The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 1, July 1897 - April, 1898 Page: 146
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146 Texas Historical Association Quarterly.
parts of Texas were a nomadic race, not usually confined to any par-
ticular locality.
The prehistoric mound builders, probably a different race of
people, were evidently located in their habitation, as shewn by the
many earth mounds constructed by them, that are to be found in
Texas and Louisiana.
During the years from 1842 to 1845, when I attended the dis-
trict courts at Nacogdoches, in Eastern Texas, there was discovered
an earth mound of oblong form fifty feet long and ten feet high,
with a large sugar maple tree (then dead) that had grown near the
middle of it, and in connection with the mound were four other
less mounds, fifty yards apart, located in the line of a large circle,
,so that each of the small ones could be plainly seen while standing
at the large one, indicating that they were constructed for some
social purpose, either for habitations or for burial places, or for
both, as has been the custom of the primitive races.
Another much larger mound, at least thirty feet high, stood in
the edge of Mr. Bradshaw's field, about eighty yards south of the
traveled road (then called Old San Antonio road) running from
Nacogdoches to Crockett, three miles east of the Neches river, in
what is now Cherokee county. Though I often saw the mound
when passing along the road, I never stopped and examined it,
as I did those at Nacogdoches.
Ten miles north of Palestine there was a set of lower mounds,
situated in what was called Mound Prairie, south of which ran a
small creek.
The town of Mount Pleasant, in Titus county, Texas, derived its
name doubtless from one of those earth mounds in or near its
original location.
The large population of mound builders were located in Louis-
iana, within and near the broad bottom about forty miles wide,
formed by the overflows of the Arkansas, Red, and Mississippi
rivers. A set of very large mounds, one of them forty feet high, was
found near Bayou Tensas above Delhi. They were in a row, like
those at Nacogdoches. There was a large one at Monticello, upon
which a house was situated, and another one with a house on it
in the village of Grand Cane on Bayou Rouge, and others lower
down the bottom. None of them, however, could compare in size
with the De Soto mound, situated two or three miles to the west
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Texas State Historical Association. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 1, July 1897 - April, 1898, periodical, 1897/1898; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101009/m1/167/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.