e tribes.

Geology is not without its testimony in this connexion. The antiquity
of human occupancy in the Mississippi valley is so extreme, that it
appears to mingle its evidences with some of its more recent geological
phenomena. The gradual disintegration and replacement of strata in that
quarter of the country, involve facts which are quite in accordance
with evidences of ancient eras drawn from other sources. It is some
seven and twenty years since the earliest evidences of this kind
arrested my attention. I was then descending the valley of the UNICAU
or White river, in the present area of Arkansas. This is one of that
series of large streams which descends the great slope or
_Wassershied_, extending from the foot of the Rocky Mountains into the
lower Mississippi. These streams have carried down for ages the
loosened materials of the elevated and mountainous parts of that great
range into the delta of the Mississippi, filling up immense ancient
inlets and seas, and pushing its estuary into the Mexican gulf. They
are still to be regarded as the vast geological laboratory in which so
large a part of the plains, islands and shores of that great off-drain
of the continent have been prepared. The evidences referred to in the
descent of the Unicau, consisted of antique, coarse pottery, scoria and
ashes, together with a metallic alloy of a whitish hue, but capable of
being cut partially with a knife. There were also deposites of bones,
but so decayed and fragmentary as to make it impossible to determine
their specific character. All these were, geologically, beneath the
various strata of sand, loam and vegetable mould, supporting the heavy
primitive forest of that valley. At Little Rock, in the valley of the
Arkansas, vestiges of art have recently been found in similar beds of
denudation, at considerable depths below the surface of the wooded
plains. They consisted of a subterraneous furnace, together with broken
clay kettles. In other portions of this wide slope of territory, a
species of antique bricks have been disinterred.[13] It is in this
general area, and in strata of a similar age, that gigantic bones,
tusks and teeth of the mastodon, and other extinct quadrupeds, have
been so profusely found within a few years, particularly in the Osage
valley.

[13] Arkansas paper.

But the greatest scene of superficial disturbance of post-human
occupancy, appears in the great alluvial angle of territory which lies
be