variety of stone tools, and a kind of stone signet of an oval shape, two inches in length, with a figure in relievo resembling a note of admiration, surrounded by two raised rims. Capt. Wilson, who presented the stone to my companion Mr. Adams, observed that it was exactly the figure of {63} the brand with which the Mexican horses were marked.[42] One of the mounds was surrounded by a regular ditch and parapet, with only one entrance. The tumulus was about twelve feet high, and the parapet five.
The "Big grave," as it is called, is a most astonishing mound. We measured the perpendicular height, and it was sixty-seven feet and a half. By the measurement of George Millar, Esq.[43] of Wheeling, it is sixty-eight feet. Its sides are quite steep. The diameter of the top is fifty-five feet: but the apex seems to have caved in; for the present summit forms a bason, three or four feet in depth. Not having a surveyor's chain, we could not take the circumference, but judged that its base covered more than half an acre. It is overgrown with large trees on all sides. Near the top is a white oak of three feet diameter; one still larger grows on the eastern side about half way down. The mound sounds hollow. Undoubtedly its contents will be numerous, curious, and calculated to develop in a farther degree the history of the antiquities which abound in this part of our country.
{64} As there are no excavations near the mound, and no hills or banks of earth, we infer that it must have been
- [Joseph Biggs took part as a boy in the siege of Fort Henry, at Wheeling;
defended a besieged blockhouse in Ohio, opposite Wheeling, in 1791; and finally died in Ohio about 1833. He claimed to have been in seventeen Indian fights in and about the neighborhood of Wheeling.—Ed.]
