Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis 0826223044, 9780826223043

Table of contents :
Mound City The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis [3877753]
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One: Metropolis on the Mississippi
Chapter Two: Indigenous Migration and Early Europeans
Chapter Three: War and the Missouria Foundation of St. Louis
Chapter Four: The Indigenous World of Eighteenth-Century St. Louis
Chapter Five: Claiming the Mounds for the Nation
Chapter Six: The Indigenous Reputation of “Red-Head’s Town”
Chapter Seven: Repurposing the Mounds for Urban Development
Chapter Eight: “Little Hope of Its Standing Fast”: The Big Mound in the 1850s
Chapter Nine: The Destruction of the Big Mound
Chapter Ten: Writing the Afterlife of the Mounds
Chapter Eleven: The Indigenous Past and Present as Local History
Chapter Twelve: Celebrating Mounds and their Builders in the Pageant and Masque
Chapter Thirteen: Commemoration and Preservation
Chapter Fourteen: Layers of Indigenous Histories
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MOUND CITY

MOUND CITY The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis Patricia Cleary

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS Columbia

Published with the generous support of The College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach

Copyright © 2024 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved. First printing, 2024. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cleary, Patricia, 1962- author. Title: Mound City : the place of the indigenous past and present in St. Louis / Patricia Cleary. Other titles: Place of the indigenous past and present in St. Louis Description: Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023042124 (print) | LCCN 2023042125 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826223043 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826274991 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America--Missouri--Saint Louis--History. | Mounds--Missouri--Saint Louis--History. | Indians of North America--Missouri--Saint Louis--Antiquities. | Saint Louis (Mo.)--History. | BISAC: HISTORY / Indigenous Peoples in the Americas | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Indigenous Studies Classification: LCC E78.M8 C54 2024 (print) | LCC E78.M8 (ebook) | DDC 977.8/6600497--dc23/eng/20231108 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042124 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042125 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Typefaces: Garamond and Aktiv Grotesk

For Jonathan

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets

St. Louis occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Osage Nation, Missouria, Illinois Confederacy, and many other tribes as the custodians of the land St. Louisans reside on, occupy, and call home. . . . I affirm and support Tribal sovereignty, history, and experiences by elders past, present, and seven generations yet to come through their continued connection to this land. —Land Acknowledgment, adapted with permission from that of the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, 2023

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

List of Abbreviations xxi 3

Introduction Chapter One:

Metropolis on the Mississippi

19

Chapter Two:

Indigenous Migration and Early Europeans

41

Chapter Three:

War and the Missouria Foundation of St. Louis

61

Chapter Four:

The Indigenous World of Eighteenth-Century St. Louis

79

Chapter Five:

Claiming the Mounds for the Nation

99

Chapter Six:

The Indigenous Reputation of “Red-Head’s Town”

123

Chapter Seven:

Repurposing the Mounds for Urban Development

149

Chapter Eight:

“Little Hope of Its Standing Fast”: The Big Mound in the 1850s

175

Chapter Nine:

The Destruction of the Big Mound

203

Chapter Ten:

Writing the Afterlife of the Mounds

225

Chapter Eleven: The Indigenous Past and Present as Local History vii

249

viii Contents Chapter Twelve: Celebrating Mounds and their Builders in the Pageant and Masque

275

Chapter Thirteen: Commemoration and Preservation

297

Chapter Fourteen: Layers of Indigenous Histories

315

Afterword

343

Notes

345

Bibliography

399

Index

425

Illustrations

Figure 0.1 Building at 1500 N. Broadway, St. Louis, Missouri, July 10, 2010

4

Figure 0.2 Mound marker, Intersection of Howard and Broadway, St. Louis, July 10, 2010

5

Figure 0.3 Publicly accessible archaeological sites of the medieval Mississippian world

12

Figure 1.1 Cahokia Mounds painting

20

Figure 1.2 Location of Greater Cahokia and other Mississippian Towns 22 Figure 1.3 Chunkey Player

