Kitabı oku: «Notes on the Floridian Peninsula; its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities», sayfa 9
CHAPTER VI.
ANTIQUITIES
Mounds.—Roads.—Shell Heaps.—Old Fields.
The descriptions left by the elder and younger Bartram of the magnitude and character of the Floridian antiquities, had impressed me with a high opinion of their perfection, and induced large expectations of the light they might throw on the civilization of the aborigines of the peninsula; but a personal examination has convinced me that they differ little from those common in other parts of our country, and are capable of a similar explanation. Chief among them are the mounds. These are not infrequent upon the rich lowlands that border the rivers and lakes; and so invariably did their builders choose this position, that during the long journeys I made in the prairies and flat pine woods east of the St. Johns as well as over the rolling and fertile country between this river and the Gulf, as far south as Manatee, I never saw one otherwise located. An enumeration and description of some of the most noteworthy will suffice to indicate their character and origin.
On Amelia island, some half a mile east of Fernandina new town, there is an open field, containing some thirty acres, in shape an isosceles triangle, clothed with long grass and briary vines, bounded on all sides by dense thickets of myrtle, live-oak, palmetto, yellow pine and cedar. About midway of the base of this triangle, stands a mound thrown up on the extremity of a natural ridge, which causes its height to vary from twenty to five-and-thirty feet on the different sides. It is composed of the common surface sand, obtained from the east side, close to the base, where an excavation is visible. A few live-oaks and pines grow upon it, the largest of which, at the time of my visit (1856), measured seventeen inches in diameter. There is a fine view from the summit, embracing on the west the vast marshes between Amelia island and the mainland, with a part of St. Mary’s sound, across which, northward, lie the woody shores of Cumberland island, projected in dark relief against the glittering surf of the Atlantic, which stretches away in a brilliant white line to the north-east, loosing itself in the broad expanse of ocean that bounds the eastern horizon. Hence, one of its uses was, doubtless, as a look-out or watch-tower; but from excavations, made by myself and others, it proved, like every similar mound I examined, or heard of as examined, in Florida, to be, in construction, a vast tomb. Human bones, stone axes, darts, and household utensils, were disinterred in abundance. Quantities of rudely marked fragments of pottery, and broken oyster, clam, and conch shells, were strewed over the field. I was informed of a second mound, smaller in size, somewhat south of Fernandina light-house; but owing to the brevity of my stay, and the incredible swarms of musquitoes that at that season infested the woods, I did not visit it. I could learn nothing of the two large tumuli on this island, known as the “Ogeechee Mounts,” mentioned by the younger Bartram.296
On Fleming’s Island, at the mouth of Black Creek, identified by Sparks with the “extremely beautiful, fertile, and thickly inhabited” Edelano of the French colonists, and on Murphy’s Island, eight miles above Pilatka, are found mounds of moderate size, and various other vestiges of their ancient owners. But far more remarkable than these are the large constructions on the shores and islands at the southern extremity of Lake George, first visited and described as follows, by John Bartram,297 in 1766: “About noon we landed at Mount Royal, and went to see an Indian tumulus, which was about one hundred yards in diameter, nearly round, and twenty foot high. Found some bones scattered on it. It must be very ancient, as live-oak are growing upon it three foot in diameter; directly south from the tumulus is an avenue, all the surface of which has been taken off and thrown on one side, which makes a bank of about a rood wide and a foot high, more or less, as the unevenness of the ground required, for the avenue is as level as a floor from bank to bank, and continues so for three quarters of a mile, to a pond of water about one hundred yards wide and one hundred and fifty long, north and south,—seemed to be an oblong square, and its banks four foot perpendicular, gradually sloping every way to the water, the depth of which we do not say, but do not imagine it deep, as the grass grows all over it; by its regularity it seems to be artificial; if so, perhaps the sand was carried from thence to raise the tumulus.”
A description of this mound is also given by Wm. Bartram, who visited it both with his father, and fifteen years later.298 In summing up the antiquities, he saw in Florida, this author says,299 “from the river St. Juans southerly to the point of the peninsula of Florida are to be seen high pyramidal mounts with spacious and extensive avenues leading from them out of the town to an artificial lake or pond of water. The great mounts, highways, and artificial lakes up St. Juans on the east shore, just at the entrance of the great Lake George; one on the opposite shore, on the bank of the Little lake, another on Dunn’s island, a little below Charlotteville, and one on the large beautiful island just without the Capes of Lake George, in sight of Mount Royal, and a spacious one on the West banks of Musquitoe river near New Smyrna, are the most remarkable of this sort that occurred to me.”
