Just who these ancient Indian tribes were—that is, just what they may have called themselves or what others may have called them—is not known. Although the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Wyandot, Mingo and other Indian tribes were living in Ohio at the time of settlement, these tribes all were newcomers in a sense; that is, they had come into the country only a century or two earlier, mostly from the east and south. The earlier tribes, which we might call the native tribes, had been driven out of the country along about 1650 by a great raid or invasion carried on by the Iroquois Indians of New York state and the St. Lawrence Valley. This was about a century before the coming of white men, and it is believed that it left the Ohio country almost without Indian residents, a sort of no-man’s land, until the Wyandots, Miamis and others arrived. And now as to the interesting questions concerning the Mound-builders: Who were they? Where did they come from and when? Why did they build Mounds? What became of them? QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE MOUND-BUILDERS Time and space will not permit us to discuss these queries very fully, but perhaps we can tell enough about them in a few lines for the present purpose. Archæologists are now pretty well agreed that the Mound-builders, the Indians and all other peoples who lived in the Americas before the coming of Christopher Columbus, belonged to a single great race, which we may call the American Indian race. They believe that the Western Hemisphere was first peopled directly from Asia, by way of Bering Straits, by bands of savages or barbarians belonging to the Mongolian or Yellow race. These simple folk appear to have migrated to America soon after the disappearance of the great ice glaciers which once covered all of our northern country, reaching as far south as central Ohio. Geologists tell us that this happened some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. And so, from the Arctic regions on the north, to the southern tip of South America, these yellow-skinned immigrants spread until they peopled both continents. In Mexico, Central America and Peru, they came to have great civilizations, and to be known as the Aztecs, Incas, and others. Just why some of them became so highly civilized while others, like some of our Indians, remained the lowly barbarians that they were, is explained partly by what the archæologists call environment; that is, by weather, rainfall, soil, natural food supplies as game, fish, wild fruits—in a word, environment means the things we find around and about us. In the end we find that while all these peoples belonged to the same race they had formed different habits and customs and were really very different from one another in what is termed culture.