or more of their sides, showing the power of the forces which were engaged in their transportation from their original beds. Nuggets of galena (sulphide of lead) and of native copper are occasionally met with, and have had the usual effect of exciting the imaginations of those who are ignorant of the fact that the rocks which contain these metals do not occur nearer than the galena region of Northern Illinois.
The "coal measures," as given in the paragraph preceding the last, furnish the only rock formations to be found in the county. There seem to be no outcrop of beds overlying this section. The first, or uppermost, vein of coal is covered by a few feet of soil only. The argillaceous limestone below it is very thinly laminated, being mingled with much clay; but the shales covering the next vein constitute a fair working roof.
The sandy iron-stones are interesting to the fossil hunter, as they contain numerous fragmentary remains of fishes, insects, etc. Fossiliferous strata of an interesting character continue exposed along the Little Vermillion to its mouth and down the Wabash. Outcrops of the above mentioned strata are found along the principal streams throughout the county.
In ascending the Big Vermillion we find on its south bank, a mile below Eugene, a bluff of banks of from twenty-five to thirty feet of irregularly bedded, highly ferruginous, coarse-grained sandstone, often containing comminuted plant remains, with some large fragments of trees, etc. Some of the beds are sufficiently solid to make good building stone. In quarrying them many fine trunks and branches of Lepidodendron and Sigillaria have been found, with a few fruits of Trigonoearpum. In the vicinity are some fine large stems of Syringotlendron Porteri.
Wells sunk below the limestone at Perrysville,, to a reported depth of ninety feet, are said to have encountered no coal; but coal may be found in the vicinity, in consequence of the irregular dip of the strata.
Good coal underlies most of the surface of Vermillion County, and is now mined abundantly at various points. A total thickness of eight feet would probably be a small enough estimate for the coal underlying every square miles of the county. Since the advent of railroads many large coal mines have been opened and worked, although some have been wholly or in part abandoned, either on account of competition in other parts of the country or of finding better mines in the vicinity.
The principal iron ore found in the county is an impure carbonate, occurring in nodules and irregular layers or bands. These nodules once were supplied to a furnace on Brouillet's Creek, where they yielded thirty-three per cent. of iron. The ore in the county varies from twenty-five to forty-five per cent. of iron. Along the bottoms of Norton's Creek, near the head of Helt's Prairie, a bed of bog iron ore, said to be three feet thick and covering six to eight acres, has been discovered.
Zinc blende (sulphide of zinc), frequently occurs, in small quantities, in the cracks and cavities of some of the iron-stone nodules. Its appearance at one place on the Little Vermillion gave rise to the so-called "Silver Mine."
The second bottoms, or terrace prairies, in Vermillion County, in order from the north, are named Walnut Mound, Eugene or Sand, Newport and Helt's. The soil is a black, sandy loam, producing the richest crops. These terraces comprise about three-tenths of the county, and are from thirty-five to sixty-five feet above the low-water mark, while the higher portions of the county are from 250 to 270 feet above low-water.
Says Professor Collett, in his Geological
Report for 1880: "Remains of the mammoth have been discovered in nearly all sections of Indiana. They have consisted, as a rule, of the most compact bones of these animals, as the teeth, tusks, jaws and thigh-bones. Some of the best preserved teeth of the mammoth were found in the counties of Vigo, Parke, Vermillion, Wayne, Putnam and Vanderburg. Thirty individual specimens of the remains of the mastodon have been found in this State," etc.
Reading the above report inspired a waggish son of the Muse, Judge Buskirk, formerly Attorney-General of the State, to indict the following warning:
It thus appears that Professor Collett,
Our State geologist
and palaeontologist,
Is digging up for his learned wallet
Every colossal
Dirty old fossil
In the shape of jaw-bones, tusk and teeth,
He is able to find our swamps beneath,
Handed down from the old heroic
Ages, named the Palaeozoic.
When he strikes a huge nasty one
Named Giganteus Mastodon,
Or in the beds of ancient ponds
Digs up big Bison latifrons,
Or an Elephas Americanus,
And others the name of which,
Preserving the fame of which,
To pronounce is enough to cause tetanus,
It seems that at once, with his fossil-stuffed wallet,
Out marches the palaeontologist Collett,
And with his little hammer
And scientific grammar
First knocks a mammoth tooth,
To put into his grip-sack;
Then constructs an awful name
By means of which to skip back
With a great rhonchisouant fury, on
The epochs carboniferous and Silurian.
