Representative in the 24th and 25th General Assemblies, and U. S. Pension Agent

at Des Moines, 1894-1898.

ANNALS OF IOWA.

VOL. III. No. 3. DES MOINES, IOWA, OCTOBER, 1897. THIRD SERIES..

PRIMITIVE MAN OF IOWA, AND HOW HE LIVED.

BY HON. CHARLES H. ROBINSON.

The presence of man in Europe during the long cycles of the great ice epochs, the last of which came to an end many thousand years ago, has been clearly proven by evidence which scientists deem incontrovertible.

Scientific explorations among the ruins of ancient cities. of Babylonia have brought to light written evidences of a civilization of a high culture existing ten thousand years before Christ. Both China and India claim to have records extending still further into antiquity, but in America, and especially within the limits of the United States, no well authenticated discoveries have been made which would warrant the belief that the advent of man upon this portion of the globe occurred at a period more remote than the close of the last ice age, or perhaps not earlier than the epoch known in Europe as the historic period.

It is true, however, that the conditions existing in Mexico, Central, and South America, at the time of their discovery by the whites, the civilization to which they had attained, the character of their architecture, and their numerous ruins, so ancient even then as to be lost to tradition, all point to the existence of man in those countries at a remote period, and it may be that some day scientific explorations in those countries will bring to light evidence of human occupation as early as in Babylon, or that the discovery of the key with which to unlock the hieroglyphics of the Aztecs and Incas will resurrect a literature as old as that of India or China.

VOL. III.-11

While there seems to have been a racial connection between our own Indians and the peoples who in ancient times inhabited Mexico, Central America, and Peru, the great difference in the extent of their progress from a condition of pure savagery would perhaps indicate that, while they may have been of the same race, their advent may have been by successive waves of immigration, such as characterized the Indo-Germanic settlement of Europe.

Where the first human inhabitants of this country came from is entirely unknown, and a mere matter of speculation. Their own traditions-trace their origin to sources as mythical as those of the Greeks and Romans.

The Choctaw tradition is that their tribe came out of a certain artificial mound in Mississippi. A depression on the top of this mound is accounted for by the Almighty stepping upon it to close the aperture when a sufficient number had emerged to form the tribe.

The Shawnees claim to have originated Phoenix-like, from the ashes of a fire; and a Georgia tribe had the earth for a father and the sun for a mother, thus reversing the Grecian myth. Some of the tribes had a tradition that their forefathers came from the west or northwest, and from this it is conjectured by some that their ancestors came originally from the great plains of Asia, the nursery of peoples. Quite a mass of evidence has been collected tending to prove that the aborigines of this country are descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, while others are confident that they are descended from a colony of Phoenicians, who are supposed to have come to this country at a time so early that even the records of that ancient civilization are silent in regard to it.

Ignatius Donnelly in his "Atlantis," has revived the story of Plato, derived originally from the Egyptian priests, that in very remote times a continent existed west of the straits of Gibraltar, connecting perhaps with the eastern or western hemisphere, or with both, which was the seat of the first civilization, and perhaps of the origin of man, and which ages ago in a cataclysm of nature, was wholly submerged with all its inhabitants.

Others again, and among them many scientists, are of the opinion that there formerly existed a very large continent occupying a portion of what is now covered by the Pacific and Indian oceans, and which was probably the primitive home of some of the races of mankind.

So far as the ordinary reader is concerned each of these theories is supported by considerable evidence, but the most unique of all is that of Rev. Cotton Mather, the eminent New England divine, who said, "The natives of the country now possessed by the New Englanders have been forlorn and wretched heathen ever since they first herded here, and though we know not how or when these Indians first became inhabitants of this mighty continent, yet we may guess that probably the devil decoyed these miserable savages hither, in hopes that the gospel would never come here to disturb his absolute empire over them."

It is altogether likely that the similitudes in manners, customs, religions, etc., between the aborigines of this country and those of various ancient peoples of the old world, instead of proving a common origin, only prove that the human. mind is everywhere about the same, and that in a similar state of progress, opportunities being equal, men will use similar means to attain a desired end.

Many investigators still claim that the Mound Builders who inhabited the Ohio and Mississippi valleys at an age not very remote, were a different race from the Indians found in possession at the advent of the whites; but those who have for years given the exploration of the mounds the closest investigation in behalf of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, are now almost entirely united in the conclusion that the Mound Builder, so called, was the ancestor of the Indian. It does not follow, however, that all the Indians are descended from them, as it is unquestionably true that many of the tribes had not reached the development represented by the Mound Builders; they, having made great progress toward civilization had become what we call barbarians, a condition in which man in his struggle for existence is aided. in a greater or less degree by the use of tools or machines.

Without recapitulating the careful comparisons of the culture of the Mound Builders with that of existing and extinct tribes, which have been made by the Bureau of Ethnology, and upon which is largely based the conclusion that the earlier were but the progenitors of the later people, let us assume that theory to be true and the following conclusion results, viz: During a period commencing some time after the close of the last Ice Age in North America, and ending with the advent of the whites or shortly before, this part of the continent was inhabited by a people who had emerged to a certain extent from the darkness of savagery, had acquired certain of the domestic arts, and whose location and boundaries are still fairly well defined by the remains of the mounds and other earthworks erected by them.

The center of this progress seems to have been in Ohio, and Iowa may be regarded as on its western frontier, the number, size and extent of these works being considered as indicative of the centers of population.

Many of these mounds have been opened by private parties, and the Bureau of Ethnology has thoroughly explored some hundreds of them in different parts of the country, and while no conclusive reason for their existence has been reached, the concensus of opinion is that many of the earthworks answered the purpose of fortifications, having the earth wall surmounted by wooden palisades, which, with strong gates of timber would render the fortress almost impregnable in the warfare of the age.

But these fortifications were few in Iowa, and have almost entirely disappeared, although there still exist in the State some thousands of the smaller mounds, which, however, are fast disappearing under the leveling influence of the plough.

Among certain of the more advanced tribes, the supposed descendants of the Mound Builders, there was a custom at and prior to the advent of the whites, of building the winter dwelling or lodge upon low mounds, the house itself being of poles wattled basket fashion and then plastered with mud and roofed with long grass or reeds. When the owner of one of these huts died it was the custom to bury him under