27

Figure 1.4 Greater Cahokia, showing the capital zone and outlier towns and shrine complexes

31

Figure 1.5 Drawing of an ear ornament found in Big Mound

34

Figure 2.1 Red Horn

44

Figure 2.2 Incised sandstone Bird Man

45

Figure 2.3 Map of “Claims before and after French and Indian Wars” 47 Figure 2.4 Map of “Early Indian Tribes, Culture Areas, and Linguistic Stocks”

48

Figure 3.1 The Settlement of Saint Louis or The Founding of Saint Louis, Fernand LeQuesne 62 Figure 3.2 A plan of the several villages in the Illinois country, Thomas Hutchins

67

Figure 3.3 Burden basket

75

ix

x Illustrations Figure 4.1 Guy Soniat Dufossat’s map of the Mississippi River from Pain-­Court

80

Figure 4.2 Map of St. Louis in 1796, by George de Bois St. Lys

81

Figure 4.3 Detail from Nicolas de Finiels’s 1797–1798 map

82

Figure 4.4 Portrait of Payouska (Pawhuska)

97

Figure 5.1 “Copy of a map of St. Louis village, c. 1804–05”

109

Figure 5.2 Diagram of the St. Louis mound group

110

Figure 5.3 Drawing of Big Mound by Anna Maria von Phul

113

Figure 5.4 View of a Mound Near St. Louis by Anna Maria von Phul

114

Figure 5.5 View from the Top of the Mound by Anna Maria von Phul

115

Figure 5.6 “Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1819”

119

Figure 5.7 Detail from “Plan of St. Louis,” Beck’s Gazetteer 120 Figure 6.1 “Indian Land Cessions in the United States,” Plate 144 (Missouri) 125 Figure 6.2 William Clark, by George Catlin

127

Figure 6.3 The Long Room, Interior of Front Room in Peale’s Museum 130 Figure 6.4 Keokuk, daguerreotype portrait, by Thomas Easterly

143

Figure 6.5 Múk-­a-­tah-­mish-­o-­káh-­kaik, Black Hawk, Prominent Sac Chief, by George Catlin

145

Figure 6.6 Black Hawk and Five Other Saukie Prisoners, by George Catlin

146

Figure 6.7 Saukie and Fox Indians on the Beach Near St. Louis, by Karl Bodmer

147

Figure 7.1 Detail from the Surveyor General’s report, 1852

156

Figure 7.2a North East View of St. Louis from the Illinois Shore, by J. C. Wild

158

Figure 7.2b Detail of Big Mound from Wild’s North East View of St. Louis from the Illinois Shore 159 Figure 7.3 Detail of the mounds from map of the harbor of St. Louis 162 Figure 7.4 Detail from the Edward and Julius Hutawa Plan of the City of St. Louis

163

Illustrations xi Figure 7.5a Saint Louis in 1846, by Henry Lewis

170

Figure 7.5b Detail of Big Mound in Saint Louis in 1846 171 Figure 7.6 Mound Fire Co. No. 9 Responds to the Burning of the Pavilion at Big Mound 172 Figure 8.1 Portrait of Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh (George Copway)

179

Figure 8.2 A Huge Mound and the Manner of Opening Them, by John J. Egan

182

Figure 8.3 Lithograph of St. Louis, by J. W. Hill and F. Michelin

184

Figure 8.4 Engraving of St. Louis, by Wellstood and Peters

184

Figure 8.5 Big Mound, Fifth and Mound Streets, by Thomas M. Easterly, 1852

185

Figure 8.6 Detail from Plan of the City of St. Louis

186

Figure 8.7 Big Mound, Fifth and Mound Streets, by Thomas M. Easterly, c. 1854

196

Figure 9.1 Big Mound, Looking East from Fifth and Mound Streets, by Thomas M. Easterly

207

Figure 9.2 Big Mound during Destruction, by Thomas M. Easterly 207 Figure 9.3 Big Mound Shown Partially Graded, by Thomas M. Easterly 212 Figure 9.4 Big Mound during Destruction. The Last of the Big Mound, by Thomas M. Easterly

220

Figure 10.1 Portrait of Ely S. Parker

227

Figure 10.2 Detail from Pictorial St. Louis

233

Figure 10.3 “Mound City” lithograph

234

Figure 10.4 “The Big Mound at St. Louis, 1869,” in Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri 242 Figure 10.5 Advertisement for Mound City Shoe Store

246

Figure 10.6 Business letterhead of Mound City Paint and Color Co.

