, broke forth through displacements which belittle the ruin of the earthquakes and volcanoes of this day to a comparison with molehills. Oftener, perhaps, enormous displacements were accomplished through vast but slower upheavals of the congealing crust, for which, as the expanding heat wasted, there was, under the influence of whirling gravitation, a corresponding subsidence of the firmer floor elsewhere, whither the shifting waters flooded away from desolated rocks to nourish other system of progress. Considering the tremendous wear of countless time since the sands of yore were drifted by hundreds of shifting oceans, or how the dust of millions of years has been blown about our windy world, wonder exceeds belief that such upheavals still decide the characteristics of recent regions. Yet nothing with- 22 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES in the ken of physical science is more certain than the all engulfing cyclic ebbs and flows of the seas, from and about the Laurentian Land, over the stratified relics peculiar to each submergence. The student of geological eras generally finds the record so covered with the sediments of other floods that the plot of the story of the rocks is found on their edges rather than their surface. Such study has revealed the existence of the upheaval that occurred while the world was so young that the greatest of its tiny creatures were not more than a few ounces or inches. While the development of those creatures was stopped and petrified in delicate beauty, the same species not far away but long afterward grew many times larger and gained disagreeable features. While all the regions far around are the result of many subniergings, that upheaval has ever since been superior to the sea. Because of this changeless isolation amid the many subsequent geological oceans that strangely failed to overwhelm this little that is lovely with so much that was awful, this ancient vestige of a buried world has been called the Silurian Island. Because they are found in a wide profusion of matchless preservation in the exact relation of their formation, instead of the general disarrangement of tilted or contorted rocks in other countries, the ledges there have had much attention from the sages of the enlightened Nations. But there is a special reason to claim a much greater local attention, for the Silurian Island includes the hills and plains of Old Clermont. As known by present names, the Silurian Island stretched rather narrowly from near Nashville, through Lexington and Cincinnati toward Lake Erie. After many inspections, the apparently level, ledges are found to slope gently to the east and to the west from an eroded ridge that in technical phrase is called the anticlinal. That anticlinal passed from the north through the eastern side of Clermont county and thence southward somewhat parallel to the Alleghenies, giving a suggestion of what with greater uplifting might have been a mountain range. That island was a part of a submarine plain, extending, when the earth was more plastic, so that the limits now can only be defined where boiling mountains of igneous rocks have left a jaggy crust aslope. By that plain, no plant-age had bloomed nor wing been glad ; for in all the petrifaction CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 23 there, hardly a trace of doubtful moss can be found among the multitudinous remains of nothing more than the mollusk race. Notwithstanding the millions of cubic leagues of sculpturesque death embalmed before that plain was abandoned by the fruitful sea, a collection limited to a single specimen of each general type of life in that far off Silurian Age scarcely exceeds the load a man may carry. Tiny gastropoda crawled about on a stomach-foot, as do the snails and periwinkles of today. The Brachiopoda stretched their arms for miscroscopic food, some from one shell but more from double shells, with either straight or wrinkled flutings in various ways that give puzzling names to scores of pretty forms. The crinoidea built themselves into exquisite lily groups. A complete form of the rarely delicate star fish is seldom found, but the moss like bryozoa grew into coral groves where myriads of trilobites lurked or raced and mingled with each and many, while the orthosceras or straight-horn, the tiger of them all, poised a jointed shape above the shrinking prey. As the curious gather them from the slimy blue mud, that was a layer of shale, or pick them from the freshly broken blue limestone that grows gray with exposure, fancy will often marvel at the strangely preserved expressions of pain or weakness or even wonder in those that died so long ago. Of such little ones was the kingdom of Siluria, when life was in its beginning, and before the dividing waters left the plain of the island a dry land forever after. That plain, geologically, is the upper deposits of the Lower Silurian Period. The waters around that island and elsewhere prospered the life of another period, called the Upper Silurian, in which the snails grew a thousand fold and the fierce straight-horns reached a length of thirty feet and developed spiral forms. Then, the earth reeled again beneath the settling crust, and the ocean swaying out and back left the old to die, and returned with new creatures belonging to what is called the Devonian System. In that system, the Mollusca tribes all grew still greater, a few more beautiful, but generally less pleasing, while the utmost progress of the time was measured by immense numbers of terrible fishes. As that age closes, the fossils include the weed and fern of a verdure yet to come. The obscure dogma of antiquity that the world forthwith 24 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES bloomed as a finished flower from the Creator's hand, no longer finds an easy credence. Without the crucibles of chemistry, the iconoclastic hammer of geology would have broken the wings of faith. But with the analysis of the elements and a partial discovery of their power to bless or harm, we learn that the Creation has been an almost eternal process of purification so constant in action and so beneficent in results for human need that the devout may happily hope that such divine harmony also requires the progressive process to attain an etherealized perfection superior to the doom of matter and fit to share a heavenly plan. Until some purification was accomplished, the bitter waters could not support a sweeter life ; the dust of the fire born rocks would require millions of leaching storms to cleanse their caustic nature ; and, until freed from the noisome fumes of the abating elements, the air could not fulfill the functions of respiration. The Creation, a miracle for enthusiastic inspiration, a proposition for astronomical calculation, and a revela- tion through geological studies, will be seen more clearly when the hypothetic speculations of chemistry are better understood. Till then, it may be safely assumed that geology is mainly a history of immense chemical changes. But, as yet, only a few pages of the Chemical History of the Creation are easy reading. A special lesson is learned from each, and the truth learned from all is that nothing was vain or useless. From the largest shell shapers to the tiny chalk makers, each was absorbing and changing an excess of something that hindered or would be harmful or should be useful in later times. When the Devonian Sea retired to deeper deeps, the wider land was sown for a prodigious vegetation that grew rankly in the warm, damp, mephitic air, deadly for breathing things, but rich for plants that filled with carbon and sank heavily into layers over which the waters returned and spread a sediment with properties and a weight that changed and pressed the woody mass into the black diamonds of carbon we call coal. That the extraction of coal and its kindred oil and gas begun through the absorption of an airy poison by a swampy vegetation beneath a vivid sun, and then completed beneath a dark and restless ocean, may well be regarded as one of the most CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 25 mysterious of chemical problems. For, the change wrought with the infinitesimal minuteness of a cellular growth extends throughout the masses revealed, wherever a bed of coal records the absence and the coming, the presence and the going, of more than a hundred nameless oceans. After the long making of coal for an age that was longer yet to come had brought a purer atmosphere, huge amphibians ventured from the narrowing seas to the enlarging lands. After a great while more, fearful monsters made ways through the jungle and wandered over the upper plains where river beds were being worn. As the wrinkling earth drew closer together, the vaster mountains were piled higher and higher above the swelling plateaus, while the deepening waters withdrew before the continents that were shaping for their master man, and for the fish and fowl and cattle of his dominion. But before that dominion was declared, a portion of the earth worn and chasmed by the storms of uncounted time was to have a smoothing touch from a mighty force. Through all these marvels elsewhere, except for the rasp of time, the Silurian Island, by much the largest and almost the, sole survivor of its class floated dry and changeless amid the successive seas and through a never ceasing variety of change. Other lands may boast grander views or a longer continuity of mortal scenes, but no other habitable plain can tell of more ancient days. A mind won weakly to conclude that coal is the woody product of tropic suns over beds where it is now mined from beneath a constant arctic ice is slow to believe that our once fiery and still feverish earth was ever chilled to a degree that built the ice of many, many centuries above the plains of Old Clermont. Yet, no part of the story of wonders is more certain than the events of the Glacial Age, when the weary world wavered from its guiding star, until the freezing north sent the gathering cold southward in a glacier with a thickness of thousands of feet and a front of thousands of miles. The deeds of that glacier were the scooping of lakes, the filling of chasms, the plowing of rivers, the smoothing of craggy steeps, and the grading of terraced valleys for graceful streams by waving slopes that make Ohio pleasing to a beauty loving God. Whether in one place or many, the glacier, the most majestic mechanical power ever shown to be possible, filling every 26 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES nook and searching every crevice, crushed and ground its mingled and scattered drift from the Arctic Highlands to and beyond the Ohio. The special proof of this throughout Old Clermont is an almost level plain of stone in the natural bed marked, wherever exposed, by the scratching or grooving of a southward moving cause. This marking is covered by a few and sometimes many feet of blue clay and broken stone of both native and foreign growth, all packed in a solidity that soon wearies the digger's strength. Above is a smoothing cover of boulder clay ground to creamy fineness by the march of the glacier, that also left an unfinished grist of boulders wrenched by an icy grasp from the rocks of the far and old Laurentian Land. The plain thus smoothed is drained by much tinier brooks and creeks and waterways than were needed for the mighty torrents, when the frozen storms of the ages were melted. Such reasoning explains why the waters of the brooks both small arid large from the O'Bannon to Eagle creek flow on bedded rocks and between hills more widely sundered than could be wrought by present agencies. As these swiftly flowing streams reach the Ohio or the Miami, their banks are found on drifted beds. The leveling purpose of the glacier included not only the scraping of crags from the upland, but also the filling of the more ancient courses of the Miami and the Ohio, which had been the outlet excavated by the once vaster floods from the north. The material haply provided for this regrading of the rivers and known as glacial gravel was made in the tumbling floods from fragments of the Laurentian boulders and distributed between and along the hills in terraced shapes that, so long as they last, will confirm and perpetuate the title of the Beautiful River. Over all, lavish benevolence spread a soil composed from the slow decay of the limestone and the vegetation of all the ten or tens of thousands of years that have followed the retreat of the Ice Reign. How much of the surface of the Silurian Island may have been worn away by parching heat or gnawing frost, under whirling winds and washing floods, or how much was plowed and scraped away by the glacier, can never' be known. A hundred feet lower or many more matters not in this inquiry, since the long succession of well attested marvels has brought us to what specially belongs to the Human Period. CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 27 But this is certain : the tendency of every grain of sand, of every drop of water is downward. Each particle is seeking the sea from which it came. "Dust to dust" is only a sigh repeated through every cycle of change. For, every such change has signified and portends the destruction of a system of living. Some think of this destruction as the terrific result of sudden convulsions ; but cautious reflection contends that decreasing fitness has been gradually replaced with better functions for the enjoyment of cleaner waters, purer airs, clearer skies, finer fruits, and a sweeter life. If this be so, probably no other century has witnessed more destruction of the best of nature's work than the last hundred years. The fires of the altars of civilization have withered the grandeur of the forest, as never before, and have given the ashes of its magnificence to mingle with the ashes of other aeons. In the struggle for place, the ill-guided plow is loosening the genial soil, the golden gift of the ages, and hurrying its no longer grass impeded flow, from denuded hills and shade-less plains, to the all devouring sea, because of which the human race and its cattle shall sometime somewhat sooner starve. Wisdom warms the heedless foe of nature to cease from wasting and let the verdant hills be glad. Unless this be quickly done—if the vicious methods that boast of "clearing off and paying for the land with three crops" are long continued, and if the precious loam be sold for but a mess of pottage or less, then the wrathful days are soon to come. For, though the clouds may return with the welcome waters, the fertility so slowly made and so recklessly wasted can only be restored from oceanic depths, which may yet again be lifted for wiser beings. Such, in part, is a specially local application of the science of geology. In finding how our land came to be, no pedantic pretense has been made. The thought submitted is intended to encourage larger attention to an exceedingly interesting part of the creative path ; for a study of that path exalts the mind to the sublimest emotions of wonder. CHAPER II. ARCHAIC. The Land of the Blue Limestone and the Home of the Blue Grass—The Antiquity of Man in America—The Mound Builders in the Ohio Valley—Recently Gained Knowledge of Their Habits—Their Stupendous Sacrifice of Human Energy — The Motives — Post Holes — The Palisade —The Tepees—Grain Pits—The Rubbish in the Pits—The Home of the Mound Builder. Tokens that Make all Time Akin—The Philosophy of Their Works—The Toltecan and Appalachian Indians—The Corn Plant—War between the Flesh Eaters and Grain Raisers—The Ancient Passes of Niagara and Detroit—The Prevalence of the Mounds—The Lowland Enclosures—The Hilltop Forts—The Masterpieces Arching Northward Around Old Clermont—Fort Ancient, the Key of the Cordon—The Mound Builders' Main Line of Defense—The Strife between Roving Hunters and Plodding Grainmen Centered in Southwestern Ohio—The Northern War for Southern Plunder--The Trails Through the Straits from the Fur Lands to the Corn Lands—The Ceremonial Works—The Milford Works—The Stonelick Works —Ancient Works Surveyed by General William Lytle—Indian