I have a photograph of it, viewed on three sides. On the hips and back are colored zigzag lines of white and brown, intended for ornament. Some years since a male, probably the mate to it, was plowed out near the same place; also an earthen vase and other pottery, with flint disks. The first found image was lost or destroyed, and the other soon will be. In style and artist to execution they appear to be the work of the present red man.
Fig. 6.
Mr. Tumlin, the owner of the premises, and Mr. Sage, of Cartersville, who knew the country while the Cherokees were in possession of it, state that the summit of the great pyramid was a fortified village, surrounded by pickets of wood and a slight embankment. This parapet is still visible, but is, at least in part, owing to furrows turned outward in plowing, and, until recently, the stumps of the pickets were struck by the plow. Near the southeast corner of the area, on the top, is a low mound. It is a third of a mile, at the nearest point, to where there is land of a height equal to the mound, and therefore it was a place easily defended. Although the Cherokees made use of it as a fort against the Creeks, they always denied having any knowledge of the race or the persons by whom the mound was erected. The gentlemen above named questioned them repeatedly on this point, and always received the same answer. If it had been designed as a place of defense originally, a much less broad and gentle road to the summit would have been made.
I was attracted to this mound and its surroundings as a type of the flat top pyramids, so common on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which have been by some archæologists attributed to the present race of red men. In Florida and in Alabama, the early English and Spanish travelers found Indian caciques with their wigwams on the top of such mounds, around which were the villages of their tribe. Instances are given where Indian towns occupied spaces surrounded by ancient embankments of earth, both with and without mounds.
Mr. S, F, Haven, long distinguished in archæology as the secretary of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass., in his article in the Smithsonian Contributions for 1855, vol viii, has referred to an instance of an intrenched fort made by the Arickarees, in a bend of the Missouri River, above Council Bluffs, The description of this fort by Lewis and Clark does not give it the character of an earthwork with ditches for defense. It was a temporary breastwork of logs and earth and stone, hastily thrown up, such as are common in Indian warfare, and in all warfare.
