of a great victory won there over the Winnebagoes many generations ago. The same old chief, when shown a clay pipe taken from the Lanesboro mounds, said it was like those made by the Sioux, and, pointing to an earthen spittoon for illustration, said the Sioux made many like it. In the "Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science," for 1875, Dr. Sternberg, of the United States Army, critically analyzes the contents of certain mounds near Pensacola, Florida, and concludes that they were built by different but contemporaneous tribes of Indians, one being probably the Natchez. In these mounds were found pottery, red hematite for pigment, flint weapons, and shell ornaments in the shape of beads and perforated disks, in conjunction with blue-glass beads and fragments of iron. The latter show that these mounds were still used, or in process of erection, later than the advent of Europeans.
Mr. E. G. Squier, in the second volume of the "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," has described in detail many mounds and earthworks of western and central New York, remarking that they extend down the Susquehanna as far as the valley of the Wyoming, northward into Canada, along the upper tributaries of the Ohio, and westward along the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario. These mounds and earthworks are said generally to be smaller than those in the Ohio Valley. They were found to contain ornamented pottery, pipes of clay regularly and often fancifully molded, or bearing the forms of animals, stone axes and hammers, stone disks and implements which the author remarks are almost identical in shape and material with some described by him from the mounds of the Ohio Valley, and spear points and bodkins of bone. In connection with these are described articles of European manufacture, such as cast copper and iron axes, and kettles of copper, iron, and brass. Although Mr. Squier had previously expressed the opinion that the earthworks of western New York were of like nature and origin with those of the Ohio Valley, when confronted with the fact of articles of European manufacture commingled with aboriginal, discovered by his own investigations, he was forced to assign the New York mounds to the Iroquois. It seems not unreasonable to assume that the New York series of mounds will be found undistinguishable from those of northern Ohio and eastern Michigan, which have unquestioningly been regarded as of the same age as those of the Ohio Valley, as well as synchronous with those of Wisconsin, which, while possessing all the essential characters of the Ohio Valley mounds, have been assigned as unhesitatingly to the existing races of Indians by the late J. A. Lapham, of Milwaukee.
It hence seems demonstrable, as well as admitted by some of the best American ethnologists, that the existing Indian races formerly carried on extensively and methodically the practice of mound-building. The mounds of sepulture are often referred to by historians and
