Finding a New Midwestern History by Jon K. Lauck & Gleaves Whitney & Joseph Hogan

Author:Jon K. Lauck & Gleaves Whitney & Joseph Hogan [Lauck, Jon K. & Whitney, Gleaves & Hogan, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sd, In, Mi, Oh, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), Mo, State & Local, Ks, Mn, Ne, history, HIS036090 History / United States / State & Local / Midwest (ia, Il, Wi), United States, Nd
ISBN: 9781496201829
Google: valvDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2018-11-01T23:49:50.259812+00:00

Mound Builders

Long before the arrival of European Americans, Indigenous Americans founded their own river towns. Commonly known as “Mound Builders,” Hopewellian and Mississippian people inhabited what we call the Midwest for approximately two thousand years, from 400 BC to AD 1400.3 First were the Hopewell Indians, who dwelt in today’s Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, western Pennsylvania, and New York, where they farmed maize (“Indian corn”), gathered nuts and berries, hunted deer, bear, and small game, and fished. Hopewell workers built large earthen mounds (roughly comparable to Egyptian, Aztecan, and Mayan pyramids) by hauling dirt in baskets strapped to their backs. The mounds served for defense, religious and burial rituals, and more.4

Much later, and in river valleys and river towns farther south, the Hopewell were supplanted by the Mississippians. They flourished from approximately AD 800 until the eve of European contact in the lower Mississippi Valley, including large portions of today’s western Illinois and eastern Missouri. Mississippians also made their living hunting, fishing, and farming maize, beans, squash, gourds, and tobacco in the rich midwestern soil of the Mississippi River bottomlands. Mississippian men and women worshipped corn and the sunshine that made it grow in varied religious rituals and dances.5

The great Mississippian city was Cahokia, whose center lay on the east bank of the Mississippi River, a few miles from modern St. Louis. From approximately AD 700 to 1400, Cahokia arose and fell. At its peak, the city boasted some 120 mounds and ten thousand to fifteen thousand men and women. At the city’s center stood Monk’s Mound (a name that comes from later Europeans who named it after Catholic missionaries from the 1700s), which was 100 feet high with a 955-foot-by-775-foot base, equal to some of the Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids. Chiefs, the hereditary rulers, lived atop Monk’s Mound, which hosted religious ceremonies, burials grounds, and human sacrificial rituals. Beneath was Cahokia’s forty-acre “Grand Plaza,” the community’s social and market center.6

Mississippian decline began before European arrival, and by 1400 the Cahokia site was abandoned. Crop blight appears to be a major cause of decline, and there were droughts resulting in famine. Disease may have been a factor. All this combined with fierce warfare between chiefdoms. However, the Midwest fostered new groups of Indigenous human occupants. Archeologists and anthropologists debate the extent to which modern Woodland Indians are direct descendants of Hopewellian and Mississippian people. 7 Shawnee, Cherokee, Miami, Fox, Sauk, Peoria, Wabash, Piankashaw, and Kickapoo arose in the Midwest and carried on through the early modern era before the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

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