From what I have collected, therefore, it would appear that the only resident Indians at the time of the discovery who showed any evidence of mound-building comparable to that found in the Ohio valley were the Chahta-Muskokees. I believe that the evidence is sufficient to justify us in accepting this race as the constructors of all those extensive mounds, terraces, platforms, artificial lakes and circumvallations which are scattered over the Gulf States, Georgia and Florida. The earliest explorers distinctly state that such were used and constructed by these nations in the sixteenth century, and probably had been for many generations. Such too, is the opinion arrived at by Col. C. C. Jones, than whom no one is more competent to speak with authority on this point. Referring to the earthworks found in Georgia he writes: “We do not concur in the opinion so often expressed that the mound-builders were a race distinct from and superior in art, government, and religion, to the Southern Indians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” It is a Baconian rule which holds good in every department of science that the simplest explanation of a given fact or series of facts should always be accepted; therefore if we can point out a well known race of Indians who, at the time of the discovery, raised mounds and other earthworks, not wholly dissimilar in character and not much inferior in size to those in the Ohio valley, and who resided not very far away from that region and directly in the line which the Mound-Builders are believed by all to have followed in their emigration, then this rule constrains us to accept for the present this race as the most probable descendants of the Mound Tribes, and seek no further for Toltecs, Asiatics or Brazilians. All these conditions are filled by the Chahta tribes.[80] It is true, as I have already said, that the traditions of their own origin do not point to the north but rather to the west or northwest; but in one of these traditions it is noticeable that they claim their origin to have been from a large artificial mound, the celebrated _Nanih Waiya_, the Sloping Hill, an immense pile in the valley of the Big Black River;[81] and it may be that this is a vague reminiscence of their remote migration from their majestic works in the north. The size of the southern mounds is often worthy of the descendants of those who raised the vast piles in the northern valleys. Thus one in the Etowah Valley, Georgia, has a cubical capacity of 1,000,000, cubic feet.[82] The Messier Mound, near the Chatahoochee River, contains about 700,000 cubic feet.[83] Wholly artificial mounds 50 to 70 feet in height, with base areas of about 200 by 400 feet, are by no means unusual in the river valleys of the Gulf States.