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Once and Future Civilizations

BEFORE EUROPEANS BEGAN KEEPING WRITTEN ACCOUNTS OF THE region’s history, the millennia of human experience in the Great Lakes country resided in the stories told by early modern Native Americans and the monuments their predecessors left behind. British and American travelers refused to integrate Indians’ stories into their own Judeo-Christian chronology, and they drew entirely misleading conclusions from the thousands of mounds, fortifications, and earthworks that dotted the landscape. A sophisticated civilization, they believed, had once controlled the heart of North America, but barbarian peoples, the ancestors of the early modern Lakes Indians, had wiped it out. Civilization had given way to primitivism, and it remained to the European colonists to rebuild an advanced society.

Modern anthropologists have determined that this self-serving interpretation of precontact history is almost entirely inaccurate. The “civilization” that existed in mid-America was actually several different societies, which flourished at different times in different places. These societies “declined” not when outside invaders overthrew them, but when large-scale settlements like Cahokia exhausted local resources, or when population growth became locally unsustainable, or when political elites lost legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. Finally, the societies that built the great mounds and earthworks of the past were Indians, whom one could in some cases link to Native peoples (like the Ho-Chunks and Shawnees) who still lived in the region when the first French explorers arrived. The post-Columbian Lakes Indians all retained, moreover, the means if not the inclination to rebuild the monuments and cities of their past: they still practiced high-yield agriculture, built large and durable towns, and conducted long-distance trade for exotic goods. That they did not create a new mound-builder culture after 1600 one may blame on the actual foreign barbarians who entered and disrupted the region: the Europeans.

Lakes Indian history before 1600 was longer and more complicated than European invaders understood. Monumental societies like the Hopewell culture and the Mississippian settlements rose and fell, but beneath this highly visible superstructure of cyclical change, pre-Columbian Indians had children, built trading networks, adopted new forms of production like maize agriculture, and told stories that made sense of their people’s place in the world. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europeans did not understand this underlying history, but fortunately modern scholars and Native peoples have been able to explain much of it.

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The Indians of the Great Lakes region traditionally did not assign a specific date to their peoples’ arrival in America. Instead, their storytellers asserted that their ancestors had come to their contact-era homelands sometime in the distant past, usually from an otherworldly place of origin, often just as those homelands were coming into physical existence. The Hurons and Iroquois traced their descent from the Sky Woman (known to the Hurons as Aataentsic), who after falling from heaven birthed the first members of the human race on an island supported by a totemic Turtle. The Anishinaabeg told a similar story: angry manitous (spirits) destroyed their ancestors in a great flood, and the sole human survivor built an island refuge on the back of a great turtle. The Odawas identified the manitous in this tale as panther-like water spirits from an aqueous underworld who had flooded the world while chasing the trickster-hero Nanabush (who had killed their chief). The Ho-Chunks, a Siouan-speaking people from Wisconsin, focused their creation account on persistent links between the celestial and terrestrial: after creating the “island earth,” Earth Maker fashioned four humans, named Hagaga, Henuga, Kunuga, and Nangiga, from dust and “a part of himself.” He sent the four brothers to live on the world below but gifted them with fire and tobacco, which served as “mediator[s] between you and us” in the spirit realm. All of these stories conveyed similar lessons: human beings had both divine and earthly natures, and they lived in a world crowded with spiritual beings, some helpful and some dangerous.¹

Modern archaeologists cannot affirm an otherworldly origin for Native Americans, but they do think that the first human beings arrived in the Western Hemisphere a very long time ago—approximately fifteen thousand years before the present day. These ancestors of the modern Lakes Indians reached their homelands just as the region was becoming inhabitable. The first people to migrate to America, the Paleo-Indians, probably crossed the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age. At the time, much of the world’s water was locked up in the greatly expanded polar ice caps, and sea levels were lower, so low that the Bering Strait was not open water but a marshy, one-thousand-mile-wide land corridor connecting Siberia with Alaska. The Paleo-Indian migrants crossed this isthmus on foot or used small boats to follow the coastline. Whichever route they followed, they and their descendants gradually made their way down the Pacific coast, past the frozen, ice-covered lands of present-day Canada and the northern United States, and then spread east and south to people the hemisphere.²

