Excerpt from Hunting in Florida in 1874

The steamer stopping the second day for an hour at Volusia to wood up, an opportunity was afforded for examining the shell mound upon which the village is built. It is formed exclusively of fresh-water species, mainly Ampullarias and Paludinas with some Unios, as are all the mounds upon the river from a few miles above its mouth, and has evidently resulted from being the dwel ling-place of some of the earliest inhabitants during the successive stages of its formation, and the casting away of the shells, after extracting their contents for food. Professor Wyman, than whom no archaeologist has given more attention to their investigation, speaks with great confidence of their pre-indian origin. My brief stay resulted in unearthing a few pieces of pottery, at varying depths, and in determining the river line of the mound to be at least one hundred feet, with a height of six or eight feet, and of an uncertain extent inland, owing to the forest growth on the top of it.

The shell mounds of Florida, whether upon the coast or the banks of its rivers, and especially those abounding upon the St. John's from near its source to its mouth, must not be confounded with the sand or burial mounds no less abundant, but scattered all over the State, and giving no evidence of ever having been used for dwelling-places. In the fourth memoir of the Peabody Acad emy of Science, Vol. 1. 1875, Professor Wyman has presented in a volume of about one hundred pages quarto, finely illustrated, the result of his researches and conclusions, in respect to forty eight fresh-water shell mounds on the banks of the upper St. John's, and to which the reader is referred for the most complete account hitherto published of these most interesting relics.

Our nights upon the St. John's were moonless, but the darkness did not prevent at least one side issue up a narrow creek, for an hour, to leave provision stores and whiskey, at the camp of a woodman. As we threaded our way in the Cimmerian gloom with interlacing branches overhead, and sometimes sweeping the upper deck, the wild fowl were startled from their slumbers, and the owls roused to a vigorous protest against the invasion of their do mains. But the lynx-eyed pilot, who successfully steered his way along the tortuous channel with not even the friendly glare of a lantern at the bow, was to me the greatest wonder of the excur siod.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.