Elevated Square, Marietta. This cut represents the mound preserved in the park at Marietta. It is ten feet high, one hundred and eighty-eight feet long, by one hundred and thirty-two feet wide. The platform on the top has an area of about half an acre. Graded ways lead up on each of the four sides. These grades are twenty-five feet wide, and sixty feet long.30 As we approach the Gulf States, these platform mounds increase in number. The best representative of this class, the most stupendous example of mound builders’ work in this country, is situated in Illinois, not far from St. Louis. The mound and its surroundings are so interesting that they deserve special mention. One of the most fertile sections of Illinois is that extending along the Mississippi from the Kaskaskia to the Cahokia river, about eighty miles in length, and five in breadth. Well watered, and not often overflowed by the Mississippi, it is such a fertile and valuable tract that it has received the name of the “Great American Bottom.” It is well known that the Mound Builders chose the most fertile spots for their settlements, and it is therefore not surprising to find the evidence that this was a thickly settled portion of their territory. Mr. Breckenridge, writing in 1811, says: “The great number of mounds, and the astonishing quantity of human bones, everywhere dug up or found on the surface of the ground, with a thousand other appearances, announces that this valley was at one time filled with habitations and villages. The whole face of the bluff, or hill, which bounds it on the east, appears to have been a continuous burying ground.”31 Mounds are numerous in this section. We learn that there are two groups of mounds or pyramids, one about ten miles above the Cahokia, and the other about the same distance below it, more than one hundred and fifty in all. Speaking of the group above the Cahokia, Mr. Breckenridge says: “I found myself in the midst of a group of mounds mostly of a circular shape, and, at a distance, resembling enormous hay-stacks scattered through a meadow. One of the largest which I ascended was about two hundred paces in circumference at the bottom, the form nearly square, though it had evidently undergone considerable alteration from the washing of rains. The top was level, with an area sufficient to contain several hundred men.” He represents the view from the top of the mound to be a very extensive and beautiful one. From this elevation he counted forty-five mounds or pyramids, besides a great number of small artificial elevations. This group was arranged in the form of a semicircle, about a mile in extent, the open space being on the river. Cahokia Mound.