River to
the Mississippi, while those of the northern lake rushed through the
Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and both lakes disappeared forever. For the next
four or five thousand years the early Ohio men kept very quiet; but we
need not suppose for that reason that there were none. Our Ice Folk, who
dropped their stone axes in the river banks, may have passed away with
the Ice Age, or they may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take
on some faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that
they went, and there is nothing to prove that they staid; but Ohio must
always have been a pleasant place to live in after the great thaw, and
it seems reasonable to think that the Ice Folk lingered, in part at
least, and changed with the changing climate, and became at last the
people who left the signs of their presence in almost every part of the
state.

Those were the Mound Builders, whose works are said to be two or three
thousand years old, though we cannot be very sure of that. There are
some who think that the mounds are only a few hundred years old, and
that their builders were the race of red men whom the white men found
here. One may think very much as one likes, and I like to think that the
Mound Builders were a very ancient people, who vanished many ages before
the Indians came here. They could not have been savages, for the region
where they dwelt could not have fed savages enough to heap up the
multitude of their mounds. Each wild man needs fifty thousand acres to
live upon, as the wild man lives by hunting and fishing; in the whole
Ohio country, the earliest white adventurers found only two or three
thousand Indians at the most; and the people who built those forts and
temples and tombs, and shaped from the earth the mighty images of their
strange bird-gods and reptile-gods, could have lived only by tilling
the soil. Their mounds are found everywhere in the west between the
Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, but they are found mostly
in Ohio, where their farms and gardens once bordered the Muskingum, the
Scioto, the two Miamis, and our other large streams, which they probably
used as highways to the rivers of the southwest.

Their forts were earthworks, but they were skillfully planned, with a
knowledge which no savage race has shown. They were real strongholds,
and they are so large that some of them inclose hundreds of acres within
walls of earth which still rise ten and twelve feet from t