Graves—Marathon Mounds—The Perry Township Mound—The Ripley Mounds—The Regrettable Effacement of Mounds in Brown and Clermont—"The Valley Which Was Full of Bones"—The Grave Does Not Cover All—The Author's Conclusion about the Mound Builders' Mission—The Sad Fated Planters and Fort Makers Served a Fine Purpose—The Kingly Corn, their Noble Gift to Humanity—The Grave Pleasure in a Study of a Perished Race of People. Perceiving how the land subject to so many mutations and yet suffering so little change came to be as it was given to man, its people should question how the glorious gift has been used and study how it may longest be enjoyed.' The Silurian Island, only discovered as such within a gener- 30 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES ation, has been known some three times as long as the region of the Blue Limestone and the-home of the Blue Grass. Beyond that the early writers knew or cared to tell little more of its past than was found in the scanty legends of the Red Men whose learning comprehended no explanation of what has since allured and baffled the acutest research of scholar:, trained to ponder the puzzling facts. While the results are not satisfactory, something has been gained worthy of meditation and remembrance. The antiquity of man is still mysterious. When and where he appeared may' never be known ; but recent explorations of monumental heaps in the milder climes of the American continents have revealed ruins that rival the oldest of the old world and indicate a higher constructive ability than was found among the Indians hunting by the Chesapeake or fighting across the St. Lawrence. The obvious inference is a decided decadence of one or a double possession by much differing tribes. Either assumption has both supporting and conflicting argument. The question is widened by a contention that man must have lived and struggled before the Glacial Age. This contention is based upon the finding of some rudely fashioned stone implements or weapons so deeply bedded in glacial drift as to preclude the supposition of a less recent origin. Some cave preserved remains are also claimed to indicate a prodigious antiquity. A few of these strange examples implying human art have been found in Europe, a few in America, and one at Loveland. The last gives a local interest to the wavering discussion. For, these rare and very accidental finds are considered wonderful, but not conclusive proof that man may have shivered before and fled from the cruel glacier which blent his abandoned designs with that tremendous burial. Upon the new earth succeeding the devastation of that long "Geologic Winter," there is, or was within memory, frequent evidence of a race whose achievement is comprehended by the graphic name of Mound Builders. While what is left of them is widely found wherever extreme cold could be avoided, no other region had more of their favor than the Ohio Valley, in which the parts most populated were toward or by the Mississippi, where the Cahokia Mound is the largest of its kind, and CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 31 in Ohio, where over twelve thousand archaic earthworks have been noted. The immense literature about these works and their makers, ranging from material description, through imagined relations, and beyond the verge of Utopian fancy, leaves one confused with the futility of the discussion. While living in and advancing along the middle portions of the ternperate zone almost from ocean to ocean, the Mound Builders either came in greatest number or made their longest stay in Ohio, where comparison asserts that more than half of all their works have been found. That pre-historic fondness for the plenty and salubrity of this still choicest section should be a delightful reflection for its present people. Ohio was great among the regions ages before the Anglo Saxon made her greater. Until recently, the Mound Builder's shelter was uncertain, but now some part of their habits can be stated. They had the secret of getting fire from the friction of dry wood, a problem that few of our time with unaided hands have been able to master. With fire piled around trunks deadened by the bruising of hammering stones, trees were felled and burnt up until spaces were made in the deep shade for light to reach the fertile loam and nourish the martial corn, the twining bean, and the lulling tobacco, planted and tilled with hoes made from larger mussel shells drilled through the strongest places for handles fastened with strips of tough bark or tougher hides. As the tillable spaces were widened for larger crops, they knew where well drained pits could be dug in the terraced gravel for the safer keeping of the surplus corn and beans and the dried fruits and berries of the forest, together with the richly flavored walnut, the oily butternut, and the spicy spoils of the shrubby hazel and the lofty hickory. The forceful fight for life utilized much that is disdained by their button wearing successors in the strife. Little, indeed nothing, except by inference, can be told of the herbs that formed their pottage. But we surely know that the fibrous seeds of the plentiful pawpaw were saved from the feasts on their luscious pulp to make the winter, 'days less lean. The mollusk breeding beds of streams were searched for the dumb victims both large and small for great mussel bakes, where the steaming delicacy was lifted from the shells to cool on tines of polished bone. Such and other 32 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES apparently fantastic speculations have become real since the antiquarian spades have dug deep into a hidden record over which our race has stalked, elate with school taught pride in its destiny, and unheeding the awful obliterations buried beneath. The more obvious realities of the Mound Builders had the earliest attention, but a sympathetic view of their homely joys and toils obscure was more slowly gained. Thousands of scattered facts consistently arranged by practical skill combine to prove a few conclusions and refute a lot of once popular fancies. From these conclusions, a few characteristics are safely to be accepted. Gathered into villages and living in families, the Mound Builders were sociable, domestic, industrious, obedient, filial and devout. The rude methods by which they gained and saved their harvest required the patient toil that makes a people tame and governable. Notwithstanding the weariness that must have attended their stern, crude struggle largely to live by grain, they found strength to undertake and had the fortitude to finish the strangest and most enduring structures ever accomplished with such deficient means. A conservative estimate claim's that their structures in Ohio alone, if joined, would form a continuous line of over three hundred miles. This line almost entirely gathered from Southern Ohio, when composed for panoramic effect, would challenge the ruins of any race for weird comparison. Curiosity could idly wander from end to end by symmetrical mounds crowding the size of a room or covering the space of a city block and reaching from the stature of a man to steeple heights. Zeal reverently inclined should longer pause by frequent temple sites within enclosures wrought in geometric forms and set with altars to forgotten gods. And while piously musing on the decline and fall of superstitions, dim-eyed pity should follow staring surprise, where monstrous effigies heave the turf and prove their faith reached the folly of serpent worship. But most impressive of all to patriotic aspiration should be the long lines of the once lofty walls of their fortifications that have crumbled and tumbled to receive a slowly thickening soil through which mighty trees have sent the roots of hundreds of annual growths to pierce the mysterious mold of the vanquished builders :—for, CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 33 The secret of their fall has not been won, Unless the best and most in all the past, That time has done, has been in turn undone By time, because it was not fit