247

Figure 11.1 Distribution of Mounds in the Eastern United States, 1894

252

Figure 11.2 Custer’s Last Fight [Anheuser-­Busch advertisement], 1896 254

xii Illustrations Figure 11.3 Drawing of mounds in Forest Park, St. Louis, 1904

260

Figure 11.4: Osage descendants of Col. Edward Chouteau, 1904 263 a, b, & c Figure 11.5 Alphonse Mucha poster for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition 267 Figure 11.6 Geronimo at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904

271

Figure 12.1 Crowd photograph of the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, 1914

279

Figure 12.2 Joseph C. Leyendecker poster for the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis

280

Figure 12.3 Lantern slide promoting the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis

281

Figure 12.4 Pageant and Masque promotional postcard

282

Figure 12.5 Photograph of Louis Manar, 1902

286

Figure 12.6 Louis Manar registration card, “Sons and Daughters of St. Louis,” 1914

287

Figure 13.1 “Boulder Marking the Site of Great Indian Mound” 304 Figure 13.2 Eagle symbol, Society of American Indians

308

Figure 14.1 Photograph of Jim Thorpe

320

Figure 14.2 Photograph of quarry damage to Sugarloaf Mound, 1940 332 Figure 14.3 Demolition of the house on Sugarloaf Mound, 2017

336

Figure 14.4 Give it Back: Stage Theory, billboard adjacent to Highway 55

337

Figure 14.5 ArcGIS map of the St. Louis mound group

338

Figure 14.6 Big Mound Marker with the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, 2019

339

Figure 14.7 Site of the Colonial Dames Big Mound marker from 1929

340

Figure A.1 Before They Built the Arch, We Built the Mound, 2009

343

Acknowledgments

Though I no longer live in St. Louis, I carry my hometown with me. I think fondly of bike riding in Forest Park, taking Bi-­State buses to Rosati-­Kain, cheering the Cardinals from straight-­A seats at the old Busch Stadium, cutting grass and shoveling snow, eating seed cookies from Vitale’s and frozen custard from Ted Drewes, visiting the zoo over and over again, and walking on the granite cobblestones of the levee along the riverfront. I compare the weather, plants, and insects of other places to those of St. Louis: the heat and humidity, the lightning bugs and the mosquitoes, the ice storms and thunderstorms and the smell of the earth after them, the sounds of cicadas on a summer night, the bright green leaves of spring, and the brilliant golds and reds of October. These are always with me. I also think about the people, those I knew growing up and those who preceded me. I think of the Indigenous peoples who first lived upon the site, the mounds they built, and the layers of the past that lie beneath city streets. I think about the descendants of the first people: the Native peoples who lived in St. Louis in the 1760s and after, those who were forcibly removed from their land, and those who are working to preserve the city’s Indigenous history today. I finish writing this book as I began it: with a commitment to honor the lives of all those, past and present, who have called the place where St. Louis stands home. I have many people to thank. Many scholars have generously shared their expertise. Some passed along drafts of their own work before publication. Others discussed arguments or read chapters. I have been inspired, challenged, and humbled by their insights, and I am aware of how much my work owes to xiii

