HISTORY OF MICHIGAN. CHAPTER I. THE ABORIGINES. Scientists have ascribed to the Mound Builders varied origins, and though their divergence of opinion may, for a time, seem incompatible with a thorough investigation of the subject, and tend to a confusion of ideas, no doubt whatever may exist as to the comparative accuracy of conclusions arrived at by a few of the investigators. Like the vexed questions of the Pillar Towers and Garden Beds, it has caused much speculation, and elicited opinions from so many antiquarians, ethnologists, and travelers, that little remains to be known of the prehistoric peoples of America. That this continent is co-existent with the world of the ancients. can not be questioned. Every investigation, made under the auspices of modern civilization confirms the fact and leaves no channel open through which the skeptic can escape the thorough refutation of his opinions. China, with its numerous living testimonials of antiquity, with its ancient, though limited, literature and its Babelish superstitions, claims a continuous history from antediluvian times; but although its continuity may be denied with every just reason, there is nothing to prevent the transmission of a hieroglyphic record of its history prior to 1656 Anno Mundi, since many traces of its early settlement survived the Deluge, and became sacred objects of the first historical epoch. This very survival of a record, such as that of which the Chinese boast, is not at variance with the designs of a God who made and ruled the universe; but that an antediluvian people inhabited this continent, will not be claimed; because it is not probable, though it may be possible, that a settlement in a land which may be considered a portion of the Asiatic continent, was effected by the immediate followers of the first progenitors of the human race. Therefore, on entering the study of the ancient people who raised these tumulus monuments over large tracts of the country, it will be just sufficient to wander back to that time when the flood-gates of heaven were swung open to hurl destruction on a wicked. world; and in doing so the inquiry must be based on legendary, or rather upon many circumstantial evidences; for, so far as written narrative extends, there is nothing to show that a movement of people too far east resulted in a western settlement. THE FIRST IMMIGRATION. The first and most probable sources in which the origin of the Builders must be sought, are those countries lying along the eastern coast of Asia, which doubtless at that time stretched far beyond its present limits, and presented a continuous shore from Lapatka to Point Cambodia, holding a population comparatively civilized, and all professing some elementary form of Boodhism of later days. Those peoples, like the Chinese of the present, were bound to live at home, and probably observed that law until after the confusion of languages and the dispersion of the builders of Babel, in 1757, A. M.; but subsequently, within the following century, the old Mongolians, like the new, crossed the great ocean in the very paths taken by the present representatives of the race, arrived on the same shores, which now extend a very questionable hospitality to them, and entered at once upon the colonization of the country south and east, while the Caucasian race engaged in a similar movement of exploration and colonization over what may be justly termed the western extension of Asia, and both peoples growing stalwart under the change, attained a moral and physical eminence to which they never could lay claim under the tropical sun which shed its beams upon the cradle of the human race. That mysterious people who, like the Brahmins of to-day, worshipped some transitory deity, and in after years, evidently embraced the idealization of Boodhism, as preached in Mongolia early in the thirty-fifth century of the world, together with acquiring the learning of the Confucian and Pythagorean schools of the same period, spread all over the land, and in their numerous settlements erected these raths, or mounds, and sacrificial altars whereon they received their peroidical visiting gods, surrendered their bodies to natural absorption or annihilation, and watched for the return of some transmigrated soul, the while adoring the universe, which with beings they believed would be eternally existent. They possessed religious orders corresponding, in external show at least, with the Essenes or Theraputæ of the pre-Christian and Christian epochs, and to the reformed Theraputæ or monks of the present. Every memento of their coming and their stay which has descended to us is an evidence of their civilized condition. The free copper found within the tumuli; the open veins of the Superior and Iron Mountain copper mines, with all the modus operandi of ancient mining, such as ladders, levers, chisels and hammerheads, discovered by the French explorers of the Northwest and Mississippi, are conclusive proofs that those prehistoric people were highly civilized, and that many flourishing colonies were spread throughout the Mississippi Valley, while yet the mammoth, the mastodon, and a hundred other animals, now only known by their gigantic fossil remains, guarded the eastern shore of the continent, as it were, against supposed invasions of the Tower Builders who went west from Babel; while yet the beautiful isles of the Antilles formed an integral portion of this continent, long years before the European Northmen dreamed of setting forth to the discovery of Greenland and the northern isles, and certainly at a time when all that portion of America north of 45 deg. was an ice-incumbered waste. Within the last few years great advances have been made toward the discovery of antiquities whether pertaining to remains of organic or inorganic nature. Together with many small but telling relics of the early inhabitants of the country, the fossils of prehistoric animals have been unearthed from end to end of the land, and in districts, too, long pronounced by geologists of some repute to be without even a vestige of vertebrate fossils. Among the collected souvenirs of an age about which so very little is known, are twenty-five vertebræ averaging thirteen inches in diameter, and three vertabræ, ossified together measuring nine cubical feet; a thigh-bone five feet long by twenty-eight in diameter, and the shaft fourteen by eight inches thick, the entire lot weighing 600 pounds. These fossils are presumed to belong to the cretaceous period when the Dinosaur roamed over the country from east to west, desolating the villages of the people. This animal is said to be sixty feet long, and when feeding in cypress and palm forests, to extend himself eighty-five feet, so that he may devour the budding tops of those great trees. Other efforts in this direction may lead to great results, and culminate probably in the discovery of a tablet engraven by some learned Mound Builder, describing, in the ancient hieroglyphics of China, all those men and beasts whose history excites so much speculation. The identity of the Mound Builders with the Mongolians might lead us to hope for such a consummation; nor is it beyond the range of probability, particularly in this practical age, to find the future of some industrious antiquarian requited by the upheaval of a tablet written in the Tartar characters of 1700 years ago, bearing on a subject which can now be treated only on a purely circumstantial basis. THE SECOND IMMIGRATION may have begun a few centuries prior to the Christian era, and unlike the former expedition or expedtions, to have traversed northeastern Asia, to its Arctic confines, and then east to the narrow channel now known as Behring's Straits, which they crossed, and sailing up the unchanging Yukon, settled under the shadow of Mount St. Elias for many years, and pushing south commingled with their countrymen, soon acquiring the characteristics of the descendants of the first colonists. Chinese chronicles tell of such a people, who went north, and were never heard of more. Circumstances conspire to render that particular colony the carrier of a new religious faith and of an alphabetic system of representative character to the old colonists, and they, doubtless, exercised a most beneficial influence in other respects; because the influx of immigrants of such culture as were the Chinese, even of that remote period, must necessarily bear very favorable results, not only in bringing in reports |