Page:Anthropology.djvu/45

centuries a camping ground and stronghold of the aborigines. Geologically it, as well as most of the bottom, has a basis of loess or drift clay with a superincumbent stratum of sand 5 to 10 feet in thickness. All around the site of the mound the soil to the depth of 20 inches is composed of the débris of old camps, a mixture of ashes, mussel shells, bones of fishes and wild animals, charcoal, broken pottery,&c.; and here hundreds of implements of stone, bone, and shell have been obtained. The big mound is said, by persons who have often seen it before the hand of vandalism desecrated it, to have been more than 30 feet high by 150 feet in diameter at the base. Its summit commanded, an uninterrupted view of the distant bluffs on both sides of the river and of the stream itself for 2 or 3 miles above and below. We can easily imagine the strange scene this great cone presented when it swarmed one autumn day with an eager, startled multitude of wild, half-naked barbarians gazing with astonishment at the sun-burnt, bearded faces and tattered garments of Marquette and Joliet as they wearily paddled their frail canoe up the quiet river at its base. More than thirty years ago the city authorities of Beardstown commenced the destruction of this splendid monument to utilize the clay of which it was composed for covering the sand of their streets, and in a few years the grand structure was totally demolished. The mound was found to have been made, on the sand, of clay taken from the bed of the river at low water or brought from the bluffs and it had been used as a burying ground by people of different eras and races. Just below the surface the shallow graves and well-preserved skeletons of recent Indians, buried with implements of stone and iron and ornaments of glass and brass, were shoveled out; and a little deeper the spades uncovered the remains of a few Europeans, deserters, perhaps, from the commands of Chevalier La Salle or Lieuteuant Tonti, who had found an asylutn and graves among the Indians of this distant wilderness. There was one of them, however, whose mission in this part of the New World was widely different from that of his buried associates: the silver cross still grasped by his skeleton hand, the Venetian beads about his waist that had formed a rosary, and the ghastly skull still encircled by a thin band of polished silver proclaimed that here a self-sacrificing disciple of Loyola had expended life in the hopeless work of converting the heathen. These intrusive burials passed, nothing more was discovered until the original sandy surface of the island was reached, and what was there deposited before the great mass of clay had been piled over it was cast aside by the laborers without notice. From the street commissioner who had the work in charge I gained the following meager account of all that attracted his attention sufficient to impress his memory. Eanged along the middle of the structure was a parapet or wall, as he supposed, of rough tiag-stones 30 inches high by 3 feet in breadth and 25 feet in length, designed apparently by the ancient inhabitants as a breastwork or rampart for the defense of their town from river approaches. But,