Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game AnimalsHulbert, Archer Butler
History
Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game Animals
Hulbert, Archer Butler
American bison; Indian trails -- United States; Mound-builders
Ohio,
Wisconsin,
Tennessee,
Illinois,
Florida,
New York,
Kentucky,
Indiana,
Michigan,
Georgia and Arkansas,
Missouri and North Carolina,
Minnesota,
Iowa,
Pennsylvania.
Now, by our last census the states which contain the largest population
today are:
New York,
Pennsylvania,
Illinois,
Ohio,
Texas,
Missouri,
Massachusetts,
Indiana,
Michigan,
Iowa,
Georgia,
Kentucky,
Wisconsin,
Tennessee.
Thus of the fourteen most thickly populated states today perhaps twelve
give fair evidence of having been most thickly populated in prehistoric
times. As a general rule (but one growing less reliable every day) the
heaviest population has always been found in the best agricultural
regions; the states having the largest number of fertile acres have had,
as a rule, the largest populations--or did have until the cities grew as
they have in the past generation.
This argument, though necessarily loose, still is of interest and of
some importance in the present study. The earliest Indians found,
without any question, the best parts of the country they once inhabited
if we can take the verdict of the present race which occupies the land.
Coming down to a smaller scope of territory, can it be shown that in the
case of any one state the early Indians occupied the portions most
heavily populated today? It has been said that, in Ohio, four counties
contain evidence of having been the scenes of special activity on the
part of the earliest inhabitants: Butler, Licking, Ross, and Franklin.
These are interior counties (at a distance from the Ohio and Lake Erie)
and, of the remaining sixty-three interior counties in the state, only
seven exceeded these four in population in 1880--when the cities had
not so largely robbed the country districts of their population as now.
Thus the aborigines seem to have been busiest where we have been busiest
in the last half of the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: ARCHAEOLOGICAL MAP OF WISCONSIN
[_Showing interior location of remains_]]
In Wisconsin the mound-building Indians labored most in the southern
part of the state, where the bulk of that state's population is
today--seventy-five per cent being found in the southern (and smaller)
half of the state.
In Michigan, a line drawn from the northern coast of Green Bay to the
southwestern corner of the state includes a very great proportion of the
archæological remains in the state. That line today embraces on the
southeast thirty-three per cent of the counties of the state, yet
sixty-three per cent of the population.
Thus it can be said that in a remarkable measure the mound-building
peoples found with interesting exactness the portions of this country
which have been the choice spots with the race which now occupies it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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