It had every appearance of having been built by human hands, the mortar seams and joints being very plain. Above it about ten feet of drift and twenty feet of rock had been removed by the workmen, and on the side exposed the men had advanced fully forty feet from where they first struck rock. Thus it was firmly embedded in a solid limestone quarry which certainly was formed about it since the wall was built. The face of the wall was well dressed, and its massive appearance gave evidence of the skill of hands perished long centuries ago, and could well be envied by the best of the stone masons of today.

On May 20, 2009, I received an email from M.I., who said that his grandfathers, father, and all of his uncles had worked the mines of northeast Pennsylvania. His Uncle Joe had worked in one of the last mines to use mules to haul out the coal--16 tons a day--shoveled by and into mine cars. One day as they were clearing away the coal from a blasted coal face over 300 feet beneath the surface, Joe said, they came across a block wall. Not wishing to create any kind of disturbance that might delay their work or their pay, they simply headed the other direction away from the wall.

In 1953 miners of the Lion coal mine of Wattis, Utah, broke into a network of tunnels between five and six feet in height and width, which contained coal of such vast antiquity that it had become weathered to a state of uselessness for any kind of burning or heat.

A search outside the mountain in direct line with the tunnels revealed no sign of any entrance. Since the tunnels were discovered when the miners were working an eight-foot coal seam at 8,500 feet, the evidence is irrefutable that an undetermined someone had conducted an ambitious mining project so far back in time that all exterior traces have been eroded away.

Professor John E. Willson of the Department of Engineering, University of Utah, was quoted in the February, 1954, issue of Coal Age, as stating: "Without a doubt, both drifts were man-made. Though no evidence was found at the outcrop, the tunnels apparently were driven some 450 feet from the outside to the point where the present workings broke into them. . . . There is no visible basis for dating the tunnels .... "

Jesse D. Jennings, professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, could offer no opinion as to the identity of the ancient miners, but he denied that the vast tunnels and coal mining rooms could have been the work of any Native American people. "In the first place," he commented, "such works would have required immediate and local need for coal. ... because before the white man came, transport was by human cargo carriers. . . . As for local use, there was no reported extensive burning of coal by aboriginals in the region of the Wattis mine."

Although the early Native Americans did not mine nor burn coal, the Lost Nation of Iynkicidu may have had great refineries, steel mills, and millions of homes that required coal for the cold winters. The citizens of the Nation of Iynkicidu may have also have exported their crafts as well as their culture to Mayan or Aztec colonies. The forgotten empire builders of our lost nation may even have established outposts in North Africa and the Middle East. Whoever these people were, they flowered technologically in a lost world before our own.

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