to last. Writers have much disputed the motives impelling their stupendous and, with our lights, futile sacrifice of human energy. Some have supposed the loftier mounds and those on natural heights were for signal stations by day and beacon lights by night, so that warnings of war could have been flashed from the Muskingum to the Miamis. Out of abundant suggestion, imagination has supplied the machinery of an empire ordered by priestly potentates with shrines to appease wrathful deities, and forts for refuge from invasions. Such notions have been counterbalanced by incredulous disbelief which cares for none of this and asserts that all Indians have a common knowledge of stone implements. A larger conservative opinion, halting between these extremes and encouraged by the exploration of the antiquities of the old world, resolved to undertake a series of thoroughly scientific excavations. In some places the results were disappointing, in others the rewards were beyond expectation. As trench after trench was advanced through the mounds and across the village sites, much of the people of old was exposed as it was near the time of their death. Then some of the once mysterious mounds were Found to be simple memorial heaps piled with infinite love and labor above the funeral houses or pens, where the dead and what they prized most when living had been stored and lightly covered with ashes and clay—not beneath but above ground—until a grassy dome could be made over the one or many below. The trenches cut smoothly down through the mounds showed the manner of the making by the little piles of differing clays or soils still keeping the shapes taken as they fell from aprons or sacks or baskets, in which the dirt had been carried from where it had been dug with scooping shells whose 'broken bits were part of the proof. The lines of excavation through the quondam villages uncovered places in a firmer ground surrounding a looser mold. On carefully removing this mold, found to be of vegetable origin, and on filling the so renewed "post holes" with plaster, 34 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES the casts obtained frequently show the bark on the posts or pickets cut to a length by fires that charred the ends still found as they were when set and tamped, maybe twenty centuries ago. With wider excavations, these casts made in the trenches of the decayed palisade have strangely restored the outlines of their tepees, whereby the kind of homes and the manner of their people may be determined. For people inclined to quit nomadic ways and to make permanent abodes in a timbered region, the palisade has afforded the readiest protection from both the pinch of frost and the spite of either man or beast. The enclosures walled with logs fastened in the ground and reaching opposing heights to serve as a refuge for those who fought the battles of the American Wilderness were models of the Mound Builder's tepees, enlarged and improved by axes of steel. Without iron tools, the tepees were roofed with bark or the skins of deer stretched over poles with a funnel like escape from fires that baked the floors beneath. For, they had not learned to make chimneys and their hearth was for a fire, when the chill was worse than the stifling warmth. Such floors were found with broken pottery and pipes, with worn or wasted pieces of all they made from flaky flint, from shell or horn, from bone or stone, scattered in and about the ashes left undisturbed, since the last occupant fled or was taken to the charnel ; except that the blinding dust of time drifting from the hills and mingling with the melancholy mold of the forest had covered all but the mounds beyond the plowman's eager share. The tepees generally had a few nearby and sometimes many surrounding grain pits. Apparently, if one was deemed unfit, another was dug and the old was filled with the refuse of the house. From this refuse—this that was waste—we learn what they had. In some pits lined with woven mats eight and ten rowed ears of corn were neatly stowed. Other pits still held shelled corn with hulled nuts and beans closely massed as if to save space. Such stores grown musty or forgotten or through accident were covered with ashes, where wind strown sparks may have started fires, that charred the perfect forms into lasting coal with sad loss to the owners and much gain to antiquarians. Whatever little possession they had, and nothing was large, CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 35 was likely to go into the open, catch-all use of the abandoned pits. Awls, drills, knives, balanced arrow points, beautiful spear heads and the blocks of flint from which they were flaked by pieces of elk horn under hammers of stone, all, in every stage, from rejected chips to perfect completion, just as they were left 'by vanished hands, were found in the rubbish thus assorted by chance. Imperfect specimens broken or unfinished, when blemished, show the progressive chipping from a suitable boulder or splinter of granite to a perfect pestle for pulverizing grain or shredding dried meat. Others prove the process of making a single or double grooved ax equally excellent for braining a foe or for cracking and splitting bones for the marrow thereof. Other heaps disclose the development of the finely proportioned and elegantly polished celts or chisel like implements both useful in tanning and handy as tomahawks. Anything dropped among the refuse in a careless moment or thrown by a heedless child, once within the pits among the bones and littered with ashes, was likely lost until discovered by our curio seeking age. The bones thus found testify that they ate much of what we call Virginia deer, black bear, elk, squirrel, beaver, otter, fox, wolf, wildcat, panther, mink, muskrat, ground hog and the faithful dog that bore them company. They were familiar with the flavors of the wild turkey, the wild goose and the trumpeter swan, and they did not waste eagles, owls or hawks. They also liked the turtle tribe and made cups and spoons from the pretty boxes of the painted kind. Scrapers, single and double pointed pins, awls, some slender and sharp for piercing leather, and some stouter and blunter as if for handling hot meat, and tips for darts or arrows were all made from chosen bones. The toughest bones of birds were used in making fish hooks and needles shaped and polished with flints and sand stone. The skeletons of all, from beak to talon, from tooth to claw, from horn to hoof, were searched for a fancied charm or a grotesque ornament. All this is proved by the refuse rescued from pits and by the relics plundered from tombs where the untutored mind of filial love or paternal grief placed the favorite tools and trinkets of the dead, with precious pottery filled with relished food ready for instant need on the gloomy trail to the spirit land. In thinking of the dan- 36 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES gets that prompted their defensive works it is easy to believe that zeal to learn their mystery has chanced upon much of their little, where the apprehensive, even in the waste pits, may have heaped and hidden their treasure, with never a thought of those who should find and gather them into crystal cases in marble halls. Such was the home of the Mound Builders. If there had been no more—if they had lived longer or come later, so that history could have noted the simple life made noble by their singular devotion of incredible exertion to commemorate their mutual dependence, fair science would have frowned less severely on their oblivion, and few or none would have cared to vex their deep repose. But, by a strange perversion of fate, the care to keep their ashes always has caused their remains to be sought with an unrelenting purpose to scatter. Yet the most ardent antiquary quick to read the meaning of every detail is prone to pity, when his spade uncovers a token that makes all time akin. Recently, an exploring trench came upon two skeletons where a carefully opened grave showed that an aged couple had been decently buried