Early Man in North America Kill a Mastodon. Were They Mound Builders?

 Early Man in North America Kill a Mastodon in Missouri

Several Native American historical accounts claim the mound builders in the Ohio Valley used the Mastodon as a beast of burden to construct the large earthworks in the Ohio Valley.

     Several accounts have appeared of discoveries tending to prove that primitive man in the United States was contemporaneous with the mastodon or mammoth. Three of these have attained a wide circulation. First in time as well as importance is that of Dr. Koch, of St. Louis. " In the year 1839, I discovered and disinterred in Gasconade County, Missouri, the bones of a Mastodon giganteus. The greater portion of the bones had been more or less burned by fire. The fire had extended, but a few feet beyond the space occupied by the animal and had been kindled by human agency with the design of killing the huge creature which had been found mired in the mud. The fore and hind legs of the animal were in perpendicular position in the clay with the toes attached to the feet. All the bones which had not been burned by the fire had kept their original position, standing upright, and apparently quite undisturbed in the clay, whereas those portions which had extended above the surface had been partially consumed. Mingled with the ashes and bones were many broken pieces of rock quarried from the river to be hurled at the animal. I found also among the ashes, bones, and rocks, several arrowheads, a stone spear-head, and some stone axes. The layer of ashes, etc., was covered by a stratum of alluvial deposits from eight to nine feet thick. [Koch afterward] found in Benton County several stone arrowheads, mingled with the bones of a nearly entire skeleton, mentioned above as the Missourian. Two arrowheads found with the bones were in a layer of vegetable mold, which was covered twenty feet in thickness with alternate layers of sand, clay and gravel. One of the arrowheads lay under the thigh bone of the skeleton, the bone actually resting in contact upon it. The layer of vegetable mold was some five or six feet thick, and the arrowhead and bones were found buried in it. Above this layer there were six undisturbed layers of clay, sand and gravel." 

. The Mastodon Mound, Grant County, Wisconsin.

. The Mastodon Mound, Grant County, Wisconsin.

THE "ELEPHANT" MOUND.

     By far the most important of the animal mounds, from the nature of the deductions it has given rise to, is the so-called "Elephant Mound," of Wisconsin. By its discovery and description the interesting question was raised as to the contemporaneousness of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon, an interest which is likely to be further enhanced by the more recent bringing to light in Iowa of two pipes carved in the semblance of the same animal, as well as a tablet showing two figures asserted by some archæologists to have been intended for the same animal.
    Although both the mound and pipes have been referred in turn to the peccary, the tapir, and the armadillo, it is safe to exclude these animals from consideration. It is indeed perhaps more likely that the ancient inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley were autoptically acquainted with the mastodon than with either of the above-named animals, owing to their southern habitat.

     Referring to the possibility that the mastodon was known to the Mound-Builders, it is impossible to fix with any degree of precision the time of its disappearance from among living animals. Mastodon bones have been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as is proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon, geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as an antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this animal was living at the time these were thrown up, granting even that the time of their erection has been overestimated. It must be admitted, therefore, that there are no inherent absurdities in the belief that the Mound-Builders were acquainted with the mastodon. Granting that they may have been acquainted with the animal, the question arises, what proof is there that they actually were? The answer to this question made by certain archæologists is—the Elephant Mound, of Wisconsin.

Recalling the fact that among the animal mounds many nondescript shapes occur which cannot be identified at all, and as many others which have been called after the animals they appear to most nearly resembling, carry out their peculiarities only in the vaguest and general way, it is a little difficult to understand the confidence with which this effigy has been asserted to represent the mastodon; for the mound (a copy of which as figured in the Smithsonian Annual Report for 1872 is here given) can by no means be said to closely represent the shape, proportions, and peculiarities of the animal whose name it bears. In fact, it is true of this, as of so many other of the effigies, the identity of which must be guessed, that the resemblance is of the most vague and general kind, the figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of any other animal. No hint is afforded of tusks, ears, or tail, and were it not for the snout the animal effigy might readily be called a bear, it nearly resembling in its general make-up many of the so-called bear mounds figured by Squier and Davis from this same county in Wisconsin. The latter, too, are of the same gigantic size and proportions.