Actually the Moundbuilders had been not a lost race, but the direct ancestors of certain of the upper Mississippi Indian tribes. But at that time only a few antiquarians knew that the Indians had made a practice of exhuming, collecting together, and reburying in mounds all the bones of the recently dead. Even after the coming of the white man this ceremony, known as the Festival of the Dead, had been celebrated in the Mississippi Valley. The Indian forts, on the other hand, were the fairly recent handiwork of the Iroquois.f
