Other examples are on record. In Greene County, Illinois, parties digging a well found, at the depth of seventy-two feet, a stone hatchet. Mr. McAdams carefully examined the well, to see if it could have dropped from near the surface. He tells us the well was dug through loess deposits; and from the top down was as smooth, and almost as hard, as a cemented cistern.41 The loess was, as in Nebraska, deposited in the still waters of the lake which once occupied the Valley of the Illinois.42 And we need not doubt but that it dates from the breaking up of the glacial ice. The position of this hatchet, then, found at the very bottom of the loess deposits, shows that, while yet the glaciers lingered in the north, and the flooded rivers spread out in great lakes, some tribes of stone-using folks hunted along the banks of the lakes, whose bottoms were to form the rich prairies of the West.
Previous to this discovery, Mr. Foster had recorded the finding in this same formation, distant but a few miles, a rude hatchet. There was in this case a possibility that the stone could have been shaped by natural means, and so he did not affirm this to be a work of man; but he says, “had it been recovered from a plowed field, I should have unhesitatingly said it was an Indian’s hatchet.”43 We think it but another instance of relics found under such circumstances, that it points to the presence of man at the close of the Glacial Age.
No doubt many similar discoveries have been made, but the specimens were regarded as the work of Indians; and though the position in which they wore found may have excited some surprise, they were not brought to the attention of the scholars. Nor is it only in the prairie regions of the West where such discoveries have been made. Col. C. C. Jones has recorded the finding of some flint implements in the drift of the Chattahooche River, which we think as conclusively proves the presence of man in a far away time as do any of the discoveries in the river gravels of Europe. It seems that gold exists in the sands of this river, and the early settlers were quick to take advantage of it. They dug canals in places to turn the river from its present channel—and others, to reach some buried channel of former times. These sections passed down to the hard slate rock, passing through the surface, and the underlying drift, composed of sand, gravel, and bowlders. “During one of these excavations, at a depth of nine feet below the surface, commingled with the gravels and bowlders of the drift, and just above the rocky substratum upon which the deposit rested, were found three [Paleolithic] flint implements.”44