During the time of this migration, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a glacial mass larger than the present-day Antarctic ice sheet, covered the lands around the Great Lakes, as far south as central Illinois. As this ice melted in the late Pleistocene, the runoff flooded the region’s rivers. Some rivers, like the older Mississippi and Ohio, carved deeper valleys that gradually filled with fertile silt. Others, like the Wabash and Wisconsin, took their modern courses when glacial lakes ruptured, discharging millions of cubic feet of water to the southwest. In the warming and now well-watered lands around the Great Lakes, many varieties of trees took root, first willow and birch, then conifers like spruce and pine, and (by 6000 BCE) maple, oak, beech, and other nut-bearing deciduous species. Browsing animals soon followed, living on the rich plant resources that the postglacial forests provided.³

Human beings began exploiting this new environment before the glaciers fully retreated. Archaeologists have located an eleven-thousand-year-old site in Calhoun County, Michigan, where hunters may have cached mastodon meat in a pond, whose cold water would have preserved their kill. Around the same time, caribou hunters left behind a campsite near present-day Holcombe, Michigan, and another Paleo-Indian party left fluted spear points near future Madison, Wisconsin. Paleo-Indian bands probably hunted large mammals, or megafauna, throughout the region during the late Pleistocene epoch.⁴

At the end of the last Ice Age, however, the human population of the Americas rose above the level where it could sustain itself through big-game hunting, while many of North America’s large mammals (such as mammoths) went extinct from overhunting and climate change. Faced with a subsistence crisis, the Paleo-Indians began to develop new survival strategies and more sophisticated toolkits. They initiated what archaeologists now call the Archaic era of North American Indian history.

Native Americans of the Archaic period (8000–1000 BCE) learned to subsist on a smaller territory than did the hunters of the Paleo-Indian era. They made fishing hooks and gaffs, which allowed them to harvest the rich fish populations of North America’s rivers and lakes: pike, bass, and catfish in the Mississippi River; sturgeon, perch, and mussels in the Great Lakes. They hunted smaller and faster animals, like birds and deer, using longer-range projectile weapons like the atlatl, a spear-thrower that increased the effective length of the hunter’s throwing arm and thus his effective range. They learned to make wild plant foods (like acorns) edible by leaching out tannin and other bitter or toxic compounds. They domesticated dogs to serve as hunting assistants (and occasionally as food), a process that began early in the Archaic era—in fact, some of the oldest domestic canine remains in North America, dated to 6500 BCE, were found near the Illinois River. They learned to make pottery, which provided them with rigid, leak-proof storage containers. Pottery making also indicated that the Archaic Indians had become less nomadic, since ceramics are heavy and easy to drop and break, and it probably also elevated the economic status of women, since women usually produced ceramics.⁵

Some Indians learned to mine copper from ore-bearing rocks, which the glaciers had deposited close to the surface in the upper Great Lakes region, and to anneal (strengthen) the metal by heating it and plunging it into cold water. Archaic Indians in Wisconsin were mining copper and turning it into spear points, fishhooks, and awls by 4,000 BCE. They apparently halted production sometime after 500 BCE, though Indians continued to mine and work copper north of the Great Lakes for many centuries thereafter.⁶

In the late Archaic era, around 1500 BCE, Indians in the Ohio valley began cultivating squash and several other North American plants that produced oil-rich seeds, such as sunflowers and sump weed. During the same period (ca. 2450–1000 BCE), they and their northern neighbors engaged in silviculture, promoting the growth of desirable trees by girdling rival tree species and burning undergrowth. The arboreal species that Archaic Indians favored, like oak and hickory, produced acorns, hickory nuts, and other “mast” that game animals could eat, attracting large populations of deer and turning some forests into de facto hunting parks.⁷ All of these Archaic-era innovations in food production took several thousand years to unfold, but they allowed Native Americans to continue increasing their numbers after their old nomadic hunting economy became unsustainable. By 1000 BCE there were probably around one million people living in North America north of the Rio Grande. If the human population in the Great Lakes region maintained its proportion to the overall Native North American population, then it reached approximately fifty thousand people by the end of the Archaic era.⁸

The Archaic era ended with the rise of several sophisticated cultures in the upper Ohio River valley: the Adena culture (1000–100 BCE), the Hopewell cultural system (200 BCE–500 CE), the Mississippians (900–1500 CE), and the Fort Ancient culture (1000–1500 CE). The Adena people, named for the “type site” in Ohio where archaeologists first discovered their artifacts, had a social or religious elite whom they interred in wooden tombs covered by conical earthen mounds. With their former leaders they buried ceremonial goods like carved stone pipes and figurines of people or animals. The culture occupied a region extending from southern Indiana to West Virginia and from central Ohio to central Kentucky. Most of its people lived near the Ohio River and its tributaries, where large populations of fish, game, and wild plants provided enough food to support dense human populations—more than ten times as many people per square mile than in the uplands.⁹

