and industries and telling a pathetic story of aboriginal life in the valley of the Cumberland.
A race of Village Indians, probably akin to the Pueblo Builders or Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, once made their home in Middle Tennessee and the adjacent territory. These industrious pottery makers and mound builders must have dwelt for several centuries in this lovely Garden of Eden.
In an evil hour, unhappily, some destroyer came, perhaps the ancestors of the savage and vindictive Mohawk or Iroquois Indians of the north, and devastated their towns and homes and scattered or exterminated the humble and less warlike Villagers. The first white hunters and pioneers discovered in the shadowy forest only their strange and mysterious mounds, and the ancient lines of earthworks that had formed their forts.
For perhaps a hundred years or more before the advent of the white man, the beautiful valley of the Cumberland seems to have been a wilderness uninhabited save by the wild animals of the forest.
As early as 1714, M. Charleville, a French trader, came, and tarried for a time near the
