Morton County – Giant Race
-Near Mandon, Dakota, is an old cemetery covering nearly one hundred acres. Excavations reveal the fact that trenches were filled with the bodies of men and animals thrown in promiscuously. The Human Bones Belonged to a Giant Race, while the dark, beautifully decorated pottery shows the race to have been skilled in that kind of work. There are many indications of its having been a great battlefield.
A City of the Dead. Mandan Pioneer. Two miles from Mandan, on the bluffs near the junction of the Heart and Missouri rivers, is an old cemetery of fully one hundred acres in extent, filled with bones of a giant race. This vast city of the dead lies just east of the Fort Lincoln road. We have just spent a half day in exploring this charnel house of a dead nation. The ground has the appearance of having been filled with trenches piled full of dead bodies, both of man and beast, and covered with several feet of earth. In many places, mounds from eight to ten feet high, and some of them a hundred feet or more in length have been thrown up and are filled with bones, broken pottery, vases of various bright-colored flints, and agates. The pottery is of a dark material, beautifully decorated, delicate in finish, and as light as wood, showing the work of a people skilled in the arts and possessed of a high state of civilization. Here is a grand field for the student who will be richly repaid for it.
- North Dakota, Morton County, Mandan, May 7, 1883.