7 to 8 foot tall with a double row of teeth ?

[Ninurta]

@"Ninurta" 

I vaguely recall from the journals of Lewis and Clark that they ran into natives who told about "little people" who lived on a particular hill.  The expedition walked the hill but did not find anything unusual.

Serpent Mound is up in Shawnee country.  I wonder if the Shawnees knew who made that.

Cheers

I doubt it. The Serpent Mound was made before the time of the Shawnee in Ohio. They originally came from north of the great lakes, but were a wandering tribe that wandered all over the place, often being employed as "border guards" by other tribes. Both the Suwannee and Savannah rivers in the south are named for them, from the time they were there as border guards for a local tribe.

Black Hoof was born near Pensacola, Florida, in the panhandle on the Gulf of Mexico. It was after his birth that his faction of the tribe moved north to Ohio during a gathering of Shawnee in the mid 1600's to early 1700's. It was after that time that the Ohio County became known as Shawnee territory.

Several Mound Builder cultures had previously occupied that area, notably the Fort Ancient Culture that encompassed southern Ohio, northeastern Kentucky, southwestern West Virginia, and into parts of southwestern Virginia along the Tug Fork of Big Sandy River and it's tributaries. Some folks claim that the Shawnee came from the Fort Ancient Culture, but I have my doubts given their roaming nature.

But the Shawnee appear to have been an amalgam of originally separate tribes, so it's possible that some of them had ancestry from the Fort Ancient people. For example, the "Chisca" (some report them as "Yuchi") Indians from this area and Upper East Tennessee, the same ones that whooped the crap out of Spanish invaders, moved westward along the Tennessee River and eventually linked to a group of Shawnee living downstream, and merged with them. LaSalle reported that merge around 1680, and eventually it became a complete merge with the Chisca losing their original identity and becoming the Thawegila Sept of the Shawnee nation, fully Shawnee at that point, no longer Chisca. The Shawnee were made up of 5 "septs", all five originally believed to have been separate tribes.

Regarding the Azgens, a few people have tried to tie them into "The Lost Colony of Roanoke" on the basis of one of those colonists having borne the name of "Richard Azgen", but I doubt that, too, because for one thing, I don't believe they could have possibly made it that far west through all those hostile natives, and two, I've never been able to find the name Richard Azgen in any of the lists of those colonists.

I'm still down with "there were giants in those days in Kentucky". The Fort Ancient culture was a mound builder culture, and the reports of double toothed giant skeletons in the eastern US are almost always associated with the Mound Builders, and found in their burial mounds. Were the Fort Ancients in Kentucky a race of tall or "giant" people, and the same as the Azggens that were exterminated? No way to tell for sure now.

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