side by side, along with several finely polished implements that were the work of years to make, and may have been their proudest possessions or a rich tribute of respect. And the right arm of the man was under the woman's neck and close by her right shoulder. Thus the semblance of a long life of affection composed by those who knew them well and adored them much had lasted and come through many centuries to prove that love goes on the same, yesterday and forever. If any in the world today and his wife were thus placed with many tears to dream the ages by, the least of realizing thought could have no better wish for 'their dust than such unbroken rest. Even when gained through breaking precepts that should be kept holy, worthy emotion delights to find charming sentiment in unexpected forms and places. But gray clad meditation, knowing the tireless haste of time to make the ceaseless waste of change where everything abideth not, will still decry the ruthless havoc of such a tomb to please a learned holiday, as never worth the violence done the voiceless dead. The explorations most helpful in bringing this lost life to light have been chiefly made in the Scioto and Miami valleys, CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 37 where they left the larger part of their greatest works in the form of either hilltop fortifications, lowland enclosures or effigies. These masterpieces arch to the east, north and west about Old Clermont. As yet, this condition has not been explained by the non-resident writers. A theory based on the known migrations of other animal life presents a philosophy easily understood if not admitted. The dispersion of man is a question that deepens as the search broadens. No odds whence they came, no considerable body of people has long enjoyed a peaceable possession of any desirable land. Notwithstanding the width and fatness of the continents, the vagrant ways of some and the busy schemes of others have wonderfully accomplished the passage of the seas and brought the most distant races into collision. As fact follows fact into view, doubts cease and better informed judgment admits that migrations by Behring Strait or by the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, eve!' as now seen, were more possible and probable than the well recorded voyages from Norway by Iceland and Greenland to Newfoundland. But much geologic evidence is claimed in proof of a wide and comparatively recent sinking of land in the northern Pacific, which would have made the passage from Asia still less difficult. In this light and among those growing familiar with other incidents in the relation, the wonder is not at the Discovery by Columbus in T492, but that the event so brilliant was so long delayed. Although doubtless occurring at the top moment of Europe's supremest need of a miracle wrought for despairing liberty, there is no adequate reason but mental inertia why the veritable voyaging of the Norsemen to America should have been ignored. When the Europeans came in earnest, their El Dorado was found pre-empted by a people moving from instead of to the west. For, the .most proof points to Alaska as the port of some, perhaps, many missing bands who fled by sea rather than face the ills they left on Asian plains. Whatever may be supposed about an extremely antique race on a submerged portion in the Pacific is a prettily ingenious hypothesis that involves a difficult explanation. It seems enough to believe, with sufficient ethnological reasons, that in man's present epoch, there were migrations from Asia compelled, most likely, by accident rather than design. 38 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES It may be assumed that such migrations were far apart and with little or no connecting experience ; because America then was a bourne from which no traveler could or would return. Through these castaways the new world was possessed by a people whose common origin was modified into at least two general divisions. Those having what was the ancient extent of Mexico have been called the Toltecan division. The other division is the Appalachian or American, including the eastern Canadian and western tribes. A naming less exact is more easily attained by calling them Northern and Southern Indians. They are collectively styled the Red Race, but the real color is brown with coarse, straight, black hair and dark brown eyes. The Appalachians have a large aquiline nose and a spare, straight,• muscular form. They are warlike, cruel, revengeful, and averse to civilized restraint. The Toltecans were lower and heavier, with thicker lips, flatter faces, oblique eyes and a gloomy expression. They inclined to agriculture rather than war, and, at the Discovery, had made much the most progress toward a fixed mode of living. Otherwise it is easier to trace a likeness than to define the difference, except that the man with a home was envied and plundered by the less .provident and more aggressive. Both were masters of the same weapons, and both were restricted to the art of the Stone Age. But the Toltecans excelled in the constructive designs which can only flourish where labor has a more regular supply of food than can be furnished by the most dextrous flint tipped arrow or spear. That regular food for the artisans who constructed the halls that dazzled the mail clad robbers with Cortes and Pizarro was obtained by the tropical Indians through their discovery and cultivation of maize or the corn plant, which has been so long and so thoroughly domesticated that botanists are unable to find or identify its wild growth. With, this glorious conquest from nature unmarred by wrong, the Southern Indians advanced their gentle sway northward into what is the modern "Corn Belt," where their princely grain found its most prolific home. Then the fierce flesh eaters from beyond the Lakes, having tasted Ohio corn and finding that it was good, came to devour the tender green or to ravage the russet harvest. Thenceforth in- CLERMONT AND. BROWN COUNTIES - 39 cessant war was waged until the Greek should cease or Trod fall. As the birds flew or the herds roamed between the cool of northern summers and the warmth of southern winters, so the lines of attack and retreat must have been as they were in an age long to come, when our own fathers sought to build happy homes in the pleasant land. In crossing the otherwise forbidding barrier of the Great Lakes, the chasm or the narrows we call Niagara or Detroit were the passes for the bands to destroy all who dared to hinder the trails of the savage hunters from the north. Of these or any other trail, the quickest approach and the surest retreat was by Detroit. Through this natural gate from the north, everything within reach to the east, west or south was liable to invasion. Even with slight perception of the continuous danger sufficient reason is found for the, to them, prodigious defense made by those who wished to plant for plenty and live in peace. Twenty-four towns in nearly as many states from Texas to Maine and Oregon have the significant word "Mound" as a whole or part of their names. Beside these, many others have a similar allusion, like Circleville or Grave Creek and more of Indian form and equivalent meaning. Wherever the artificial hillocks cluster, some trace of a defensive work is not far away. A proof that the danger prompting a defense came from the north is the increasing percentage of ceremonial works and the lighter fortifications or none southward in Kentucky and Tennessee. All that was different on the north side of the Ohio, where safety was sought through a series of forts made more obvious by longer study. A reader delighting in the repetitions of history, while regretting the consequent effacement, is pleased to learn that civilization in placing our principal towns has largely approved the judgment which located the busiest scenes of primeval life. St. Louis was once called the Mound City. Cincinnati from Third street to the hills and from Deer creek to Mill creek was a maze of earthworks rather centrally topped