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THE
Mound Builders.
(Cup found in Mound at Rainy River, Aug 22nd, 1884.)
BY
GEORGE BRYCE, M.A., L.L.D.
Professor in Manitoba College and President of theHistorical Society, Winnipeg.
PRICE, 25 CENTS.
(Season 1884-85, Transaction 18.)
(HISTORICAL SOCIETY.)
Manitoba Free Press Print, Winnipeg.
The Mound Builders.
A Lost Race Described by Dr. Bryce, President of the Historical Society.
SEASON 1884-85
Ours are the only mounds making up a distinct mound-regionon Canadian soil. This comes to us as a part of the large inheritancewhich we who have migrated to Manitoba receive. Nolonger cribbed, cabined, and confined, we have in this our "greaterCanada" a far wider range of study than in the fringe alongthe Canadian lakes. Think of a thousand miles of prairie! Theenthusiastic Scotsman was wont to despise our level Ontario, becauseit had no Grampians, but the mountains of Scotland allpiled together would reach but to the foot hills of our Rockies.The Ontario geologist can only study the rocks in garden plots,while the Nor'wester revels in the age of reptiles in his hundredsof miles of Cretaceous rocks, with the largest coal and iron areaon the continent. As with our topography so with history.The career of the Hudson's Bay Company, which is in fact thehistory of Rupert's Land, began 120 years before the history ofOntario, and there were forts of the two rival Fur Companies onthe Saskatchewan and throughout the country, before the firstU. E. Loyalist felled a forest tree in Upper Canada. We are especiallyfortunate in being the possessors also of a field for archaeologicalstudy in the portion of the area occupied by the moundbuilders—the lost race, whose fate has a strange fascination forall who enquire into the condition of Ancient America.
The Indian guide points out these mounds to the student ofhistory with a feeling of awe; he says he knows nothing of them;his fathers have told him that the builders of the mounds wereof a different race from them—that the mounds are memorials of avanished people—the "Ke-te-anish-i-na-be," or "very ancientmen." The oldest Hudson's Bay officer, and the most intelligentof the native people, born in the country, can only give somevague story of their connection