The Adena people’s successors, the Hopewellians, covered a much larger geographical area; they were a network of societies bound together by trade and some common cultural forms. The main Hopewell peoples resided in central Ohio and northern Kentucky, while their cultural relations and trading partners dwelt in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The Hopewell people lived in widely separated homesteads in river valleys and, like their Adena predecessors, spent part of their labor building large burial mounds for their elite. Hopewell mounds usually formed geometric shapes, and their builders sited them near other earthen buildings in ceremonial complexes, some of which covered several square miles. At the edge of these complexes, the Hopewellians built temporary dwellings where commoners lived part of the year, while they were constructing earthworks or attending religious ceremonies, before they returned home to hunt and plant.¹⁰

In their mounds, the Hopewellians interred not only their leaders but also hundreds of grave goods, many of which they fashioned from exotic materials: obsidian blades, copper jewelry, mica cutouts of human hands, and artifacts made of marine shells and grizzly-bear teeth. The trade network that provided these materials extended south to the Gulf of Mexico and west to the Rockies. The goods themselves were most likely “prestige goods,” indicators of status that circulated in a different economic sphere from ordinary goods like food or animal skins.¹¹

It is not easy to draw conclusions about the nonmaterial lives of Hopewell peoples from the remains they left, but the anthropologist Matthew Coon has made some thought-provoking suggestions. The orientation of human remains at one Hopewell-era site in Ohio, he argues, indicates that the Indians there may have organized themselves into social “halves” (or “moieties”). Such large binary groups would have helped draw potentially rival families and clans together. Coon also believes that some of the Ohio Hopewellians’ engravings show human beings wearing animal masks, and he notes that masks would have improved social harmony by allowing lower-ranking people to disguise themselves while they publicly criticized their ruling elite. His hypotheses help answer one of the most fundamental questions facing any large society with a governing class: why do the governed give their allegiance to the governors? In the case of some of the Hopewell communities, the answer may lie in the formation of large groups that increased social solidarity and in the development of mechanisms for criticizing rulers.¹²

The Hopewell era coincided with the spread of a new crop, Mesoamerican maize (Indian corn), through the Ohio valley. It is likely that maize agriculture led to population growth in the region. A carbohydrate-rich diet lowers the risk that pregnant women will have miscarriages, and the development in the fifth century CE of thinner pottery that one could use to heat food more efficiently allowed women to turn maize into gruel, which they could use to wean their children at an earlier age. Women who stopped lactating would then resume their menses and their fertility. Population growth, which provided the labor force for the Hopewellians’ mounds and earthworks, may have eventually produced social conflicts and stresses that the Hopewell culture’s institutions could not contain. Perhaps this helps explain that culture’s disappearance after 500 CE. Only a few centuries would pass, however, before new “mound-builder” cultures would take Hopewell’s place.¹³

One of these cultures, the effigy mound builders of modern Wisconsin, emerged during the Late Woodland period (500–1200 CE) and began building their distinctive mounds around 700 CE. The Wisconsin mound builders lived in an ecologically diverse region rich in food resources: forests harboring game animals, marshes full of fish and birds, and flat prairies suitable for raising corn, which local Indians adopted around 900. They constructed their mounds, numbering over three thousand by 1200 CE, at places where large numbers of people gathered to hunt, fish, and hold religious ceremonies. The mounds themselves apparently formed a vast symbolic map of the effigy builders’ cosmology. Some of the effigies, concentrated in southeastern Wisconsin, represented long-tailed water spirits from the builders’ watery underworld, similar to the manitous in the Odawas’ creation and flood story. Some, concentrated in southwestern Wisconsin, represented bird spirits from the builders’ Upper World, akin to the thunderbirds from Ojibwa mythology. Some, located in a band across the present southern border of Wisconsin, represented bear and other animal spirits from the Middle World (that is, the physical world). A few represent a horned human who may have been a precursor of Red Horn, a culture hero of the Ho-Chunks, whose cosmology resembled that of the effigy builders. The finished mounds were probably ceremonial centers—some contain concentrations of stones that archaeologists believe are the remains of altars—and they certainly served as burial mounds, though the sparseness of grave goods suggests that the effigy builders had an egalitarian society, certainly more so than their Mississippian neighbors.¹⁴

