their chief settlements sufficiently old and populous
to send forth colonies. It is manifest in their remains that the
communities of this ancient people most remote from the populous centres
on the Ohio, east, north, and west, were, like all border settlements,
the rudest and least populous. The remains at these points do not
indicate either as much wealth or as many workers, and the places where
these borderers settled must have been the latest occupied and the
earliest abandoned. One diligent investigator, who believes they came
originally from Mexico, speaks of the time of their stay in the country
as follows:

"When we consider the time required to people the whole extent of the
territory where their remains are found, and bring that people into a
condition to construct such monuments, and when we reflect on the
interval that must have passed after their construction until the epoch
of their abandonment, we are constrained to accord them a very high
antiquity."

He points out that they were sun worshipers, like the Mexicans and
Peruvians, and calls attention to the disks dug from their mounds, which
appear to have been designed as representations of the sun and moon.

Their long occupation of the country is suggested by the great extent of
their mining works. All who have examined these works agree with Colonel
Whittlesey that they worked the Lake Superior copper mines "for a great
length of time." How long they had dwelt in the Ohio Valley when this
mining began can not be told, but a very considerable period must have
elapsed after their arrival at that point before the mines were
discovered. We can not suppose the first settlers who came up from the
Gulf region to the Ohio Valley went on immediately, through the
wilderness a thousand miles, to hunt for copper mines on Lake Superior;
and, even after they began to explore that region, some time must have
passed before the copper was found.

After they discovered the mines and began to work them, their progress
could not have been rapid. As their open trenches and pits could be
worked only in the summers, and by methods that made their operations
much slower than those of modern miners, no great advance of their work
was possible during the working time of each season; and yet remains of
their mining works have been discovered wherever mines have been opened
in our day; and, as previously stated, they are known to exist in heavy
forests, where the modern mining