That prehistoric men existed in Texas is made manifest by the flint arrow-heads that may be found in most parts, if not all over the country, wherever the surface rocks are exposed, amongst which they are usually discovered. In some places there have also been found stone knives, scrapers, hatchets, and hammers, especially in Western and Northwestern Texas.
These instruments, even the arrow-heads, required skill in their uniform construction, which makes it probable that the making of them was a vocation of those who were proficient in it, and that they were an object of commerce amongst those primitive people. This is rendered more probable from the fact that the very fine flint rock from which they are made is not found, so far as is generally known, in this country nearer than the flint hills and mountains of Arkansas and Alabama. In all the prairies west and north of the Trinity river, and in the mountains and high plains of the west, there are not, so far as known, any mounds of earth or rocks constructed by prehistorie men, and therefore it is to be presumed that those who inhabited or roamed over those parts of Texas were a nomadic race, not usually confined to any particular locality.
The prehistoric mound builders, probably a different race of people, were evidently located in their habitation, as shewn by the many earth mounds constructed by them, that are to be found in Texas and Louisiana.
During the years from 1842 to 1845, when I attended the district courts at Nacogdoches, in Eastern Texas, there was discovered an earth mound of oblong form fifty feet long and ten feet high, with a large sugar maple tree (then dead) that had grown near the middle of it, and in connection with the mound were four other less mounds, fifty yards apart, located in the line of a large circle, so that each of the small ones could be plainly seen while standing at the large one, indicating that they were constructed for some social purpose, either for habitations or for burial places, or for both, as has been the custom of the primitive races.
Another much larger mound, at least thirty feet high, stood in the edge of Mr. Bradshaw's field, about eighty yards south of the traveled road (then called Old San Antonio road) running from Nacogdoches to Crockett, three miles east of the Neches river, in what is now Cherokee county. Though I often saw the mound when passing along the road, I never stopped and examined it, as I did those at Nacogdoches.
Ten miles north of Palestine there was a set of lower mounds, situated in what was called Mound Prairie, south of which ran a small creek.
The town of Mount Pleasant, in Titus county, Texas, derived its name doubtless from one of those earth mounds in or near its original location.
The large population of mound builders were located in Louisiana, within and near the broad bottom about forty miles wide, formed by the overflows of the Arkansas, Red, and Mississippi rivers. A set of very large mounds, one of them forty feet high, was found near Bayou Tensas above Delhi. They were in a row, like those at Nacogdoches. There was a large one at Monticello, upon which a house was situated, and another one with a house on it in the village of Grand Cane on Bayou Rouge, and others lower down the bottom. None of them, however, could compare in size with the De Soto mound, situated two or three miles to the west of the Mississippi river, thirty miles above Vicksburg. It covered at least two acres of ground at the base, was sixty feet high, and had an area of a square acre on the top, on which had been constructed a fortification that was garrisoned with negro soldiers, commanded by white Federal officers in time of war. That mound was made memorable as the place of a battle on the 28th of May, 1863, in which the Confederates captured a large number of negro soldiers.
However much these mound builders may have wandered to the east or west for temporary pursuits, their permanent habitation must have been in the region where we find their mounds. That must have been their central location for association and primitive government, of which the erection of so many and so large mounds furnishes ample evidence. Whatever was the use made of them, whether as habitations, burial places, or places for worship, or as refuges from attacks of savage animals at night, they were erected under some strong incentive and conviction for their necessity; for they required great labor, regulated by some system in the control of those who constructed them. For instance, the De Soto mound contained many thousands of cubic feet of earth, and the digging and carrying the earth, and piling it up to the height of sixty feet, required an immense amount of labor, directed by some common design.
These mounds were not built as a protection against overflows of the rivers entirely, though they might have served for that purpose occasionally in the Mississippi bottom, for many of them were erected where there were no such overflows. All of them were found near some stream of water, which may indicate their use for fishing, but certainly for domestic purposes. The location of those mounds, at distances apart of easy travel from one to the other, indicated the association of a race of people in some sort of organized combination. It is probable also that this race of people, inhabiting the territory of Texas and Louisiana, were only a part of a very numerous race that extended in association all along up the Mississippi river and to what is now the State of Ohio, where numerous mounds have been discovered since its settlement by the Anglo-American population.
