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For instance, it has been suggested that the Mandan Indians were a separated and lost fragment of the mound-building people, they being noticeably unlike other Indians in many respects, lighter in color, and peculiar in manners and customs. What is conjectured may be true, but we have no means of proving its truth.
The animal forms are inferior to those carved in stone by some of the mound-building peoples. That any of these images were idols in the ordinary acceptation of the term is an idea that cannot be entertained.
Lamps, whistles, toys, bricks, tiles, and other articles in common use with many barbaric nations, are not found in this province. Pipes, so neatly shaped by other mound-building peoples, are here of a very rude character, a point indicating decided distinctions between the tribes of this province and those of neighboring sections.
Mexico, Central America, and Peru are dotted with the ruins of stone edifices, but in all the mound-building area of the United States not the slightest vestige of one attributable to the people who erected the earthen structures is to be found. The utmost they attained in this direction was the construction of stone cairus, rude stone walls, and vaults of cobble-stones and undressed blocks.
To carry the imitative idea farther and to suggest, as has been done by writers, that the carver of the Mound-Building epoch sat down to his work with the animal or a model of it before him, as does the accurate zoological artist of our own day, is wholly insupported by evidence derivable from the carvings themselves, and is of too imaginative a character to be entertained.
I find it most reasonable to believe that the mounds in this part of the continent were used precisely as similar structures were used in Mexico and Central America. The lower mounds, or most of them, must have been constructed as foundations of the more important edifices of the mound-building people.
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