The mounds—monuments of a primitive race, found scattered over many parts of North America, especially in the valley of the Mississippi—have long attracted the attention of men curious in such speculations. These heir-looms of dim, oblivious centuries, seem to whisper mysteriously of a shadowy race, populous, nomadic, not altogether uncivilized, idolatrous, worshipping "in high places." The Anglo-Saxon ploughshare is busy in obliterating these memorials, but many yet survive, and many, perhaps, remain yet to be discovered. Whether they were the work of the progenitors of the Indians, or of a race long since extinct, is a question for such as have taste and leisure for such abstruse inquiries. The general absence of written language and of architectural remains, indicates a low grade of civilization, and yet the relics that have been disinterred, and the enormous extent of some of their earth-works, would argue a degree of art, and of collective industry, to which the Indians are entire strangers. We may, at the least, conclude that either they, in the lapse of ages, have greatly degenerated, or that the mound-makers were a distinct and superior race. Some of these mounds are found in Virginia. The most remarkable of these is the Mammoth Mound, in the County of Marshall. Mr. Jefferson[85:A] was of opinion that there is nothing extant in Virginia deserving the name of an Indian monument, as he would not dignify with that name their stone arrow-points, tomahawks, pipes, and rude images. Of labor on a large scale there is no remain, unless it be the barrows, or mounds, of which many are found all over this country. They are of different sizes; some of them constructed of earth, and some of loose stones. That they were repositories of the dead is obvious, but on what occasion they were constructed is a matter of doubt. Mr. Jefferson opened one of them near Monticello, and found it filled with human bones. The Mammoth Mound in Marshall County is 69 feet high, 900 in circumference at the base; in shape the frustrum of a cone, with a flat top 50 feet in diameter. An oak standing on the top has been estimated to be five hundred years old. In the interior have been discovered vaults, with pieces of timber, human skeletons, ivory beads, and other ivory ornaments, sea-shells, copper bracelets around the wrists of skeletons, with laminated mica, and a stone with hieroglyphic characters inscribed on it, in the opinion of some, of African origin. The whole mass of the mound is studded with blue spots, supposed to have been occasioned by deposites of the remains of human bodies consumed by fire. Seven lesser mounds are connected with the main one by low entrenchments. Some rude towers of stone, greatly dilapidated, are also found in the neighborhood. Porcelain beads are picked up, and a stone idol has been found, as also tubes of lead, blue steatite, syphon-like, drilled, twelve inches long, and finely polished.

The places of habitation of the Indians may yet be identified along the banks of rivers, by the deposites of shells of oysters and muscles, which they subsisted upon, as also of ashes and charred wood, arrow-points, fragments of pottery, pipes, tomahawks, mortars, etc. Vestiges may be traced of their moving back their cabins when urged by the accumulation of shells and ashes. Standing on such a spot one's fancy may almost repeople it with the shadowy forms of the aborigines, and imagine the flames of the council-fire projecting its red glare upon the face of the York or the James, and hear their wild cries mingling with the dash of waves and the roar of the forest. Here they rejoice over their victories, plan new enterprises of blood, and celebrate the war-dance by the rude music of the drum and the rattle, commingled with their own discordant yells.

The Indians of Virginia were tall, erect, and well-proportioned, with prominent cheek-bones; eyes dark and brilliant, with an animal expression, and a sort of squint; their hair dark and straight. The chiefs were distinguished by a long pendant lock. The Indians had little or no beard, and the women served as barbers, eradicating the beard, and grating away the hair with two shells. Like all savages, they were fond of toys and tawdry ornaments. The principal garment was a mantle, in winter dressed with the fur in, in summer with it out; but the common sort had scarce anything to hide their nakedness, save grass or leaves, and in summer they all went nearly naked. The females always wore a cincture around the middle. Some covered themselves with a mantle of curiously interwoven turkey feathers, pretty and comfortable. The greater part went barefoot; some wore moccasins, a rude sandal of buckskin. Some of the women tattooed their skins with grotesque figures. They adorned the ear with pendants of copper, or a small living snake, yellow or green, or a dead rat, and the head with a bird's wing, a feather, the rattle of a rattlesnake, or the hand of an enemy. They stained the head and shoulder red with the juice of the puccoon.

The red men dwelt for the most part on the banks of rivers. They spent the time in fishing, hunting, war, or indolence, despising domestic labor, and assigning it to the women. These made mats, baskets, pottery, hollowed out stone-mortars, pounded the corn in them, made bread, cooked, planted corn, gathered it, carried burdens, etc. Infants were inured to hardship and exposure. The Indians kindled a fire quickly "by chafing a dry pointed stick in a hole of a little square piece of wood, which, taking fire, sets fire to moss, leaves, or any such dry thing." They subsisted upon fish, game, the natural fruits of the earth, and corn, which they planted. The tuckahoe-root, during the summer, was an important article of diet in marshy places. Their cookery was not less rude than their other habits, yet pone and hominy have been borrowed from them, as also, it is said, the mode of barbecuing meat. Pone, according to the historian Beverley, is derived "not from the Latin panis, but from oppone," an Indian word; according to Smith, ponap signifies meal-dumplings. The natives did not refuse to eat grubs, snakes, and the insect locust. Their bread was sometimes made of wild oats, or the seed of the sunflower, but mostly of corn. Their salt was only such as could be procured from ashes. They were fond of roasting ears of corn, and they welcomed the crop with the festival of the green-corn dance. From walnuts and hickory-nuts, pounded in a mortar, they expressed a liquid called pawcohiccora. The hickory-tree is indigenous in America. Beverley has fallen into a curious mistake in saying that the peach-tree is a native of this country. Indian-corn and tobacco, although called indigenous, appear to have grown only when cultivated. They are never found of wild spontaneous growth. In their journeys the Indians were in the habit of providing themselves with rockahominy, or corn parched and reduced to a powder.