The artificial lakes in this account are the excavations made in obtaining material, since filled with water. The highways, which, in another passage, the above quoted writer describes as “about fifty yards wide, sunk a little below the common level, and the earth thrown up on each side, making a bank of about two feet high,”300 seem, from both French and Spanish accounts to have been not unusual among the natives. Laudonniére mentions one of great beauty that extended from the village of Edelano to the river some three hundred paces in length,301 and another still more considerable at the head quarters of the powerful chief Utina,302 which must have been very near if not identical with that at Mount Royal. La Vega, in his remarkable chapter on the construction of the native villages,303 speaks of such broad passages leading from the public square at the base to the house of the chief on the summit of the mound that the natives were accustomed to throw up for its site. What we are to understand by the royal highways, Caminos Reales, near Tampa Bay, that lead from one town to another, (que van de un Pueblo al otro,)304 an expression that would not be applicable to mere trails, is not very evident.
Six miles by water above Lake Monroe, near the shore of a small lagoon on the left bank of the river, stands an oval mound of surface soil filled with human bones of so great an age, and so entirely decomposed, that the instrument with which I was digging passed through them with as much ease as through the circumjacent earth. Yet, among these ancient skeletons, I discovered numerous small blue and large white glass beads, undoubtedly inhumed at the formation of the tumulus. The bodies were all of adults and no special order in their deposition seemed to have been observed. Previous to my visit, I was informed that small earthenware articles had been disinterred, some of which were simply pyramids of triangular bases, whose use had much puzzled the finder. We know that this form, sacred in the mythologies of the old world to the worship of the productive power, had also a strong religious significance among the Natchez, and many other aboriginal tribes,305 and probably in connection with the burial of the dead, it possessed among the Floridians, as it did among the ancients and orientals,306 a symbolical connection with the immortality of the soul and the life after death.
In the rich hammock half a mile below Lake Harney on the left bank of the St. Johns, is a large oval mound, its transverse diameter at base forty yards, and thirty feet in height. It is surrounded by a ditch whence the soil of which it is constructed was taken. An extremely luxuriant vegetation covers the whole hammock and the mound itself, though few of the trees indicate a great age. On the same side of the river twenty miles above the lake, is another similar mound. They are abundant on the rich lands of Marion and Alachua counties, and in the hammocks of the Suwannee, and are found at least as far south as Charlotte’s Harbor and the Miami river. There is one on the government reserve in Tampa, another at the head of Old Tampa Bay, and a third on Long Key, Sarasota Bay. A portion of the latter has been washed away by the waters of the gulf and vast numbers of skeletons exposed, some of which I was assured by an intelligent gentleman of Manatee, who had repeatedly visited the spot and examined the remains, were of astonishing size and must have belonged to men seven or eight feet in height. This statement is not so incredible as it may appear at first sight. Various authors report instances of equally gigantic stature among the aborigines of our country. The chiefs of the province of Chicora, a portion of what is now South Carolina, were famous for their height, which was supposed to prove their royal blood;307 some inhabitants of the province of Amichel on the Gulf of Mexico were not less remarkable in this respect;308 and Beverly found among certain human bones religiously preserved in a temple of the Virginian Indians an os femoris, measuring two feet nine inches in length;309 while in our own days, Schoolcraft saw a humerus at Fort Hill, New York,310 and Lanman, sundry bones in a cave in Virginia311 that must have belonged to men compared to whom ours is but a race of dwarfs.
On the opposite banks of Silver Spring run, respectively a quarter of a mile and a mile and a half below the head, there are two tumuli. Pottery, axes, and arrow-heads abound in the vicinity, and every sign goes to show that this remarkable spot was once the site of a populous aboriginal settlement.