by a signal height that gave name to Mound street. The extent and elegance of the de' signs at Marietta indicate that it was a concourse or parade ground for that region. The much wasted ruins by Newark were not exceeded by anything of their kind. The Scioto from 40 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES mouth to sources was a succession of settlements rivaling the numbers of today, whose odd glory made perfect and then destroyed at Circleville is still the regret of archaeologists, however much the worth of the modern town, that might and should have been elsewhere, far enough at least for a public park in which the preserved square, circle and mounds restored to pristine symmetry would -attract visitors from all the world. But as there is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon, so did the majesty of their plans along the Miami exceed them all. For there, "in the imminent deadly breach" of their dominion, Fort Ancient still stands preserved and restored for all the ages to come to prove that its contrivers were worthy heroes of the mythic time, and to refute the declaration that would class them with the wandering wild men of the northern wilderness of four hundred years ago. Whether or not the lowland enclosures included a military purpose is still mooted. As first found or restored, they seem as surely planned for scenic effect as that their ornaments were polished for artistic satisfaction. The necessity greater than all law may have been the prevailing motive, and the piling of dirt against both sides of an upright row of logs to hold them firm makes a quick but not lasting defense. Yet a conflict in the larger settlements narrowed to the extremity of fighting in their sanctuaries would soon be decisive. A row or streak of black dirt found along the ridges of a large enclosure near Oxford, in Butler county, and in some other places has been deemed the result of a burnt palisade, but such a condition generally passes before the experts have a chance for inspection. Only very few have any candid doubt about the purpose of the hilltop works of which the largest and in fact the pivot of the line was Fort Ancient. There is no need to gild the gold of the many descriptions of this and the associated masterpieces of the people who built with no help from metal tools. But there is need to mention them as the environment that once and long ago controlled the land of Clermont. Fort Ancient with walls angling through a length of five miles to enclose a hundred and twenty-six acres of lofty hill land on the eastern side of the Little Miami, and, by its stream, about forty miles from the Ohio, was built CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 41 according to their ideas of greatest strength not only for the protection of the immediate vicinity, but also for greater service on the line of constant annoyance to all whose game was choicely fed on the blue grass of the Silurian Island. This massive fortress was supported twenty-five miles to the west by the shorter but very strong walls around seventeen acres on the Great Miami about three miles below Hamilton. Some call this the Butler County Fort, and others name it the Fortified Hill. Thirty-five miles farther southwestward, Miami Fort 'covered twelve acres commanding the junction of the Great Miami and the Ohio. Between Miami Fort and Fortified Hill, ninety-five acres were included in what is considered a fortified camp known as the Colerain Works. The plan also included defenses at Dayton and Piqua. As attack from the north was not favored by the crooked course of the East Fork of the Miami, the eastern support of Fort Ancient was fixed in Highland county, where a huge wall around thirty-five isolated acres some five hundred feet above the adjacent lowlands by Brush creek is called Fort Hill. Of all, this fort is most remote from former extensive population. Still, whoever visits these strictly military sites must be prepared generally for the most inaccessible headlands in the vicinity. Ten miles down Brush creek reaches the famous Serpent Mound in Adams county, which the critical claim was located there, because the effigy of the Serpent was begun by nature. Thus, through reverential awe, it may have been that Fort Hill was fitly located to prevent insult to the sacred ground. A trail of about twenty miles would have brought help to or from Spruce Hill Fort enclosing a hundred and forty forbidding acres on Paint creek. This was the largest and strongest stone structure short of Mexico. Thus, roughly stated, on or near an arc with a cord of less than one hundred miles, from Miami Fort to Spruce Hill Fort—from the mouth of the Great Miami to near Bainbridge in Ross county, the most famous effigy in the world, one of their largest camp sites, and five. out. of six of their strongest fortifications were located. Another great camping ground at Newark, and the sixth great fortress, Glenwood Fort, in Perry county, protected the Hocking and Muskingum valleys from invasion, and so completed the Mound Builder's main line of defense. 42 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES With all that can be gleaned from comparative investigation, and for those accustomed to notice the ways of war worn deep by the march and countermarch of many armies contending through long divisions of time for the possession of earth's fairest plains, there is much need for patience with those who flout the suggestion of a strife centered in Southwestern Ohio, between the roving hunters and the plodding grainmen. The supposition of such strife is consistent with the experience of other times and places. To the objection that the Northern Indians were too few to occasion such extreme defense, it may be answered that from Braddock's Defeat or before, to Wayne's Victory or since, it is not probable that two thousand warriors were ever in one battle against our forefathers. The raids were generally made by scores rather than hundreds. Yet there was no lack in the dramatic interest inspired. Others profess a doubt of the value ,of the forts. The same remark was made at Bunker Hill. `It is true : their castle's strength might not long laugh a modern siege to scorn. But arm to arm, whether with arrow or thrusting spear or with repeating rifles, their restored parapets would be no easy thing to storm. It is idle to deny the logic that requires belief. There was strife elsewhere, but none like what is manifest between the Scioto and Miamis, and none that happened with such cogent reason as that which forced the Toltecan farther southward than the Appalachian cared to follow. With a comprehensive view of their ruins, fancy may conjure up many 'a stirring day, when pitiless raids wasted the growing corn, desolated the villages, and frighted the planters into ever narrowing limits ; when the swift runners with evil tidings ceased to dare the perilous race with stealthy foes ; when the signal fires failed to burn because the watchers were few and fearful ; when the dreamers of strange designs were driven from the matchless charm of the Muskingum ; when the broken bands came westward and brought a double confusion along the once bountiful Scioto ; when the northern war for southern plunder backed westward on Fort Ancient and made the Valley of the Miamis the final battle ground between an unrelenting savagery and a humble barbarism too peaceful to live ; when hungry guards weakly manned the walls against CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 43 the ever coming attacks along the trails from the Straits between the frigid fur country and the pleasant corn lands ; when despairing defenders driven from the farther forts at last huddled at Miami Fort ; and, when, boating down the Ohio forever away, the mourning exiles found consolation in believing their dead beneath the beautiful mounds too deeply buried to ever feel a touch of cruel change. Under the nearby protection of the great forts to the north the marks of the Mound Builders southward to the Ohio, from the Miami to the Serpent Mound