historic Man_, chap. x. The annual _Smithsonian Reports_
for thirty years past illustrate the growth of knowledge and
progressive changes of opinion on the subject. The
bibliographical account in Winsor's _Narr. and Crit. Hist._, i.
397-412, is full of minute information.]

[Footnote 156: _Houses and House-Life_, chap. ix.]

[Sidenote: The mounds were probably built by different peoples in the
lower status of barbarism;]

[Sidenote: by Cherokees;]

[Sidenote: and by Shawnees, and other tribes.]

Recent researches, however, make it more and more improbable that the
mound-builders were nearly akin to such people as the Zunis or similar
to them in grade of culture. Of late years the exploration of the
mounds has been carried on with increasing diligence. More than 2,000
mounds have been opened, and at least 38,000 ancient relics have been
gathered from them: such as quartzite arrow-heads and spades, greenstone
axes and hammers, mortars and pestles, tools for spinning and weaving,
and cloth, made of spun thread and woven with warp and woof, somewhat
like a coarse sail-cloth. The water-jugs, kettles, pipes, and sepulchral
urns have been elaborately studied. The net results of all this
investigation, up to the present time, have been concisely summed up by
Dr. Cyrus Thomas.[157] The mounds were not all built by one people, but
by different tribes as clearly distinguishable from one another as
Algonquins are distinguishable from Iroquois. These mound-building
tribes were not superior in culture to the Iroquois and many of the
Algonquins as first seen by white men. They are not to be classified
with Zunis, still less with Mexicans or Mayas, in point of culture, but
with Shawnees and Cherokees. Nay more,--some of them _were_ Shawnees and
Cherokees. The missionary Johann Heckewelder long ago published the
Lenape tradition of the Tallegwi or Allighewi people, who have left
their name upon the Alleghany river and mountains.[158] The Tallegwi
have been identified with the Cherokees, who are now reckoned among the
most intelligent and progressive of Indian peoples.[159] The Cherokees
were formerly classed in the Muskoki group, along with the Creeks and
Choctaws, but a closer study of their language seems to show that they
were a somewhat remote offshoot of the Huron-Iroquois stock. For a long
time they occupied the country between the Ohio river and the Great
Lakes, and probably built