What now are the characteristics of this class of Floridian mounds? In summing up the whole available knowledge respecting them, we arrive at the conclusion that to whatever purpose they may have subsequently been applied, they were originally constructed as vast cemeteries. Mount Royal tumulus is but a heap of bones covered with earth, and none have as yet been opened but disclosed the same contents. They are very simple in construction. I saw no well-defined terraces, no groups of mounds, none with rectangular or octagonal bases, no ditches but those made in excavating material, no covered ways, no stratification; in short, none of those signs of a comparatively advanced art that distinguish the earthworks of Ohio. Their age is not great. Some indeed are covered with trees of large size, and in one case the annual rings were said to count back to the year 1145,312 (a statement, however, that needs confirmation,) but the rapid growth of vegetation in that latitude requires but a few years to produce a forest. The plantation of Lord Rolles, deserted some fourscore years since, is now overgrown with pines a foot in diameter, and I have seen old fields still bearing the marks of cultivation covered with lofty forests, and a spot of cleared land, forsaken for ten years, clothed with a thriving growth of palmetto and oak. Moreover, savage and civilized, all men agree in leaving nature to adorn the resting places of the dead, and hence it is an egregious error to date the passing away of a nation from the oldest tree we find on its graves. Rather, when we recollect that from the St. Lawrence to the Pampas, many tribes did religious homage to certain trees, and when we remember how universal a symbol they are of birth and resurrection, should we be surprised were they not cultivated and fostered on the sepulchres of the departed.313
We need no fanciful hypotheses to explain the reason and designate the time of these constructions. The bare recountal of the burial rites that prevailed among the aborigines is all sufficient to solve the riddle of bone-mounds both as they occur in Florida and all other States. The great feature of these rites was to preserve the bones of the dead, a custom full of significance in nature-worship everywhere. For this purpose the corpses were either exposed or buried till sufficient decomposition had ensued to permit the flesh to be easily removed. The bones were then scraped clean, and either carried to private dwellings, or deposited in public charnel-houses; such were the “Templos que servian de Entierros y no de Casas de Oracion,” seen by De Soto at Tampa Bay,314 and the “Osarios,” bone-houses, in Cofachiqui, among the Cherokees.315 Finally, at stated periods, they were collected from all quarters, deposited in some predetermined spot, and there covered with soil heaped into the shape of a cone. Annual additions to the same cemetery gave rise to the extraordinary dimensions that some attained; or several interments were made near the same spot, and hence the groups often seen.316
As the Natchez, Taencas, and other southern tribes were accustomed to place the council-house and chief’s dwelling on artificial elevations, both to give them an air of superior dignity, to render them easy of defence, and in some localities to protect from inundations,317 so the natives of Florida, in pursuance of the same custom, either erected such tumuli for this purpose, or more probably, only took advantage of those burial mounds that the vicissitudes of war had thrown in their hands, or a long period of time deprived of sacred associations. In the town of Ucita, where De Soto landed, “The Lordes house stoode neere the shore upon a very hie mounte made by hande for strength,”318 and La Vega gives in detail their construction.
While this examination of their sepulchral rites, taken in connection with the discovery of glass beads in situ, leaves no doubt but that such remains were the work of the people who inhabited the peninsula at its discovery by Europeans, it is not probable that the custom was retained much after this period. The Lower Creeks and Seminoles, so far from treating their dead thus, took pains to conceal the graves, and never erected mounds save in one emergency. This was in the event of a victorious battle, when they collected the dead into one vast pile, and covered them with earth,319 simply because it was the most convenient way to pay those last and mournful duties that humanity demands at our hands.
Another class of burial mounds, tallying very nearly with those said by the French to have been raised over their dead by the early Indians of the St. Johns, are not unusual in the hammocks along this river. They are only a few feet in height, resembling in appearance the hillocks of humus left by the roots of uprooted trees, from which they can be distinguished by their general range, (N., S.,) by the hollows on each side whence the earth was obtained, and by their construction. They are sometimes distinctly stratified, presenting layers of sand, ashes and charcoal, and clay. Bones, arrow-heads, axes, and pottery are found in them, but as far as my own observations extended, and those of a Norwegian settler bearing the classic name of Ivon Ericson, who assured me he had examined them frequently on the Upper St. Johns, in no case were beads or other articles indicating a familiarity with European productions discovered.
The utensils, the implements of war and the chase exhumed from the mounds, and found in their vicinity, do not differ from those in general use among the Indians of all parts at their first discovery,320 and go to corroborate the opinion that all these earthworks—and I am inclined to assert the same of the whole of those in the other Atlantic States, and the majority in the Mississippi valley—were the production, not of some mythical tribe of high civilization in remote antiquity, but of the identical nations found by the whites residing in these regions.
An equally interesting and more generally distributed class of antiquities are the beds and heaps of shells. These are found with more or less frequency on the shores of every State from Connecticut southward along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Some of them are of enormous extent, covering acres of ground, and of a singular height. For a long time it was a debateable point whether they belonged to the domain of the geologist or antiquarian; later researches have awarded them to both, by distinguishing between those of natural and artificial origin.321 The latter are recognized by the presence of darts, pottery, charcoal, &c., in original connection with the shells and debris throughout the mass, by the presence of surface soil, roots, and stumps, in situ beneath the heap, by nearness to an open fishing shore, and finally by the valves of the shell fish being asunder and their edges factured or burnt; on the other hand, whole closed shells as at Easton in Maryland, fragments of older fossils in original connection, distinct stratification,322 and remoteness from any known oyster bed, as those of northern Texas, northern Georgia, and perhaps of Cumberland county, New Jersey, are convincing proofs of their natural deposition.