The most important subjects of inquiry about the mound builders are as to how they subsisted, and why they became extinct as a people. It can be well imagined that in their time there was a rank forage of grasses spread over the prairies and forests, and of reeds and canes in the branches, creeks, and rivers, that attracted and sustained large numbers of herbivorous animals, such as bisons, elks, deer, and other less animals, and that carnivorous animals, such as bears, panthers, wolves, cats, foxes, and others, preyed upon those grazing animals. There must have been a continual war for supremacy by those people upon those ravenous beasts. In addition to animals fit for eating the numerous fruit-bearing trees, and the birds and fowls that resorted to them, and the fishes in the creeks and rivers, furnished an abundant supply of food, and the skins of animals served for clothing when necessary.
They may also have had occasionally to contend with other races of people for the protection of their homes and hunting grounds. Daniel Boone, we are told, tried the experiment of such a life for about two years in the wilds of Kentucky, and got tired of it. It made him notorious—perhaps from the singularity of it. “Boone's Lick” is left behind to commemorate his primitive exploit of savagery. This is referred to in order to show that men who know a better way will not endure such life long, except on compulsion. The compulsion of the prehistoric men was their want of knowledge of, and consequently their want of desire for, any better way.
They were somewhat like the Indian chief of one of the wild tribes, who had lived all his life on buffalo meat and pecans, and who was carried by an Indian agent to Washington, and was there asked by some person what he thought of the great houses, steamboats, and railroads, and other fine things that he had seen. His answer, in effect, was that he was not surprised that white man could make all these things, but he was surprised that the white man could first think that he wanted them.
The Indian spoke from his own standpoint, and was mistaken in thinking the white man first thought he wanted those things. For that want was the final product of growing wants during numerous past centuries, from a primitive start upwards from the condition of prehistoric races of men.
Much of what can be said about these prehistoric races is necessarily speculative surmises or presumptions from facts, not leading to conclusions of absolute certainty. But there is one circumstance pertaining to them from which may be deduced a most important moral, social, and political lesson, instructive to the people of this or any other age, and this is their extinction as a race of people, and the reason of it. It is not known, nor is it even probable, that the American Indians were descendants of the mound builders; and if they were, they had advanced but little from the condition, as we suppose it to have been, of the prehistoric races. Their habitual indisposition to labor, and the absence of any works or fabrics requiring it, when America was discovered by white men, rebuts any such presumption of fact.
The reason why those prehistoric races became extinct, if they were not destroyed by succeeding and more powerful races, is that they did not till the soil as one of or the principal means of subsistence. There is no evidence left where they existed of their having thought of or adopted that better way of perpetuating their race. The cultivation of the soil for such a purpose, as from our information of its earliest adoption upon the Nile in Egypt and upon the Euphrates in Asia, draws men closer together, makes more intimate their association, causes the construction of houses and other improvements, and leads necessarily to the claim of rights of person and property, and the establishment of government to protect them; all which puts men in the attitude of combined organization for individual well-being and the common protection of the body politic thus formed. This has been the starting movement upwards in all of the great nations of people that have existed and that still exist. In most if not all of them there has been a period of their growth when rural homes, with their occupations and surroundings were the most cherished and the most honored abodes of men. Then prosperity filled the horn of plenty to overflowing, then patriotism knew no bounds in the love of home and country, and then independent manhood rated honor with life. The nation then, large or small, was intrinsically powerful and happy, and so continued until ambition ran riot after the glittering bauble of national greatness with its costly magnificence, and after national power or superiority over other nations; and then, just as it grew in reputed grandeur in its superstructure, the great mass of people, upon whose shoulders it was reared, sank under the exactions necessary to build up and sustain it; and that is the malady with which all of the great nations of the past have sickened and died, that are no more. Any country whose government allows agriculture with its concomitant interests to be repressed and degraded, to promote the objects of the greed and selfishness or the love of power, is hazarding the prosperity, patriotism, and independent manhood of the mass of the people governed by it.
Nor is this merely pessimistic imaginings, but simply the calm interpretation of human destiny, when the Cincinnatus-like homely virtues of practical life are lost in the aspiring evolution to attain to higher civilization and national fame, as it has been illustrated in the history of the past, ever since mankind struggled up from the condition of the prehistoric races.