belong mainly, perhaps entirely, to the ceremonial type. In this region about four hundred earthworks have been noted ; anal of these over two hundred are or were within the present limits of Clermont county. Among these several enclosures could once but not now be clearly traced. Much the greater extent of those enclosures was in Miami and Union townships about what was once called the Forks of the Miami. The largest was a square and circle on the north side terrace of the East Fork with and near Greenlawn cemetery. Sixty years ago the ground was shaded by ancient sugar trees and kept smoothly open by herds that grazed along the firm ridges then some eight feet in height and half as much in level width across the top. Each of the gateways was fronted some twenty feet away by a small mound that may have been palisaded at a deadly distance for lancers and bowmen. The four walls with inside ditches and the four mounds were then kept as 'a part of the fine estate taken from the original owner 'and transmitted by Philip Gatch of heroic pioneer fame, except that the eastern and western walls were graded through for the Milford and Chillicothe Turnpike. And so this noble and beautiful pre-historic scene might have remained and should have become a proud part of the most beautiful burial place within the eastern reach of Cincinnati. But a furious storm wrecked the sacred grove, and, like the forest of Salmygondin, the trees were burnt for the sale of the ashes. Since then, the plow has left scarcely a trace for the observation of :travelers flitting by on the Cincinnati & Columbus Traction cars through the once guarded space, without a suggestion of the strangely busy throngs sometime gathered there for patriotic exhortation and priestly benediction before going to unavailing battle for the lovely 'and. 44 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES A somewhat smaller square and circle stood a scant mile southward across the river on a farm long owned by the Edwards family. Some two miles up the south terrace on the lands of the pioneers, Ira Perin and William Malott, were two small squares each with no circle. About five miles up the river on the east side of Stonelick on the Patchell lands a fine circle of about eight acres with no square was crossed by the Milford and Chillicothe Pike, which also passes by a group of mounds near Marathon, and also near more about Fayetteville. The far past is made to seem less remote by noting that this great highway of Brown and Clermont counties goes west by the noted pre-historic sites of Red Bank and Madisonville near which the Colerain Works interlock with the western forts and with what was great in front of the mouth of the Licking. Going east through Highland county, that pike is good for much of the way to Fort Hill and the Serpent Mound, while Spruce Hill Fort and the Paint Creek tepees are directly on the road to the remarkable antiquities of the Scioto Valley only some eighty miles from Milford. By the mouth of the East Fork in Anderson township, in Hamilton county, and about two miles from the Gatch enclosure is the noted Turner group of works that connect with the Newtown mounds and the Red Bank chain of villages. The places chosen for habitation prove that rich land. was appreciated. From the big circle near the mouth of Stone Lick, the scattering traces up that rapid stream and through Stone Lick township thicken toward its northeastern line, where the diminished heights encircle a lonely but pretty valley of some forty acres made very fertile by the elements washed from the weathered hills. Several mounds once adorned summits not far from this sequestered vale, at first the home of the pioneer, John Metcalf, and then of Ira Williams. No enclosure enhanced the scene which must have been a place of much resort and probably the site of one or several tepees, whence the people hasted away, perchance, when the forts failed and left the women and children without help to carry their wealth of implements along to the safety sought but never found. For, in few places or none in Old Clermont has the plow lifted to modern gaze such a profusion CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 45 of flint and granite tools as has therein been found, and thence, like Wycliff's ashes, been "scattered wide as the waters be." So long as the odd stones were held to be the abandoned and altogether useless trumpery of the recent Indians, the shapely granites and flints made with the utmost patience of many lives were carefully gathered and carelessly heaped where plows and hoes would not again be dulled. When more discerning culture asserted them to be wonderful survivals with a marvelous story from a voiceless past, and when bartering agents for far away collectors went seeking them along country lanes, the lightly valued and never-to-be recovered tokens of a vastly ancient possession were sold for a petty price and with wonder at the buyer's folly. Still, some of the best were kept, from which several of the most excellent came to the writer. One much admired is a curved flint knife ingeniously flaked to fit four different ways of grasping and present four different angles for cutting. The general effacement of mound work elsewhere has had much regrettable repetition in Brown and Clermont. While living in Williamsburg, in the midst of his overwork between 1800 and 1810, while the lines were still plain, General Lytle made careful surveys of the earthworks east of Milford. The square was 95o feet on each side with a gate at each corner and in the middle of the sides. The circle was irregular to fit a very ancient course of the river. The large circle was connected by parallel walls with a small circle of 300 feet in diameter on top of the island like hill now marked by the water tower. Fan-like walks also extended down the river. This and the plan of the Edwards' works across the river, were published in the classic work of "Squier and Davis on the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley." Besides these, General Lytle surveyed "a position of about Too acres, about 20 miles up the East Fork." The plan of that position was so singular that it has been reprinted in the most elaborate foreign works, among others, in the very expensive Du Paix Collection. What obtained fame among the learned has been ignored and forgotten at home. Inquiry about that position has not been satisfied. If "about 20 miles up" is taken along the banks of the very winding stream, nothing has been located. But if taken as the roads cross the country, the cir- 46 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES cuitous course of the East Fork presents quite as many miles of equally distant slopes for consideration. In the absence of other claim, the most probable scene of much lost and otherwise forgotten toil is the once pretty woodland just above the mouth of Crane Run, locally known as Indian Graves. Up to the enactment of the stock laws after the Civil War, the neighboring herds kept the fenceless grove like a swarded park, which was a trysting place for the fishers and hunters in that direction, and a wooing ground where picnic parties warbled life away or gentle footsteps lightly tripped a dance with pleasant hope. But that may not be again until another aeon of change shall have massed the chemical elements to refit the earth for another race, perhaps no more thoughtful of our sort than we have been of others. Ax and file have overcome the great poplars, beeches and sugars that stood in long lines both curved and straight with a regularity seemingly too cunning for chance. The plowman has also leveled numerous heaps from which many a load of stone has been wagoned off to make walls and roads for the wanton wasters. Any trace of an enclosure surveyed by General Lytle, if this be the place, has been lost in the transformation wrought by the early clearings, but cairns in the more recent hilly grove are a fixed memory with many still living. Whatever was left undone in plundering the graves by the first generation of the