They dwelt in towns, the cabins being constructed of saplings bent over at the top and tied together, and thatched with reeds, or covered with mats or bark, the smoke escaping through an aperture at the apex. The door, if any, consisted of a pendant mat. They sate on the ground, the better sort on matchcoats or mats. Their fortifications consisted of palisades ten or twelve feet high, sometimes encompassing an entire town, sometimes a part. Within these enclosures they preserved, with pious care, their idols and relics, and the remains of their chiefs. In hunting and war they used the bow and arrow—the bow usually of locust, the arrow of reed, or a wand. The Indian notched his arrow with a beaver's tooth set in a stick, which he used in the place of a file. The arrow was winged with a turkey-feather, fastened with a sort of glue extracted from the velvet horns of the deer. The arrow was headed with an arrow-point of stone, often made of white quartz, and exquisitely formed, some barbed, some with a serrate edge. These are yet to be found in every part of the country. For knives the red men made use of sharpened reeds, or shells, or stone; and for hatchets, tomahawks of stone, sharpened at one end or both. Those sharpened only at one end, at the other were either curved to a tapering point, or spheroidally rounded off, so as to serve the purpose of a hammer for breaking or pounding. In the middle a circular indenture was made, to secure the tomahawk to the handle. They soon, however, procured iron hatchets from the English. Trees the Indians felled by fire; canoes were made by dint of burning and scraping with shells and tomahawks. Some of their canoes were not less than forty or fifty feet long. Canoe is a West Indian word, the Powhatan word is quintan, or aquintan.[89:A] The women manufactured a thread, or string of bark, or of a kind of grass called pemminaw, or of the sinews of the deer. A large pipe, adorned with the wings of a bird, or with beads, was the symbol of friendship, called the pipe of peace. A war-chief was styled werowance, and a war-council, matchacomoco. In war, like all savages, they relied mainly on surprise, treachery, and ambuscade; in the open field they were timid; and their cruelty, as usual, was proportionate to their cowardice.

The Virginia Indians were of course idolatrous, and their chief idol, called Okee, represented the spirit of evil, to appease whom they burnt sacrifices. They were greatly under the influence and control of their priests and conjurors, who wore a grotesque dress, performed a variety of divinations, conjurations, and enchantments, called powwowings, after the manner of wizards, and by their superior cunning and shrewdness, and some scanty knowledge of medicine, contrived to render themselves objects of veneration, and to live upon the labor of others. The superstition of the savages was commensurate with their ignorance. Near the falls of the James River, about a mile back from the river, there were some impressions on a rock like the footsteps of a giant, being about five feet apart, which the Indians averred to be the footprints of their god. They submitted with Spartan fortitude to cruel tortures imposed by their idolatry, especially in the mysterious and horrid ordeal of huskanawing. The avowed object of this ordeal was to obliterate forever from the memory of the youths subjected to it all recollection of their previous lives. The house in which they kept the Okee was called Quioccasan, and was surrounded by posts, with human faces rudely carved and painted on them. Altars on which sacrifices were offered, were held in great veneration.

The diseases of the Indians were not numerous; their remedies few and simple, their physic consisting mainly of the bark and roots of trees. Sweating was a favorite remedy, and every town was provided with a sweat-house. The patient, issuing from the heated atmosphere, plunged himself in cold water, after the manner of the Russian bath.

The Indians celebrated certain festivals by pastimes, games, and songs. The year they divided into five seasons, Cattapeak, the budding time of spring; Messinough, roasting ear time; Cohattayough, summer; Taquitock, the fall of the leaf; and Popanow, winter, sometimes called Cohonk, after the cry of the migratory wild-geese. Engaged from their childhood in fishing and hunting, they became expert and familiar with the haunts of game and fish. The luggage of hunting parties was carried by the women. Deer were taken by surrounding them, and kindling fires enclosing them in a circle, till they were killed; sometimes they were driven into the water, and there captured. The Indian, hunting alone, would stalk behind the skin of a deer. Game being abundant in the mountain country, hunting parties repaired to the heads of the rivers at the proper season, and this probably engendered the continual hostilities that existed between the Powhatans of the tide-water region and the Monacans, on the upper waters of the James, and the Mannahoacks, at the head of the Rappahannock. The savages were in the habit of exercising themselves in sham-fights. Upon the first discharge of arrows they burst forth in horrid shrieks and the war-whoop, so that as many infernal hell-hounds could not have been more terrific. "All their actions, cries, and gestures, in charging and retreating," says Captain Smith, "were so strained to the height of their quality and nature, that the strangeness thereof made it seem very delightful." For their music they used a thick cane, on which they piped as on a recorder. They had also a rude sort of drum, and rattles of gourds or pumpkins. The chastity of their women was not held in much value, but wives were careful not to be suspected without the consent of their husbands.

The Indians were hospitable, in their manners exhibiting that imperturbable equanimity and uniform self-possession and repose which distinguish the refined society of a high civilization. Extremes meet. Yet the Indians were in everything wayward and inconstant, unless where restrained by fear; cunning, quick of apprehension, and ingenious; some were brave; most of them timorous and cautious; all savage. Not ungrateful for benefits, they seldom forgave an injury. They rarely stole from each other, lest their conjurors should reveal the offence, and they should be punished.[91:A]

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