Indian Burial Mound in Missouri
By Horace L. Mason, Corning, Missouri. The “Mound Builders” occupied and were numerous in this portion of the Missouri River Valley, latitude 40° 17' North, longitude, 95°24' West from Greenwich. Extensive mounds now exist. I have examined their contents to some extent and sent to the Smithsonian Institute specimens of pottery that I have taken out of them. The only indication of human remains were teeth in great numbers. They were so ancient that the bones were entirely decomposed. The pottery specimens were mostly spherical shaped pots, holding about one gallon, made of material, when freshly broken, resembling slate, and from one-fourth to one-third of an inch in thickness. The outside looked as though they had been subjected to the action of fire; as though used for cooking, having an eye to accommodate a bail, resembling much in form and shape the cast iron pot of the present day, used for cooking over the fireplace. Also, open dishes from two to three inches deep, and six to eight inches in diameter, and rudely ornamented while in a plastic state, and made of the same material as before described, and about one-fourth of an inch in thickness.
One mound in this immediate vicinity, in a good state of preservation, from one hundred to one hundred and ten feet in diameter, and six to eight feet high, situated on the Missouri bottom prairie, originally about three-fourths of a mile from the run, and near two miles to the foot of the bluffs.\
It was formed of the soil or alluvial deposit, like the bottomlands here, except a layer at the bottom about six inches in thickness, which was brought from the bluffs. It is easily distinguished from the soil on the bottom called geologically “loess or bluff formations,” a finely pulverized marl, almost as white as sand. It must have been prepared in some manner, as when reached by the spade. We could hardly cut through it; it broke in chunks like mortar. Stone implements are rarely found here. The few specimens I have seen are entirely different from specimens frequent and numerously found in Ohio.
