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GEMS AND PRECIOUS STONES IN THE
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A few were obtained in an extensive relic bed on the Savannah River, above Augusta, the largest being 4/10 of
an inch in diameter, and all of them blackened by fire. Many of the
smaller mounds on the coast of Georgia do not contain pearls, because
at the period of their construction the custom of burning the dead
appears to have prevailed very generally ; hence, it may be that the
pearls were either immediately consumed or so seriously injured as to
crumble out of sight.
This
absence of pearls tends somewhat to confirm the opinion that beads and
ornaments made from the thicker portions of shells that were carved,
perforated, and brilliant with their primal covering, were regarded by
the imaginative Spaniards as pearls. More minute investigation,
however, will doubtless reveal the existence of pearls in localities
where the pearl-bearing shells were collected. Perforated pearls have
been found in an ancrent burying-ground located near the bank of the
Ogeeche River, in Bryan County, Ga.; and many years ago, after a heavy
freshet on the Oconee River, which laid bare many Indian graves in the
neighborhood of the large mounds on Poullain's plantation, fully a
hundred pearls of considerable size were gathered.
There
can be no doubt that what were regarded as pearls by the early Spanish
voyagers were really such, although it is well known that shell-beads
have been found in mounds in connection with pearls ; but the numbers
found in Ohio, and which have been mentioned by Prof. Frederick W.
Putnam and by others, leave no room for doubt in this matter. That the
Indians of the South also had these pearls, both drilled and
undrilled, is beyond question. Notwithstanding the intimacy existing
between remote Indian tribes, as shown by many authorities, and the
fact that Pacific coast shells have been carried to Arizona, and that
clam shells have been found in Zuni cities by Lieut. Frank H. Cushing,
it is likely that these pearls came, not from the pearl oyster of the
Pacific coast, but from the marine shells of the Atlantic coast and the
fresh-water shells of the eastern part of the continent. It is more
than probable that the Indians opened the shell to secure the animal,
which they valued as an article of food ; that the
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