xiv Acknowledgments

other scholars. Andrew Hurley first set me on the path of writing St. Louis history, and I thank him for that invitation, his scholarship, and his advice. His detailed comments on the manuscript prompted me to reconsider important aspects of urban history. Jay Gitlin and Michael Oberg also read chapter drafts and generously offered feedback. For favors and suggestions great and small, I am grateful to Susan Alt, Steve Aron, Robert Cook, David Cressy, Philip Deloria, Carl Ekberg, John Kelly, Walter Johnson, Bob Moore, Timothy Pauketat, Sharon Person, and Kenneth Winn. Acting as outside readers for the University of Missouri Press, Bob Morrissey and Sean Harvey provided the kind of thoughtful and constructive criticism that authors relish. Their engaged and lengthy reports – both to the original complete manuscript and the revised version – helped me re-­evaluate many aspects of this study, and I hope they know how much their reactions informed my revisions. Their students and colleagues are lucky to have such generous and thoughtful readers. At every step of my work on the history of St. Louis, both for my previous book and this one, William Foley has been an extraordinary mentor and reader, a source of encouragement, advice, and good ideas; thank you, Bill! When I was seeking up-­to-­date information about Sugarloaf Mound, Andrea Hunter, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Osage Nation, allowed me to interview her, and others in her office were very helpful as well, including Sarah O’Donnell, NAGPRA coordinator. I thank them for their time and assistance. I would also like to thank Candace Sall, Director of the Anthropology Museum, American Archaeology Division, at the University of Missouri–Columbia; Beth Carter, Registrar at the Missouri Historical Society; Kristina Hampton, Manager of Collections and Special Projects at the St. Louis Science Center; Patti Wright, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Archaeology at University of Missouri–St. Louis; Krystiana Krupa, NAGPRA Program Officer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign; Amy Clark, Curatorial Assistant, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Saint Louis Museum of Art; and the NAGPRA staff at the Peabody Museum, especially Emma Lagan, for explaining what they could about their collections of Indigenous artifacts and ongoing efforts to facilitate repatriation. Bill Iseminger, now retired from Cahokia Mounds State

Acknowledgments xv

Historic Park, shared both images and ideas about basket technology and use, as well as helpful references. Pamela L. Begay, the director of the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University, generously advised me on Missouri land acknowledgment practices and the adaptation of the Buder Center’s for the epigraph of this book. At California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), my academic home, I have accrued other debts. CSULB has been a good place to be, thanks in no small part to the talented colleagues who combine commitments to teaching our students, conducting research, and serving our community with dedication, competence, grace, and good humor. My friend David Shafer has been an exemplary chair and scholar, and I appreciate his support. I am grateful to my late colleague Troy Johnson for his initial invitation to serve on the CSULB Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) committee and to its members, particularly NAGPRA coordinator Cindi Alvitre, of the Tongva Nation, Emeritus Professor Craig Stone, and NAGPRA chair Louis Robles Jr., Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation, for sharing their insights and concerns as they endeavored to protect and honor their ancestors and their cultures. I would like to acknowledge the real difference that generous support from CSULB has made to the completion and publication of this project, and I am deeply grateful to President Jane Conoley and staff within the College of Liberal Arts for aid, particularly Dean Deb Thien, History Department administrator Susan Tsuji, and Administrative Services Manager Terie Bostic. I would like to single out my friend and colleague Norbert Schürer for timely help with German translations from St. Louis newspapers. Jeff Lawler helped me navigate some census databases. While busy as a student in our MA program, Chloe Bell-­Wilson helped build a database of mound materials. Other friends and colleagues contributed by lending an interested ear, passing along references, or reading drafts, including Susan Carlile, Ali Îğmen, Marie Kelleher, Eileen Luhr, Claire Martin, Nancy Quam-­Wickham, Sarah Schrank, and Sean Smith, as well as members of the History Department who responded to an early paper I presented to our Faculty Research Seminar. CSULB students in both undergraduate and graduate courses have kept me focused on making the past a

