20.75 33.15 129.39 70.90 1.68 9.54 32.58 150.90 67.90 33.55 8.09 Iowa City & Western Railway, 3 per cent fund. Iowa City & Western Railway 1 per cent fund.. Drainage fund... Unclaimed fees fund... War and defense bonds fund.. Muscatine Western Railway fund. City general fund.. Board of health fund. City bond interest fund... City sinking fund... City poll fund. Poor fund. Refunded. Cash... $31,294.57 $31,294,57 The officers making the above report were A. Medowell, auditor, and C. M. Reno, treasurer, in 1881, and Hugh McGovern, treasurer in 1882. TAX LEVY FOR 1882. The following action of the county board, on September 8, 1882, serves to show in part, the present financial condition and tax requirements: Resolved, That the auditor certify the tax list to the county treasurer, as provided by law: For State revenue, two and one-half mills on each dollar valuation, and a poll tax of fifty cents. For county fund, three mills on each dollar valuation. For poor fund, one mill on each dollar valuation. For school fund, one mill on each dollar valuation. For insane hospital, one-half mill on each dollar valuation. For bridge fund, two mills on each dollar valuation. And it is further ordered, that for Iowa City corporate purposes there be levied as certified to this board by the city council of Iowa City as follows, to-wit: For general fund, ten mills on each dollar valuation. Bond interest fund, three and one-half mills on each dollar valuation. For sinking fund, two mills on each dollar valuation. For macadam fund, one mill on each dollar valuation. I Also the several funds assessed by said city council upon certain lots and parcels of ground for sidewalks and repairs, together with the several delinquent poll taxes, and also a special tax for water works of three mills on each dollar valuation of certain lots and parcels of ground, etc. [Descriptions here omitted.] The following was adopted the next day, September 9: Resolved, That the chairman of the board of supervisors be, and he is hereby authorized to borrow $3,000 for six months, for the use of the county. The railroads do something toward paying the cost of running the county. They pay taxes for State and county purposes, as follows in Johnson county, in 1882: Making a total paid by these roads $10,147.43, not including school taxes. In the agricultural division of Chapter V., Part 2, in this volume, will be found sundry tables of real estate and personal property valuations, and the equalized value per acre, by townships. The total valuation in 1882 was as follows: Realty, $5,563,686; personal, $2,093,318; railroad, $490,839. Total, $8,147,843. CHAPTER IV.-PART 1. Mound-Builders-Ancient Mounds-Indians-Etc.,-in Johnson County. MOUND-BUILDERS AND INDIANS. Every place has a pre-historic history; and so has Johnson county. Relics of the ancient, pre-historic Mound-builder race of America are found in this county. The reader will naturally want to know who and what were these mysterious people. This is just what scientists have been trying to find out for fifty years past; and we can only say, “they are gaining on it." An eminent scientist, Prof. John S. Newberry of Ohio, delivered a lecture last winter (1881-82) before the Academy of Science of New York, on the ancient civilization of America; and he speaks thus of the Mound-builder peoples: When the savages were pressed back by advancing civilization between the lakes and the Mexican gulf, it was discovered that they were not autochthonous, for mounds, caves, palaces and remains of cities showed the existence of a race that lived in the highest style of civilization. Investigation and research by historians, geologists and archæologists have brought to light much concerning these wonderful people. They can be divided in two classes which, with local differences, are generally the same. One is the mound-builders, who dwelt in the fertile valley of the Mississippi, following a sedentary and peaceful life. Mounds built by them and instruments and pottery and copper ornaments made by them, have been discovered all through the Mississippi valley. They were miners, farmers, raised tobacco, and remains of their oil wells still exist at Titusville, Pa. In numbers they probably equaled the inhabitants of the region at present and enough is known of their osteology to say they were of medium size, fair proportions, with a cranial development not unlike our red Indian. Their teeth were large and strong.* They buried their dead with great ceremony. When and why, and how the mound-builder disappeared we do not know. Their ultimate fate was probably entire extinction. The second class of these early Americans was the palacebuilders of the table-land, a class that was spread from Chili, on the south, to Utah, on the north, reaching their greatest degree of power and civilization in Central America, Mexico and Peru. The Incas and Montezumas were types of this race,. and though when swept from the earth by the brutality of Pizarro and Cortez, their glory was already in its decadence, we can scarcely conceive of the extent of their magnificence.. This Mexican and Peruvian era far surpassed anything in our day in the construction of public works, roads, aqueducts, palaces and cities. The macadamized road that led from Callao to Lima exceeded in cost the Union Pacific railroad; and if all the forts within our borders were put into one, it would not equal the fortified structure that is yet to be seen on the Peruvian coast. Louis Hoffman, an engineer who was with Maximilian, has described the ruins of a large seaport town on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The Central American country abounds in evidences of the Aztec race, and last winter many archæologists went thither, and from their labors we *See a Johnson county specimen of jaw and teeth, at M. W. Davis' drug store, in lowa City. shall soon learn more of this wondrous people. Their origin is lost in antiquity. They may have come from the seed borne across the sea by Phoenician traders-perhaps they sprang from the fabled race of Atlantis. They were either indigenous or imported in an embryotic state from the oriental archæpelago-the latter the most likely. Such is a brief summing up of facts regarding the human races that occupied this land prior to our modern Indian tribes. Of these latter we have history enough; but the former are properly pre-historic. ANCIENT MOUNDS. The pre-historic remains of an ancient race that once inhabited Johnson county in considerable numbers are fast passing away. Many mounds. which were plainly visible when white men first came here are now entirely obliterated by being plowed down in cultivated fields or dug open by relic hunters, and in other ways; and fifty years hence there will scarcely be a mound left to prove that such evidences of a former race ever existed. From M. W. Davis, the druggist, and Col. S. C. Trowbridge, we gather the following points: There were mounds and evidences of an ancient town near Solon, in Big Grove township. On section thirty-three in Liberty township there were about fifty mounds visible some twenty years ago, with trees a foot and a half to two feet in diameter growing on top of them. On section three in Lucas township there were perhaps twenty mounds, some of which are still visible [August, 1882,] while others of them have disappeared: They are on land belonging to Lewis Englert's vineyard. There are a considerable number of mounds on sections three and four in Lucas township, on land owned by Wm. Burger. In Newport township, on section 27, there is a large group or neighborhood of mounds, probably fifty or more in number, and all situated on knolls or ridges, from which there is drainage every way. In 1863 and '64 Mr. Davis and others opened several of these mounds. They all contained human bones, arranged in such ways as to show that the body had been buried either in a sitting posture or lying down, but bent in the same way as for sitting; all had their faces toward the west; and all the skeletons were found to have been covered with wood ashes from an inch to an inch and a half deep before the earth which formed the mound had been piled upon them. In one they found a male skeleton which had a prodigiously large and powerful lower jaw, with a comparatively small cranium; these and some of the leg bones of the same individual Mr. Davis still has, preserved in his collection. They also found a child's skeleton, and with it a small jug or bottle. This was of a grayish-black colored earthenware, with a round body about three inches in diameter; on one side were some rude markings, as if a ring with two cross-lines and some dots had been drawn with a fine-pointed stick when the clay was |