CHAPTER 5
The people greeting Columbus appeared naïve and primitive, “naked…just as their mothers bore them,” he reported, and “believ [ing] very firmly that I with these ships and people came from heaven.”19 No sophisticated civilization or advanced culture were found among the islands of the Carribean, that he discovered, notwithstanding the rumors he occasionally heard of great and gilded cities. It would be left to other explorers to discover—and cruelly conquer—the Aztec and Inca civilizations and their elaborate ruins. To the north, however, as the British colonists began arriving and building their own homes and cities in the ancient land, it seemed a relatively empty continent inhabited by scattered children of the forest.
That impression began to change with the westward expansion, especially after the Revolutionary War, as the nation expanded westward into the Ohio and Mississippi River Valley areas. To their amazement, they found tens of thousands of mounds, earthwork structures, and fortifications; striking evidence of a long vanished yet advanced civilizations. The early settlers and explorers of this region referred to the ancient people who once occupied these lands and cities as the “Mound Builders,” whose artifacts can now be seen in a number of museums in the region. These ancient and mysterious cultures that once existed in great numbers in the river valley areas are referred to as the Adena culture (that flourished from about 1000 BCE to 200 CE) and the Hopewell culture (that flourished from 300 BCE to approximately 400 CE.)
Dr. Roger Kennedy, who has served as director of the National Park Service and the American History Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, explains:
Eighteenth century pioneers passing over the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley wrote often of [the] feeling of being freed of encumbrances, of fresh beginnings. Judging from what they said, and from what has been said of them subsequently, most of them shared the misconception that they were entering an ample emptiness intended to be theirs alone.
In fact…[t]he western vastness was not empty. Several hundred thousand people were already there, and determined to resist invasion. Nor was it without its own history, as the Europeans slowly acknowledged after encountering a profusion of very large ruined buildings. Whatever may have been the [e]denic expectations of the newcomers, it became obvious that the Indians of the Valley were the survivors of much larger populations.
Even along the headwaters of the Ohio, on the banks of mountain brooks, there were signs of ancient habitation…As the streams grew larger, so did the buildings…Below Pittsburgh, at Grave Creek, in what is now West Virginia, a conical mound is still today 2,700 feet in circumference and 70 feet (21 meters) tall. It was built, by Indians while Rome was young.
Scores of structures almost equal to its bulk still remain… In the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, tens of thousands of structures were built between six and sixty-six centuries ago. Some, as large as twenty-five miles in extent, required over three million person hours of labor.20
Cahokia, Monks Mound
The largest of these structures stands across the river from the modern-day city of St. Louis, in western Illinois, at a place called Cahokia. Frank Joseph, author and editor-in-chief of Ancient American Magazine, described his astonishment at finally discovering the magnitude of the Cahokia remains.
At the zenith of its metropolitan grandeur, around AD 1000, Cahokia’s population was larger than that of contemporary London. In fact, it was greater than that of any city in the United States for the next eight hundred years, until Philadelphia reached the same population density after the turn of the nineteenth century.
How was it possible that such a place escaped my notice? In my youthful arrogance, I presumed I knew at least the broad outlines of history. But during all my education, I was never told anything about Cahokia. In my student years at Southern Illinois University the name was only fleetingly familiar because of a brown road sign that flashed by as I sped along I-64 on weekend trips from the Carbondale campus to St. Louis: ‘Cahokia Mounds Exit.’ I presumed it must have been only an Indian cemetery, and went on my merry way, without giving it another thought.
Twenty years later…I deliberately sought out the largest ceremonial center north of the Rio Grande River. I have since returned to that evocative site again and again on behalf of my books and magazine articles about ancient America.
…Cahokia was actually the hub of an even greater network of related city-states: the Mississippian culture, a loose confederation of like-minded pyramid builders who dominated North America east of the Mississippi River.
Despite their prodigious accomplishments in social organization, monumental architecture, applied astronomy, large-scale agriculture, and urban planning, their society collapsed about one hundred years before the arrival of modern Europeans. It was all news to me. Throughout my school years, I was told that American history began when Christopher Columbus set foot on the beach at San Salvador. Prior to this seminal moment, my fellow students and I were told, the Aztecs and Mayas in Mexico and Peru’s Incas had done something civilized, albeit backward, but no true civilization occurred in what would later become the United States….
But as the magnitude and fate of Cahokia and its precursors began to unfold, I was struck by some obvious, even disconcerting, though ignored conclusions—especially that our civilization is not the first on this continent. Others have risen and fallen in North America several times long before our own.21
The mounds at Cahokia and elsewhere sparked, curiosity, as settlers and even America’s Founding Fathers, who, according to Kennedy, “sought with all the means at their command to discern what might be learned (emphasis added) about those who had been in the Great Valley [Ohio Valley] before them.”22 George Washington even encouraged the effort, when in 1788 he wrote to Richard Butler, a former commander under General Washington, who was later in charge of Indian affairs in the Northwest Territory, where he participated in archeological digs in the Ohio Valley. Washington urged Butler on, noting that such exploration could prove “very valuable and may lead to some useful discoveries. Those works which are found upon the Ohio…show traces of the country’s having been once inhabited by a race of people more ingenious, at least, if not more civilized than those who at present dwell there…Any clue…which can lead to knowledge of these, must be gratefully received.”23
Published accounts about the mounds had already appeared before the Revolutionary War, and more appeared thereafter. However, the most substantial of the early accounts was authored by Caleb Atwater, whose description of the antiquities discovered in the State of Ohio and other western states appeared in 1820 as part of the first publication of the American Antiquarian Society, organized in Boston some years earlier. “Atwater…grew up among the Ohio mounds and studied them nearly all his life, even as they vanished…His own town of Circleville…was laid out following the outlines of two circular earthworks…”24
Adena Mound 1901
But the mounds were quickly disappearing in the wake of new settlement, and Atwater wanted to give the ancient Mound Builders their due. His tone suggested the need for additional and careful study, criticizing the “crude and indigested statements” of those who arrived at hasty conclusions “after having visited a few ancient works.”25 Atwater himself had examined the mounds in Ohio; those outside the state, he relied on the findings of others, including H. H. Brackenridge. Having studied the mounds at Cahokia and elsewhere, Brackenridge had concluded: “I am perfectly satisfied that cities, similar to those of ancient Mexico, of several hundred thousand souls, have existed in this country.”26
Cahokia and Moundville opposite St. Louis on the Mississippi River
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19 Mauricio Obregón, The Columbus Papers: The Barcelona Landfall of 1493, the Landfall Controversy, and the Indian Guides (New York: Macmillan, 1991) 66.
20 Kennedy, Hidden Cities 1-2
21 Joseph, 4-6
22 Kennedy, 244
23 Ibid., 246
24 Robert Silverberg, The Mound Builders, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986) 50.
25 Ibid., 51
26 Ibid., 56