Buffalo bones are found within a burial mound in Granville, Ohio

The Ohio Valley Mound Builders and the Buffalo

The famous Alligator mound is also located in Granville, Ohio. This effigy along with the buffalo bones found in a burial mound nearby shed evidence on the importance of the animal spirits within the mound builders religion.

     There is proof, however, that the buffalo was known to builders of mounds from Dakota, as cited above, to the Blue Ridge. From a mound in the river bottom-land near Corning in the northwest corner of Missouri, at a depth of five or six feet, I dug some teeth which were pronounced to be those of a buffalo by anatomists at the Cincinnati Society of Natural History. "In a very large mound, square in shape, three hundred feet on each side and thirty feet high [opposite St. Louis], (Cahokia) there were found, in contact with a number of copper implements and ornaments, a number of the teeth of the buffalo. * * * They had most probably been worn as ornaments." — McAdams, 35. Putnam found a "pendant made of buffalo horn" on an altar at the Turner mounds (see page 386). "The entire skeleton of a bison was found by Professor Appey in a large tumulus [near Granville, Ohio,] associated with human remains." — Moorehead, 19.