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Show CLIMATE----INDIAN SUMMER----ABORIGINES. 79 Harmony is extremely fertile. The fields are not manured for many successive years, and produce the finest crops; such land, however, in good situations, is no longer cheap. The climate is salubrious, and the inhabitants attain a great age. The winters are generally mild; the changes of temperature are often very great and rapid. The cholera has not yet visited this country. We arrived at the season called the Indian summer, when, with a temperature of + 10° to 17° Reaumur, the atmosphere was gloomy and misty. Most persons experience, at this season, irregularities in the digestive organs, and head-ache. Poppig gives a very accurate account of the North American autumn, and Mrs. Trollope felt the peculiar effect of this warm autumnal weather on strangers; it is, however, very remarkable that this state of the atmosphere in the Ohio Valley quickly put an end to the cholera, on which Dr. Daniel Drake wrote an essay. The weather in the winter-time is generally bright and clear; sometimes there are fogs, and hoar frost, which encrusts the trees with the most beautiful crystals : parhelia and aurora borealis are frequently seen. On the 14th of December we had a tremendous thunder-storm at daybreak; Reaumur's thermometer was at + 2°; the rain, thunder, and lightning were equally violent; the latter covered the heavens with a sheet of fire, and was extremely dazzling; the thunder resembled a discharge of artillery. We were told that, in the preceding year, 1831, the weather had been exceedingly unhealthy, and the inhabitants even affirmed that wounds would not heal. Like the whole of the interior of North America, the country on the Wabash has still numerous traces of a very early extinct original population, of which even the present Indians have no traditions, and whose remains have been spoken of by many writers. Warden, in his account of the United States, and more particularly in the great work, entitled " Antiquites Mexicaines," has mentioned such remains in all the States, and collected much information on this subject. Here, too, in the neighbourhood of Harmony, there are ancient tumuli, which, externally, are exactly similar to those which are everywhere found in our German forests. Lesueur had examined many of these tumuli, and sent part of the articles found in them to France. Some of the most considerable tumuli were found on the spot, near the back of the village, where Rapp made his churchyard, and which is now planted with acacias. The bones of the Swabian peasants are here mingled with those of the aboriginal Indians. Lesueur dug through some of those tumuli, which are now much levelled, and covered with greensward, and found a right-angled oblong parallelogram, level at the bottom, formed of large flat stones, set edgewise, and likewise covered over with similar stones. Some decayed bones were found in it, of which I received a considerable number from Mr. Lesueur, and sent them to Mr. Blumenbach, at Gottingen. This mode of interment is not that of the present Indians, who themselves affirm that these tumuli were made by the whites. Most of the skulls which were found were without the bones of the face, and all were very much decayed. The race of men to which they belonged were not smaller than those now existing, and, consequently, afford no evidence of a dwarfish race, which has been fabulously m • |