The Mississippians would become the most famous of the post-Hopewell mound-building cultures. Their society arose around 900 CE and flourished in the greater Mississippi valley and the southeast until 1500 CE. The Mississippian people practiced intensive agriculture, lived in large towns or cities, built large temple mounds, and organized themselves into a hierarchy of social classes. Of the urban centers that the Mississippians constructed, the largest was Cahokia, a city built on the bottom lands near present-day Saint Louis. Cahokia’s establishment was more a revolutionary than an evolutionary event: its builders erected much of the city in a single surge of construction that began around 1050 CE. Archaeologist Timothy Pauketat speculates that the Cahokians may have drawn inspiration from the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054, which produced a bright new star visible everywhere in the world. Cahokia was centered on a massive, terraced platform mound, known today as Monk’s Mound, which stands over one hundred feet high and is comparable in size to the stone pyramids of Mesoamerica. The city featured several other platform temple mounds, a vast public plaza, several wooden “henge” structures used as astronomical calendars, and the dwellings of about fifteen thousand residents. No other city north of Mexico would reach this size again until the 1700s.¹⁵

The Mississippians’ hierarchy comprised a small elite of priests and nobles, a large class of commoners and warriors, and a population of slaves at the bottom. Mississippian slaves were generally war captives, and like slaves elsewhere in the world they were (to borrow sociologist Orlando Patterson’s term) “socially dead,” not part of any kin group or patron-client relationship. Slaves at Cahokia sometimes became more permanently dead: archaeological excavation of one of Cahokia’s mounds uncovered the remains of more than eighty men and women killed at the same time and interred with two high-status men. The eighty victims were almost certainly slaves sacrificed to “accompany” the two priests or nobles into the grave.¹⁶

Life in Cahokia was marginally better for commoners, but even they suffered from dietary deficiencies and hard labor, which raises the question of why they would remain in Cahokia and other Mississippian settlements if life was so difficult. Some Mississippians, like the nearby farming villagers who provided Cahokia’s food supply, may have feared attack or enslavement if they didn’t move into the region. Others probably remained in Cahokia and other Mississippian towns for security: there was safety in numbers, and warriors protected commoners from becoming another Indian community’s captives and sacrificial victims. Moreover, there were positive benefits to living in Cahokia that compensated commoners for their other hardships. Based on remains found in a massive midden, or trash heap, at the Cahokia site, archaeologists believe that the city’s elite held periodic feasts in which the whole populace gorged itself on meat and corn and smoked huge quantities of tobacco. These feasts created a collective state of euphoria and torpor that would have boosted public morale. With its public feasts, dramatic sacrificial ceremonies, and protective warriors class, the city of Cahokia offered ample compensations to Indian commoners who might otherwise have led easier lives, had they lived in a smaller town or village.¹⁷

Cahokia reached its peak of population and development during the first century after its founding. By 1150 CE, the city’s population declined to about half of its peak level, and by 1300 Cahokia and most of the other Mississippian towns in the Great Lakes region stood empty. Some of this decline one can attribute to a series of droughts that hit the mid-continent during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, depopulating the farming settlements that had previously fed Cahokia. Cahokia and its neighboring villages were also experiencing shortages of firewood by 1150, as the region’s many city dwellers and farmers cut down the trees in the vicinity. Modern scholars detect a rise in individualism and war making among Cahokia’s leaders, demonstrated by their display of increasingly exotic and unique “prestige goods” like shell cups and copper ornaments, and by a shift from the construction of temple mounds to the building of protective palisades. Cahokia’s decline was not merely demographic but cultural: at a time when resource shortages were already placing a strain on the populace, the priest/aristocrat class who ruled the city devoted more resources to warfare and individual display than to collective well-being. Since Cahokia’s elite derived its legitimacy from its mediation between their people and the spiritual world, and since poor harvests and drought indicated that supernatural forces had become more than a little angry, it is unsurprising that the city’s commoners would desert their leaders.¹⁸