Now allow me as a friend, Professor Collett,
To advise you to put up your learned wallet,
Until the present Legislature has adjourned;
Or else by misadventure it might come to pass
Some day you'd strike the bones of a mammoth ancient ass;
And when by the Legislature the circcumstance was learned,
At once you'd feel the tempest of their ire
Roused by your sacrilege upon their ancient sire,
And straight they'd have your salary in no fix, --
Worse than you ever knocked a tooth from a
Jeffersoni Megalonyx.
The following sketches of the Mound-Builders, Indians, etc., are compiled from data furnished by Hon. John Collett. When first explored by the white race, this county was occupied by savage Indians, without fixed habitation, averse to labor and delighting only in war and the chase. Their misty traditions did not reach back to any previous people or age, but numerous earth-works are found in this region of such extent as to require for their construction much time and the persistent labor of many people. Situated on river bluffs, their location combines picturesque scenery, adaptability for defense, convenience for transportation by water, and productive lands. These are not requisites in the nomadic life of red men, and identifies the Mound-Builders as a partially civilized people. Their mounds and other works are of such extent that it required years of labor, with basket and shovel, to erect, and such coordination of labor as to indicate the rule of priestly government or regal authority; they were certainly to that extent civilized. The vastness of their work indicates a large community of people, so that governments were necessary, which must have had civil power to request and require the necessary labor. The implements found in the graves, mounds and tombs, were more often domestic and agricultural, and indicate a peaceful, obedient race. Their temples were defended by bulwarks of loving hearts rather than by warrior braves. Many of the religious emblems and articles of utility made of stone, point back to the earliest forms of sentiment represented by the fire and sun worshipers of Central Asia, and give a clue to the reason why their favorite habitations and mounds were as a rule never placed beneath the eastern bluffs of streams, but on the other hand were so located in elevated positions or on the wetern bluffs, that when the timber was cleared away and the land reduced to cultivation, a long outlook was given to the east and to the sunrise, from which direction their expected
Messiah or ruler was to come. Similar customs still prevail in Mexico.
Traditions intimate that the tribes were driven southward from the northern portion of the continent, and these traditions are corroborated by the discovery of relics in this region made from material found only far to the north.
Clusters of mounds are found in Vermillion County on Mound Prairie, near the Shelby battle-ground, and nearly all along the tract between Eugene and Newport, many of them twenty to forty feet in diameter, four, five or six feet high, and the clusters containing from ten to eighty mounds. One memorable mound is situated in the northern part of the town of Clinton, from which earth was removed for road building about 1830. In it were found stone implements of the Mound-Builders, accompanied with copper beads, five copper rods, half an inch in diameter and eighteen inces long, showing that it was one of the earliest of the Mound-Builder's works, whilst they were also accompanied with other implements imported from the north.
Another on the Head farm near Newport, had copper rods or spear heads and smaller stone implements. These were probably burial mounds. A majority of them contained no relics, but were siimply abandoned mounds of habitation. Mr. Pigeon in his volume called "Dacoudah," says he noticed figured mounds of men and beasts on the south bank of the Little Vermillion, three or four miles from its mouth. A burial mound near the northeast corner contains a chief in a sitting position at the center. Radiating from his body like the spokes of a wheel were five persons, slaves or wives, to wait upon him in the other world. His useful implements for the other world were a great number of copper beads, from a half inch to an inch and a quarter in diameter, seven copper axes, one of which contained unmelted virgin silver as it occurs at Lake Superior, varying in weight from two to eight pounds, and seven copper rods, (spear-heads), with pots and crocks containing black mold as if it were food. The streams near their homes afforded fish for food, and the implements found indicated that they were skilled in handling fish spears and gigs. The soil surrounding their homes was always the choicest, with the addition of beautiful and engaging scenery. The relics found in their mounds show that in their more northern homes in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, the common northern material, the striped slate and copper, was abundant. In Vermillion County relics of this character, were scarce and precious, if not holy. At more southern points striped-slate implements of northern stone are very rare, while the precious copper could no longer be used in implement-making, but was beaten into the finest of sheets and bent over ornamental pendants. All these, and the customs of their burial, indicate an Asiatic origin, and prove conclusively that in their migration to this region they pass by more northern regions, including Lake Superior.
Afterward the northern barbarian came, of an intermediate race between the Mound-Builder and the red man. The Mound-Builders were driven away by this irruption their property seized, many of their wives made captive and adopted by the new people, Many of the customs of the old people consequently remained with the new comers, and the latter also deposited their dead in the old mounds, over the remains of the more ancient people. The number of individuals thus found buried together number from five to 2,000 or 3,000. Their graves and relics from the tombs are the only story of their lives.