xvi Acknowledgments

useable one, constantly reminding me that how and what we teach and learn together can and should make a difference. I thank them for their questions and trust in their commitments to crafting an inclusive past as they move into their own classrooms as educators. Archivists, librarians, and historical society staff members have been indispensable. Archivists always do critical work to support researchers, but in recent years they have done more. When the COVID-­19 pandemic shut down many institutions in March 2020, they went above and beyond their job descriptions to provide long-­distance access to materials. I would like to thank the staff at the State Historical Society of Missouri (SHSMO), including John Brenner and Isabelle Graves; Pat Barge, Research Analyst at the Missouri State Archives-­St. Louis; Bill Glankler, Supervising Archivist, Missouri State Archives-­St. Louis; Jennifer Clark at the Gateway Arch National Park; Katherine Terry at the National Archives branch in St. Louis; Wade Popp at the National Archives branch in Kansas City; Linda Krieg, Executive Director of the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society; Renee Jones and Amanda Bahr-­Evola of the St. Louis Public Library; Charles Brown of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at University of Missouri–St. Louis; Marie Wasnock at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; and Jaime Bourassa, Emily Jaycox, Molly Kodner, Lauren Sallwasser, Jason Stratman, and Amanda Claunch of the Missouri Historical Society (MHS). At the MHS, Dennis Northcott helped immeasurably, offering help time and again. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Dennis’s willingness to provide extra help when in-­person visits were impossible made the timely completion of this book possible. For all these archivists’ assistance over the years, thank you. At CSULB, History librarian Greg Armento provided regular help, which I greatly appreciate. I am grateful as well to Fran Levine, former President of the Missouri Historical Society, and Laura Westhoff, Chair of the History Department at University of Missouri–St. Louis, for the invitation to deliver the 2019 James Neal Primm Lecture at the Missouri History Museum. At both the dinner beforehand and the post-­lecture meet and greet, I enjoyed many conversations with other St. Louisans interested in the history of the mounds and Native peoples in the area. I thank the editorial staff of the Missouri Historical Review for permission

Acknowledgments xvii

to reprint material that first appeared in “The Destruction of the Big Mound: Possessing and Defining Native American Places in Early St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Review 113:1 (October 2018): 1-­21. Financial support for this book came from the State Historical Society of Missouri through the Center for Missouri Studies Fellowship Program; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, under the auspices of a Mellon Short-­Term Research Fellowship; research and publication support from California State University, Long Beach; and lastly, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH Fellowship funded the leave that allowed me to complete the book, and its officers made humane allowances for flexibility in the midst of the pandemic. The assistance from CSULB was instrumental as well. I also want to thank my editor at the University of Missouri Press, Mary Conley, and copyeditor, Susan Curtis, for their careful attention to the manuscript. It is a privilege to have a chance to thank other friends and colleagues. Members of our long-­time book club have shared their love of books, good food, companionship, and conversation in person for over a decade and via zoom during the pandemic, including Linda Alkana, Amy Bentley-­Smith, Kurt Helin, Pamela Roberts, Sean Smith, Dana Stibor, Linda Wilson, and the late John Wilson, with a special thanks to Sean and Amy for their initial invitation to join the group, their steadfast friendship, and to Sean for always being my tech guy. Pamela, whose interest in this project grew in part from her own commitments to Indigenous peoples and research on cultural practices related to death and dying, has been a constant source of support. And although she may not fully appreciate the significance of her role, Linda Wilson, as the inspired director of a remarkable preschool, introduced me long ago to a group of women whom I would not have met otherwise. To my mom friends since our children’s toddler days– Kristin Dunn, Annalyn Hallas, Amy Lappen, and Akiko Sekiya – thank you for sharing the journey and all that goes with it. I am full of admiration for you and profoundly grateful for your friendship, an unanticipated boon of parenthood. Thank you to Neal Oliver for your interest in the progress of this project and to Henry Lau for taking my author photo. Other friends, old and new, helped to sustain my work with their interest in

