_The Mound-Builders of the Mississippi Valley_.--At the coming of the Europeans this ancient people had nearly all disappeared. Only a few descendants in the southern part of the great valley of the Mississippi represented living traces of the Mound-Builders. They had left in their burial mounds { 198} and monuments many relics of a high type of the Neolithic civilization which they possessed. As to their origin, history has no direct evidence. However, they undoubtedly were part of that great stream of early European migration to America which gradually spread down the Ohio valley and the upper Mississippi. At what time they flourished is not known, although their civilization was prehistoric when compared with that of the Algonquins, Athabascans, and Iroquois tribes that were in existence at the time of the coming of the Europeans. Although the tradition of these Indians traces them to the Southwest, and that they became extinct by being driven out by more savage and more warlike people, whence they came and whither they went are both alike open to conjecture.
Their civilization was not very different from that of many other tribes of North American Indians. Their chief characteristic consisted in the building of extensive earth mounds as symbolical of their religious and tribal life. They also built immense enclosures for the purpose of fortification. Undoubtedly on the large mounds were originally built public houses or dwellings or temples for worship or burial. Those in the form of a truncated pyramid were used for the purposes of building sites for temples and dwellings, and those having circular bases and a conical shape were used as burial places.
Besides these two kinds was another, called effigy mounds, which represented the form of some animal or bird, which undoubtedly was the totem of the tribe. These latter mounds were seldom more than three or four feet high, but were of great extent. They indicated the unity of the gens, either by representing it through the totem or a mythical ancestry. Other mounds of less importance were used in religious worship, namely, for the location of the altar to be used for sacrificial purposes. All were used to some extent as burial mounds. Large numbers of their implements made of quartz, chert, bone, and slate for the household and for the hunt have been found. They used copper to some extent, which was obtained in a free or native state and hammered into implements and ornaments.