Examples in Florida are numerous and striking. At Fernandina new town on Amelia island, a layer extends along the face of the bluff for one hundred and fifty yards and inland a quarter of a mile, sometimes three feet in depth, composed almost wholly of shells of the esculent oyster though with clams and conches sparsely intermixed. The valves are all separate, the shells in some places rotten, fractured and mixed with sand, charcoal, and pottery, while in others as clean and sound as if just from the hands of the oysterman.
Similar deposits are found in various parts of the island; on the main land opposite; on both sides of the entrance to the St. Johns; on Anastasia island; and every where along the coast both of the Atlantic and the Gulf. One of the most remarkable is Turtle Mound on Musquito Lagoon, near New Smyrna. “It is thirty feet high, composed almost altogether of separate oyster shells, it being rare to find an entire one; there are also some conch and clam shells, both of which are, however, exceedingly scarce. That it is artificial there is no doubt on my mind. Some eight or ten years since we experienced a gale in this section of the country, from the northwest, which caused that portion of the mound facing the river, the steepest part, to wash and fall considerably; being there a few days afterwards, I took considerable pains to examine the face of it, and found as low as the bottom and as high up as I could observe, numberless pieces of Indian pottery, and quantities of bones principally of fish, but no human ones; also charcoal and beds of ashes. The one on which I reside, opposite New Smyrna, is precisely of the same formation. Having had occasion some time back to dig a hole six or eight feet deep, I found precisely the same contents that I have described at Turtle Mound, with the addition of some few flint arrowheads.”
For this interesting description from the pen of a gentleman of the vicinity I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. F. L. Dancy, State Geologist of Florida; he adds from his own observation an account of one on Chrystal river, on the Gulf coast, four miles from its mouth. “The marsh of the river at that point is some twenty yards wide to the firm land, at which point this mound commences to rise; it is on all sides nearly perpendicular, the faces covered with brush and trees to which the curious have to cling to effect an ascent. It is about forty feet in height, the top surface nearly level, about thirty feet across, and covered with magnolia, live-oak, and other forest trees, some of them four feet in diameter. Its form is that of a truncated cone, and as far as can be judged from external appearance, it is composed exclusively of oyster shells and vegetable mould. These shells are all separated. The mound was evidently thrown up by the Indians for a lookout, as the Gulf can be distinctly seen from its summit. There are no oysters growing at this time within four or five miles of it.”
Other shell heaps are met with along the coast but none equalling in magnitude that seen by Sir Charles Lyell323 on Cannon’s Island at the mouth of the Altamaha, covering ten acres of ground, “elevated in some places ten feet and on an average five feet above the general level,” and which this eminent geologist attributes exclusively to the Indians, or the vast beds of Gnathodon Cuneatus, on Mobile Bay, described by Mr. Hale,324 which, however, are probably of natural formation, though containing quantities of human bones, pottery, images, &c.
It is strange that we find no notices of the formation of these heaps by the early travellers; I do not remember to have met with any except a line in Cabeza de Vaca, where, speaking of a tribe on the Gulf, he says their houses were “built of mats on heaps of oyster shells.”325
Along Manatee river I noticed numerous small heaps of conches, attributable to the later Indians, and in the post-pliocene shellbluffs at the mouth of this river, nearly twenty feet in height composed largely of a species of Pyrula,326 I found numerous fragments of a coarse, ill-marked, pottery, not, however, where the shells were unbroken and clean, but where they were fragmentary, mixed with charcoal, ashes and dirt, and never more than three feet below the surface. The singular hillocks, whose formation is a geological enigma not readily solved, so frequent along the St. Johns, vast aggregations of Helices with some Unios and other fresh water shells in connection, without admixture of earth, in some cases thirty feet high, and irregularly stratified, are not to be mistaken for those of artificial construction, though from the frequency of Indian relics found in them, they seem to have been a chosen place of burial for the aboriginal tribes.
Among the relics dating from a later period are the “Indian Old Fields.” These are portions of land once cleared and cultivated by the Seminoles, and are found wherever the fertility of the soil promised favorably for agriculture. They are very abundant in Alachua, where, says Bartram,327 “almost every step discovers traces of ancient human habitation,” reminding us of the time “when the Indians could assemble by thousands at ball play and other juvenile diversions and athletic exercises on these then happy fields and green plains.” Such is the tenacity of the soil for retaining impressions, that the marks of tillage by which these are distinguished from the Spanish old fields are easily seen and readily discriminated, even after they are covered by a dense growth of trees.
