[7] Gen. George Rogers Clark, an early and careful observer, scouted the idea advanced by Noah Webster, in Carey's _American Museum_, in 1789, that these extraordinary Western military defenses were the work of De Soto. "As for his being the author of these fortifications," says Clark, "it is quite out of the question; they are more numerous than he had men, and many of them would have required fifty thousand men for their occupancy."--L. C. D. [8] Indian traditions, by Cusick. [9] This description, written by Withers in 1831, still holds good in the main. The mound, which proves to have been a burial tumulus, is now surrounded by the little city of Moundsville, W. Va., and is kept inclosed by the owner as one of the sights of the place. The writer visited it in May, 1894.--R. G. T. [10] George Rogers Clark, who was repeatedly at Cahokia during the period 1778-80, says: "We easily and evidently traced the town for upwards of five miles in the beautiful plain below the present town of Kahokia. There could be no deception here, because the remains of ancient works were thick--the whole were mounds, etc." Clark's MS. statement; Schoolcraft's _Indian Tribes_, IV., p. 135.--L. C. D. [11] This mound was used, at least in part, for burial purposes. Nearly fifty years ago, when the writer of this note explored this remarkable artificial elevation of eighty feet in height, he found in the excavation numerous beads of shell or bone, or both, ornaments of the dead buried there.--L. C. D. [12] This proves nothing. A silver medal of John Quincy Adams's administration, evidently presented to some Indian chief was, in 1894, found in Wisconsin, twelve feet below the surface. Iron and silver tools and ornaments, evidently made in Paris for the Indian trade, have been found in Ohio and Wisconsin mounds. It is now sufficiently demonstrated that the mound-builders were the ancestors of the aborigines found in the country by the first white settlers, and that the mounds are of various ages, ranging perhaps from three hundred to a thousand years. Various _Reports_ of the Bureau of Ethnology go into the matter with convincing detail.--R. G. T. [13] Jacob Wolf, in digging a well on Hacker's creek, found a piece of timber which had been evidently cut off at one end, twelve or thirteen feet in the ground--marks of the axe were plainly distinguishable on it. [39] CHRONICLES OF BORDER WARFARE. CHAPTER I