Bristow,
who .was surgeon of the Army of the Cumberland during the Civil War,
that mussels of the Tennessee River were occasionally eaten 'as a
change' by the soldiers of that corps, and pronounced no bad article of
diet. Shells of the Unio are sometimes found in Indian graves, where
they had been deposited with the dead, to serve as food during the
journey to the land of spirits."
Dr.
Brinton saw on the Tennessee River and its tributaries numerous shell
heaps consisting almost exclusively of the Unio Virginianus (Lamarck).
In every instance he found shell heaps close to the water-courses, on
the rich alluvial bottom lands. He says : " The mollusks had evidently
been opened by placing them on a fire. The Tennessee mussel is
margaritifer-ous, and there is no doubt but that it was from this
species that the early tribes obtained the hoards of pearls which the
historian of De Soto's exploration estimated by bushels, and which
were so much prized as ornaments."'
A
source has recently been pointed out whence small pearls, and perhaps
some fine specimens, could have been obtained by the Indiana of
Florida, and in considerable quantities. In the Unios of some of the
fresh-water lakes of that State, there were found not less than 3,000
pearls, most of them small, . but many large enough to be perforated
and worn as beads. From one Unio there were taken eighty-four
seed-pearls ; from another fifty, from a third twenty, and from several
ten or twelve each. The examinations were chiefly confined to Lake
Griffin and its vicinity. It is said that upon one of the isles in Lake
Okeechobee are the remains of an old pearl fishery, and it is proposed
to open the shells of this lake, which are large, in hopes of finding
pearls of superior size and quality.
The
use of the pearl as an ornament by the southern Indians, and the
quantities of shells opened by them in various localities, make it seem
strange that it is not more frequently met with in the relic-beds and
sepulchral tumuli of that region ; but after exploring many shell and
earth mounds, Col. Charles C. Jones failed, except in a few instances,
to find pearls."
1 See Artificial Shell Deposits in the United States, in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1866, p. 357.
8 Antiquities of Southern Indians, p. 486.