Other Mississippian centers in the Great Lakes region included Angel Mounds in Indiana and Aztalan in Wisconsin, the latter a fortified Mississippian colony with four large platform mounds. These communities joined Cahokia in decline in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Their depopulation probably resulted from a combination of resource depletion and colder temperatures accompanying the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a global cooling period that began in 1300 CE and lasted half a thousand years. One of the more robust Mississippian offshoots, the Fort Ancient culture of present-day Ohio and Kentucky, lasted somewhat longer than its predecessors. Beginning around 1000 CE, the Fort Ancient people built settlements similar to those of other Mississippians, grouping their dwellings around central plazas with posts that served as solar calendar markers to indicate corn planting and harvest days. Perhaps as a response to the regional droughts that afflicted Cahokia, they developed and dug efficient storage pits for their surplus corn in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Like the Hopewellians and Mississippians, the Fort Ancient people constructed geometric burial mounds, such as Serpent Mound in the Scioto River valley and Alligator Mound near present-day Granville, Ohio. Some of the artifacts they left behind, like stones from the game of chunky and shell-tempered pottery—pottery made with burned shells, to lighten and strengthen the clay—were also typical of Mississippian peoples, and one could find them in the southeast well into the eighteenth century.¹⁹

After 1450 CE, a changing (drier, cooler) climate caused the Fort Ancient people partially to disperse. They retained their core settlements but spent much of the year traveling the tributaries of the Ohio, hunting and gathering and trading. The other post-Mississippian cultures of the Great Lakes region decentralized or dispersed at the same time. The former residents of Cahokia abandoned the American Bottom altogether, while the people of Angel Mounds remained near the Ohio-Wabash confluence but resettled in small villages, grouped into a loose confederacy that archaeologists call the Caborn-Welborn culture. The native peoples of Wisconsin split into two groups of settlements, one on the Mississippi River and the other southeast of Green Bay, both belonging to what archaeologists now call the Oneota culture. The Oneotas made shell-tempered pottery like the Mississippians’ and decorated it with bird and water-spirit images reminiscent of the Wisconsin effigy-mound culture, but they themselves did not build mounds and instead buried their dead in small cemeteries. They also spent less of the year in fixed settlements, devoting several months to hunting the bison that had begun moving into the eastern prairies (modern Illinois and Wisconsin) in the fourteenth century. Some of the old “mound-builder” culture did remain: the trade networks that earlier elites had created, and recognition that the old mounds and earthworks in the region still had spiritual value even if few people visited them.²⁰

The Indian cultures that dominated the Great Lakes region in the post-Mississippian period consisted of hunters, farmers, and traders, but no aristocrats or monument builders. European travelers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries considered this a devolutionary change. When they first discovered the mounds and earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, and Fort Ancient cultures, Europeans assumed that the “Mound Builders” had been a single advanced civilization. They speculated that this predecessor race had descended from Old World migrants—Phoenicians, Vikings, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, even refugees from the mythical continent of Atlantis—unrelated to their more “primitive” Indian successors. (Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, incorporated this belief into the Mormons’ religious doctrine.) It was not until the late nineteenth century that American ethnographers and archaeologists concluded that the Mound Builders represented several different cultures, all of them Native American. And it took scholars until the late twentieth century to begin working out the social and environmental causes of these different cultures’ rise and fall.²¹

In the meantime, early European and American explorers persisted in viewing the Great Lakes region as a marginal country. French travelers and traders called it the pays d’en haut or “Upper Country,” while English-speaking Americans used the term “Western World.” It is evident, however, that the lands around the Great Lakes had been a center of human culture and development for thousands of years. Indians had been hunting in that region since the Pleistocene, had there learned to mine copper and domesticate dogs earlier than any other people in North America, and had built some of the largest towns and cities the continent would see prior to the eighteenth century. Far from a wild periphery, the Lakes region was long-settled, lay at the center of a continent-wide trading network, and for many centuries hosted highly sophisticated Native American cultures.²²

The various “Mound Builder” cultures had almost all dispersed by the sixteenth century, but if their 2,500-year-long history makes one thing clear, it is that their disappearance need not have been permanent. The decline of one complex culture did not preclude the rise of a successor culture in the future. Hopewell succeeded Adena, the Mississippian and Fort Ancient cultures succeeded Hopewell, and there was no reason to assume, from the vantage point of 1600 CE, that the Indians of the Great Lakes region would not eventually create another complex, urban culture. Certainly there was still a large Native American population in the region, along with trading networks that could supply enough prestige goods to enrich and empower a future elite.

What prevented such a revival from occurring was the introduction of a new group of migrants who—largely inadvertently—decimated the region’s Indian population and introduced a new supply of exotic goods too large for the region’s surviving elite to control. The new migrants called themselves by several names; collectively, we would call them Europeans. Their invasion of the Midwest began the most revolutionary charge the region had seen since the rise of Cahokia, and possibly since the end of the Ice Ages.