xviii Acknowledgments

this project, fond support, and company, including Yolanda Baber, Liz Barnett, Candice Dickens-­Russell, James Hallas, Jesse Hallas, Nathaniel Lau, the Laurels and their teacher Cori Amendt, Joshua Lazerson, Nancy Lucker Lazerson, Reies Montes, Jackson Oliver, Lewis Oliver, Diana Lopez LaPlume, Tim Meeks, Maria Rivas, George Robb, and Vanessa Sue-­Seto. To members of my family in St. Louis, I am grateful as always for support, encouragement, and practical assistance. My relatives excel equally as cheerleaders and helpers, exuberant in their enthusiasm and ever ready to lend a hand. During the pandemic, they stepped up to go in when archive doors reopened, but travel from California was still not feasible. Kevin Cleary and Michael Cleary have been extremely helpful; it was always a tossup to see which of them would respond faster to a texted message about their availability. I am very lucky to have wonderful brothers who are also willing and adept remote research assistants! Thank you, Kevy and Mikey! Kevin also put me in touch with Joe Mastroianni, who graciously answered my questions about an image his parents had in their basement. Niece Megan Erisman Cleary and nephew Owen Cleary, a history buff since he was very young, did some helpful digging in the library at the MHS research branch on Skinker, and I appreciate their careful photographs of relevant documents. Sisters-­in-­law and St. Louisans Caroline Lillian Cleary and Celeste Cleary have been steadfast supporters and have hosted me in their comfortable homes during my research trips. I also appreciate the presence of many of the family listed above, and nephew Mike Cleary, at the 2019 Primm lecture, and sister Carol Annie, who flew across the country for the occasion. Family on the West Coast have been reliable champions as well. My sisters in California, Kitty Cleary Adamovic and Carol Cleary-­Schultz, and their husbands, Larry Adamovic and Jeff Schultz, have offered infinite support of various kinds, and I appreciate, above all, their relocating to California. Their moves have made my life better and richer, as have the presence of Meghan Adamovic, Rachael O’Neill Adamovic, Allison Adamovic, Jake Adamovic, Theo O’Neill Adamovic, Brian Cleary, Shannon Foss Cleary, Elora Cleary, Kelly Schultz, and Keira Schultz. Kitty Cleary Adamovic deserves a special award for sustaining family communication with zooms throughout the pandemic. While I

Acknowledgments xix

was completing this manuscript, nephew Jake Adamovic combined his graduate studies at CSULB with regular book pickups for me on his walks to and from campus. I thank niece Kelly Schultz for her interest in this project and questions about naming and terminology. Brother Tom and sister-­in-­law Karen Rabideau Cleary have shared their interest in history, a useful database subscription, and a real enthusiasm for this study. A very avid reader of western history since her retirement from medicine, Karen Ann also read (and read aloud to Tommy) the manuscript, providing written and oral feedback, which I appreciated hugely. I am fortunate indeed in the families I have gained through accidents of birth, marriage, work, and friendship, both here and in England. To my husband Hugh Wilford and our son Jonathan Wilford, words fall short in conveying how much I rely upon your constancy, love, and support. Living with two such witty wordsmiths is a real gift. Fortunately for me, Hugh is equally brilliant as a scholar and a husband, and he is a deeply devoted father as well. I have appreciated all our conversations about this project over the years, as well as Hugh’s myriad good suggestions, tireless housecleaning, and encouragement. Although Jonathan heard a lot about this book and examined many of the images, he did not read it in draft form, though he began to offer suggestions toward the end of the writing process. Instead, while Hugh and I were working on our respective book manuscripts, Jonathan began to write his own stories and a novel. Some days, he wrote more than I did, every page full of imagination and pizzazz; he has a real, enviable knack for snappy dialogue that moves the action forward. A thoughtful, creative, and kind person, Jonathan is a real joy to know, and being his mother has been one of the greatest gifts of my life: a privilege and an adventure. Each day, he fills my heart with gratitude and a profound sense of the responsibilities we all have to each other, how deeply our lives are intertwined with others. Sometimes, we experience those connections through the stories that we read and tell. Knowing about others’ lives, past and present, enables us to honor them and to learn from them as we work to build a better, shared future. With those thoughts in mind and with all my love, I dedicate this book to Jonathan.

