people,
also preserved in the Field Museum, came from the mound known as No.
25. This consisted of a large figure of a bird, in hammered copper,
fifteen and seven eighths inches long, with a pearl inserted to form
the eye. The head is quite expressive, and the tail-feathers well
represented, although the wings and the general proportions are rude.
This is shown about one third of the actual length.
The
Effigy mound was next examined. The first trial shafts proved it to be
evidently of human construction, and not of glacial origin, as some had
supposed. One or two open cuts were then begun, using teams with a
large shovel until indications of burials were found, when the further
work would be carried on by hand, with extreme care.
After
about two weeks, in which time several skeletons were unearthed, with
some shells, beads, and copper ornaments, a burial of extraordinary
character was reached on November 14. Here was lying a skeleton which
the newspapers soon reported as "The King of the Mound-Builders." It
was much decayed, but was covered and surrounded with a wealth of
relics. The skull was surmounted by a tall cap or helmet of copper,
from which extended a wonderful pair of antlers, exactly imitating
those of a deer, but made of wood and covered with copper. The whole
skeleton, to quote the words of Mr. Moorehead, "glittered with mica,
pearl, shell, and copper." Plates of the latter were above, beneath,
and around it, with bears' and panthers' teeth, etc., and over 1000
beads, many of them of pearl. The succeeding month, during which the
last cut was finished down to the base-line, and a third one much
advanced, revealed numerous skeletons, with abundant objects of the
same general kind, including a remarkable separate deposit of copper
articles of curious workmanship, ornaments of cut mica, and one of
cannel coal, fragments of meteoric iron and celts made therefrom, and
"many thousand pearl and shell beads." The latest trophy here unearthed
was another enormous ax of copper, nearly two feet in length,
unparalleled in the world.
The
first altar was next reached ; it was about four by five feet, and some
six inches deep, and had an immense variety of objects upon it and
around it, nearly all entirely ruined by the fire. Among them were
pearl beads.
The
largest altar had been not only heaped with all sorts of valuables,
but they had been piled around it so as to form a sloping mass of
twelve feet or more in diameter at the base. Among these was a layer of
mica plates of extraordinary size, eighteen or twenty inches in
diameter. It is not easy even now to obtain sheets of mica of such
dimensions, in any quantity. Carvings and effigies in bone and slate,
rock-crystal arrow-heads, obsidian knives, etc., etc., damaged and
broken by heat, were cemented together by half-melted copper. The
