From West Virginia and down the Ohio River Valley to Southern Illinois is part of the region known to be occupied by Edena cultures (800 BCE - 100 CE), mound and earthwork-building people who pre-dated the Mississippian culture (100 BCE - 500 CE) who I would meet later. I stopped a few times on my way to the Shawnee National Forest to visit various burial mounds and sites of earthen forts. I was surprised to find many of these ancient burial mounds in the center of modern towns which really shouldn't have surprised me since a good townsite is always a good townsite.
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| Oak Mound Reservation, Clarksburg, WV |
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| Criel Mound, South Charleston, WV |
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| Shawnee Reservation Mound, Dunbar, WV |
I want to thank friends at the Serpent Mound Historical Site for setting me up with a Google Map collection of these sites that I could follow as I drove to the Shawnee National Forest. I made sure to spend time at each one and get at least a mile walk in. The human body is not made for extended car rides! Another time I'd like to visit many of the other mound sites and museums on this list. Only the Criel Mound had any real historical information posted - a beautiful set of NPS interpretive panels that answered all my questions.
I explored along the Ohio River, walking many flat, hot miles to investigate several sites and one museum in and around Metropolis, IL, "Home of Superman," but home also to the excellent Massac Fort State Park. I was able to follow seven miles of bike and walking trails as well as remote farm roads. But yikes was it hot! The small museum at the park contained an excellent collection of stone tools that illustrated the scale of farming taking place in and around the Mississippian Kincaid Mounds complex which I visited just upriver from Fort Massac. I found this site to be pretty lonely, almost forgotten - even the interpretive panels at the small and remote parking lot had been sawn off and carted away. It represents to me the neglect of indigenous and ancient history in this country, an almost willful ignorance.
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| Agricultural tools at the Massac Fort museum. |
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| Hunting points in collection at Massac Fort museum, Metropolis, IL |
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| The odd look of this raised mound is due to archeological step trenches. |
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| This lifted complex sits above Ohio flood waters and many platforms were built atop it. |
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| One of several platforms that would have held a temple or governance buildings. |
While walking the lonely dirt roads around Kincaid Mounds along cut-off river braid lakes and wetlands, I thought about how this agricultural center marked the beginning of industrial agricultural on this continent. Large-scale farming is still ongoing with vast flat fields flung far out in every direction. Bald eagles wheeled overhead and deer raced across the open bend in the river. Modern corn grows now where ancient maize varieties once grew. Floods brought renewed soils to the bottomland. The mound complex, built upon its raised foundation of tons of earth carried to this site by the basketful, kept the town above the waters while the fields received their life-giving silts.
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| This Google Maps sat-view shows the floods in relation to the complex. |
My walks around these sites were more-or-less wanderings where I wasn't too worried about hiking any mileage but concentrated instead on being present in land memory. For someone who spends untold hours reading landscapes, I found these pre-contact archeological sites to be both fascinating in their secretiveness and for hiding-in-plain-sight. I didn't finish my second week due to getting sick ( I will another time) so Cahokia has to wait, but whether I was wandering around rock shelters or mounds, I was taken with how faded
modern memory of ancient people is on this land. I was craving a good museum and found a small one at Massac Fort, but I was amazed at how much of a mystery these places still are to us and how much of this history is neglected.
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| Stone-lined grave, Millstone Bluff, Shawnee National Forest |
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| Petroglyph, eagle/thunderbird. Millstone Bluff. |
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| Depressions of "basements" of house sites. |
Just an hour north of Kincaid Mounds in the Shawnee National Forest were Millstone Bluff and Rim Rock National Recreational Trail which contains Middle Woodland sites. I hiked a short (1 mile) bluff trail at Millstone through what had been a village site built on top of an escarpment. Stone-lined box graves could be seen just visible above forest leaf litter. Ground depressions of home sites and a council house were scattered through the woods. In summer with all the greenery it took a sharp eye to see the layout of houses and commons areas. Petroglyphs carved onto the bluff were slowly disappearing under moss and lichen. I'm glad I spent the extra time to finally find the thunderbird figure. At Rim Rock the imposing remains of a stout stone defensive wall enclosed the backside of the escarpment where a similar bluff top village had once been. No one knows why these small towns built defensive structures or occupied such high ground against attack. Who were their enemies? What were the threats?
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| Defensive wall remains at Rim Rock, Shawnee National Forest. |
I worry about the erasure of indigenous history, especially on public lands where we stand the best chance to learn about and appreciate it. The people have not vanished. They are not gone. They are today's Shawnee, Creek, Cherokee, Osage, Sioux, and Ho-Chunk. The trope of "mysteriously vanished people" is still bantered about, however, and it just isn't fair or accurate.
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| Large rock shelter at Rim Rock, Shawnee National Forest, IL |
The Smithsonian Institute sponsored many scientific expeditions into the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys in the 1800s and Cyrus Thomas' 1894 publication documented the combined research with over 100,000 mounds and earthworks. Many 19th and early 20th century American archeologists and antiquarians, however, claimed he had
undercounted that number by many thousands. Since Thomas' report, the majority of these sites have vanished under the plow, urban/suburban development, mining, highways, railroads, and fell victim to massive looting that completely destroyed thousands of mounds. As sites vanished, so the myth rose that these people were "long gone." In fact, many early 20th century historians claimed that these "lost" people were in no way related to modern indigenous people, unable or unwilling to recognize the living descendants of the Mississippian cultures. These myths have persisted unfortunately.
One of my best lunch stops during the week was on the day of mounds and earthworks exploration. Here I sat at a picnic table on a small river barge above the Ohio with visitors Ken and Darleen from northern Ohio who claimed Shawnee heritage. Catfishing was a long-standing tradition in their family and the E-town floating catfish pound and restaurant was a favorite place to eat when in the area. Darleen said she felt a strong connection to the people who lived here hundreds of years ago and was very proud to say her people were "still be here despite it all." Truly, the BEST catfish I have ever had and real nice company to share it with.
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| E-Town Catfish Pound and Restaurant |
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