Abbreviations

AAIA

Association on American Indian Affairs

AIM

American Indian Movement

BIA

Bureau of Indian Affairs

IORM

Improved Order of Red Men

MHS

Missouri Historical Society

MHSA

Missouri Historical Society Archives

NAGPRA Native Americans Graves Protection and Repatriation Act SHSMO

State Historical Society of Missouri

SLU

Saint Louis University

SLPMR

Saint Louis Pageant and Masque Records

UMSL

University of Missouri–St. Louis

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

xxi

MOUND CITY

Introduction

On a gray, humid day in July 2010, I was driving through downtown St. Louis with my brother Kevin, the air-­conditioning blasting as we cruised along Broadway. We were looking for the site of the mound. Not so very long ago, over two dozen massive, monumental earthworks stood in the Near North Riverfront neighborhood, constructed nearly a thousand years ago by Native peoples. Their capital city lay to the east of the Mississippi River, around today’s Cahokia, Illinois. What fueled this search was my own ignorance. Though born and raised in St. Louis, I did not know about Missouri’s many mounds when I lived there. I had visited Monks Mound in Illinois, and had, like so many other schoolchildren, climbed to its summit. Monks Mound anchors Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a state park since the 1920s and a UNESCO world heritage site since 1982. It is the largest pyramid north of Mesoamerica, at its base roughly the same size as the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt, and larger than the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Mexico. But local mounds? In Missouri? I grew up unaware of their existence and of the forces that had led to their leveling. But Native peoples know of the mounds, and white St. Louisans in the late 1700s and 1800s had lived alongside the earthworks and commented on their number, size, and grandeur. The earliest French settlers called the largest one the grange de terre, the earthen barn, and later residents labeled it the Big Mound. Once a dominant feature of the landscape, the Big Mound measured 319 feet long, 34 feet high, and 158 feet wide at its base. Like other mounds in the vicinity, however, it did not survive St. Louis’s growth. In 1869, railroad workers wielding shovels and pickaxes leveled it to street grade. In a matter of months, a structure that had stood 3

4 Introduction

for hundreds of years disappeared, its fate sealed by urban development and railroad expansion. Now, on a muggy Saturday morning a century and a half later, along roads devoid of traffic, people, and activity, we were searching for the space that had been emptied—­the site of the Big Mound—­and the historical marker installed by city boosters in 1929 to commemorate it.1

Fig. 0.1: Building at 1500 N. Broadway, St. Louis, Missouri, July 10, 2010. Photograph by the author.

At the corner of Broadway and Cass, we stopped to look at a dilapidated red brick building with the words “Mound City Buggy Company” painted on the south side. In large block lettering, the faded outline recalled a defunct business for a discarded technology. The whole building struck me as symbolic of the history I was seeking: layered traces of long-­gone lives, enterprises, and times, piled upon each other, glimpses of an elusive past. The photograph I took shows the building in 2010. Taggers subsequently covered the bottom half of the façade with graffiti, which a later clean-­up removed. The efforts to get rid of recent paint

Introduction 5

deemed undesirable and to conserve older bits seemed a declaration of sorts: if not actively preserved, the past can fade. What we choose to remember and whose lives and labors we recall, matters.

Fig. 0.2: Mound marker at the intersection of Howard and Broadway, St. Louis, July 10, 2010. Photograph by the author.

Farther along, we came to the mound marker, a granite boulder in the middle of the triangular intersection of Howard and Broadway. The weeds among the cobblestones reflected neglect, and the marker itself bore signs of ill use. After passing through streets of abandoned warehouses and boarded-­up buildings, I was not surprised by the marker’s poor condition. The way the boulder had been defaced, however, made an impression on me: the copper plaque that explained its meaning was gone. On one side, there was a sculptor’s portrait, in profile, of the head of an Indigenous man meant to represent a Mound Builder (a term that became popular among non-­native people in the 1800s as a label for Indigenous societies that had mounds). On the other side, a plaque had commemorated the great mound that once stood at the site. The