irreverent whites was completed by the next, and soon there will be nothing but this mention to memorate the scene. This place has had some local celebrity as the graves of those killed in a battle of or with Indians. The tradition is lacking in fact. The battlefield of Grassy Run is four miles or more farther up the river. Although that Indian band was successful in their favorite, patriotic and exhilarating pursuit of horse stealing, it is impossible they returned so far on a dangerous trail loaded with so many dead for such an elaborate burial. The largest number said to be slain in that battle would not account for the burials at Indian Graves, and the mode of burying was not the Shawnee fashion. Such durable sepulture indicates a more settled mode of life than was found by the earliest explorers along the Ohio. Topped by the most aged trees, such graves mark an ancient CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 47 occupation down the Miami, along the East Fork and up the Ohio where the valleys of Nine Mile, Twelve Mile, Indian Creek, Bull Skin, White Oak, Straight Creek, Red Oak, Eagle Creek and beyond were the abode of people who covered cribs of wood with mounds or made stone graves if possible, and sometimes both. These graves usually by the brow of far looking hills or sightly knolls were made by setting suitable stone on edge around a space for one or several bodies with bottoms of flagging stone and a stronger covering of wider and longer stone, all sunk more or less and heaped with earth. The heaps sometimes had the appearance of having had a secondary curbing and even a coping. In noting whence the larger stones had been carried by hand, for other way was none, the performance seems incredible to those who can remember seventy years ago. Eastward from the East Fork, enclosures are few and small or blotted out. One near New Richmond is a ditched and walled triangle of about an acre. Perhaps those works were less needful, or maybe the people were not sufficient for such tasks, or they may have been required for duty farther north, where the great forts must have had help from far. Some properly conducted explorations have proved uniquely interesting. On July 12-15, 1888, in Jackson township, by the county line near Marathon, under the personally skillful direction of the noted archaeologist, Prof. Warren K. Moorehead, a trench twenty-five feet wide, and much larger at the center, was cut through a mound seventy-five feet wide, ninety-five feet long, and known at first to be quite twenty feet high, but reduced to eight feet by many plowings. Within ten feet from the center and within seven feet from the surface, large quantities of burnt clay mingled with charcoal were found, and then a skull with teeth burnt black. At the center and four feet from the bottom, a well preserved skeleton was found covered with what was thought to have been elm and hickory bark. Beneath this skeleton were three layers of earth, each six inches thick. The upper layer was white, the next sand, and the lower layer was red burnt clay. Below this was another skeleton badly charred at the extremities, and surrounded with black and yellow earth slightly burnt. On the level,. seven feet below the surface, a large slab of limestone with 48 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES the imprint of seven ribs had been subjected to intense heat. Snail and mussel shells, deer horns and pottery occurred in fragments. After a fruitless exploration of two mounds more in that vicinity, Prof. Moorehead's party excavated a circular mound' in Perry township, near Fayetteville, about one hundred feet in diameter and five feet high, undisturbed in a woods and surrounded with a circle two hundred feet in diameter, with a base of seven feet and about three feet high. Nothing was found except forty-two mica sheets laid in, neatly overlapping layers covering about three square feet some ten feet east of center. The use seems to have been purely ceremonial. The party then undertook a mound seventy feet long and sixty-five feet wide that once stood nearly twenty-five feet high, with a corresponding circle, near St. Martins in the same township. Two skeletons were found whose skulls indicated death in battle. One skull was faced with a sheet or plate of copper five by seven inches stone, hammered cold from the ore, with two perforations to fit the eyes. Close by on a three-inch layer of earth burned hard as brick was another skeleton with a battle broken skull. The same party then dug through a group of seven mounds about thirty feet in diameter and having an average distance apart of one hundred feet along the front of the hills facing the East Fork, nearly two miles below Marathon. These mounds were each composed of both earth and stone and all belonged to the burial class. Such are the memorials of the people that once hunted and fished and made merry along, but knew nothing of, the line common to the counties of Brown and Clermont. While what was so frequent on the west side has been so ruthlessly wasted the less common remains on the east side have been better preserved. If Brown county has few enclosures to remember, several mounds remain to be cherished. This is notably so of the Ripley mounds which, and all that are anywhere, will be kept for centuries—if the owners stay wise. For, until man ceases to ask his origin or to question his destiny, the mystery of the Mound Builders will have peculiar fascination, and refinement will regret that so much of their strangely beautiful work has been destroyed. Yet, with what might have been learned from careful study of the scattered CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 49 or demolished and forever lost relics of Old. Clermont, we could have only slight assurance about the social scheme resulting in such productions. For larger opinion holds the enclosures to be probable sanctuaries and possible retreats, and the mounds to be voluntary or prescribed tributes to petty greatness ; and no view includes the mothers and children, or the pain and sorrow of the common lot. Who so would know something of this must revisit the tepee villages "down in the valley which was full of bones," and there give heed, while conquering Science armed with charted scrolls and magic glasses bids the "very dry" bones to declare a tale that makes the antique world seem never before so dark. In reviewing the hope or failure, the pride or shame, the ecstacy or weariness, of an ended life, we are apt to think the grave covers all. And so it was with the earth protected spaces between the moldered logs or crumbling stone through the four hundred certain years since Columbus, and, through how much longer before, any can guess but none can tell. A comparison of many investigations shows that the custom, purpose, progress—in a word—the culture—of a people throughout Southern Ohio, West Virginia, Central Kentucky, and on into Tennessee was contemporaneous in respects too frequent to be accidental. This people seems to have been numerous enough for self-protecting against a probable foe. But when the sheetless dead are called from the midst of valleys full of bones, it is found that three-fifths of the born died tinder the age of sixteen and three-fourths of these children did not live to be six years old. More than half of those surviving childhood did not reach thirty years, and hardly one in a hundred passed the age of fifty. To make the tabulation still more terrible, one-sixth of the skeletons, on various diseased bones, have brought, through all the hundreds of burying years, the ineffaceable lesions of a horrible infection which, in the innocence of their ignorance must have seemed the scourge of all their gods. With constructive imagination for linking historic suggestion between an imperative cause and an inevitable result, this shocking revelation supplies enough reason for the utter displacement of the ruined and ruining race. Burdened with unutterable weakness, for which they could neither plant nor hunt because of incessant raids, the |