Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/80

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76
PATHS OF MOUND-BUILDING INDIANS

"Stone cairns . . . on trail crossing ridge between Tuckasegee river and Alarka Creek" (Swain county, North Carolina).[1]

Flint Ridge in Coshocton and Licking counties, Ohio, contained stone and earth mounds and quarries; "Indian trail from Grave Creek mound, West Virginia, to the lakes, passing over Flint Ridge."[2]

Some of these remains are undoubtedly of no later age than the Indians whom the first whites knew; many of them are of far earlier times. It is now held by the most prominent archæologists that there are works of the mound-building Indians which do not date back far from the time Columbus discovered America. Thus any work which gives evidence of having been in existence five hundred years may belong to the mound-building era. And throughout all these five hundred years there is hardly a time when there is not evidence of Indian occupation. So the line between the mound-building Indians and the later

  1. Catalogue of Prehistoric Works East of the Rocky Mountains, p. 157.
  2. Id., pp. 169, 177.