6 Introduction

plaque was missing, presumably stolen. Such thefts are increasingly a problem in urban America, with wiring, gutters, and plaques removed for their scrap metal value; in 2011, a St. Louis report noted that over $4.6 million in copper and other metal had been stolen in a little over a year.2 A sizeable trade in stolen bricks is similarly destructive, with would-­be thieves sometimes setting fire to abandoned buildings so as to make it easier for them to harvest bricks after the pressure from firehose spray dislodges the mortar. In this case, a criminal act had rendered a nearly century-­old marker for an Indigenous monument mute. There was no acknowledgment of the history of the mounds, their builders (called Mississippians by archaeologists), or their modern descendants, among them the Osage Nation. I am far from alone in feeling saddened by the physical state of parts of St. Louis and by what it suggests about the social and economic forces at play in the city. In his brilliant book, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Missouri-­born scholar Walter Johnson begins by evoking a wrecked urban landscape, describing how thirty thousand vacant houses stand in St. Louis, where “the pieces of the past lie jumbled together and scattered.”3 The tale is one of loss: of population decline, demolition, “‘redevelopment’ by bulldozer,” and the removal of Black neighborhoods. Johnson ties histories of violence, urban development, and racial discrimination together, culminating in what most Americans outside of Missouri likely think of in conjunction with Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb: the police shooting and death of Michael Brown in 2014 and Black Lives Matter protests. Johnson’s work, though focused on St. Louis, tells a larger story of developments significant throughout the country. He argues that St. Louis “has been the crucible of American history—­that much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-­Blackness in the city of St. Louis.”4 The growth of the United States as an empire, typically understood as an overseas phenomenon of the twentieth century, had an earlier, continental dimension. In the 1800s, expansionism and subjugation of Native peoples were central to the nation, with St. Louis, as Johnson chronicles, the launching point for military campaigns against Indigenous people for much of the century. In this study, I am trying to explore what was

Introduction 7

going on within St. Louis as those genocidal, expansionist campaigns were underway, a local counterpoint to Johnson’s focus on the “Indian Wars” taking place at a distance.5 Growing up, I incorrectly understood St. Louis as beginning with Lewis and Clark. Who or what preceded them was a blank in my early education, a gap that inspired me to write my previous book: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis. In school and from my parents, I learned about the city’s role in a history of expansion that defined St. Louis and gave rise to its most memorable moments and sites. I was, as Christen Mucher puts it, “taught to be a settler—­how to think like one, how to see like one,” that is, to celebrate the progress of white settlement.6 At the beginning was the opening of the West, initiated by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, with Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark the heroic figures. Its culminating event was St. Louis’s moment in the spotlight, the 1904 World’s Fair. The fair’s full title—­the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—­commemorated the history of continental growth, as did the name of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, more commonly known as the Gateway Arch, constructed on the riverbank between 1962 and 1965. That architectural masterpiece is the city’s most recognizable structure, a testament to westward expansion, and at 630 feet, the tallest monument built in the Western Hemisphere. But that soaring landmark was neither the first nor the only large monument built on the site of what is today downtown St. Louis. Overlooked and largely erased from the city’s histories and popular memory are the first monuments: a complex of over two dozen huge earthworks arranged around a plaza with an extensive view over the river. Into the present, their creators and their descendants have been too often ignored by non-­native historians, scientists, and policy makers, who have dismissed Indigenous sources of knowledge about the mounds, contemporary Indigenous peoples’ ongoing connections to them, and Native peoples’ efforts to protect them. The results have been disastrous: histories, policies, and practices that have excluded or attacked Native peoples, their presence, priorities, and perspectives. Historian Christine DeLucia argues, forcefully and persuasively, that historians have been a central part of the process of creating narrow and limited interpretations

8 Introduction

of the past. Products of a discipline whose nineteenth-­century practitioners sought to promote the nation-­state and the ideal citizens of it, historians, myself included, are implicated in this process. By ignoring Indigenous knowledge makers and sources, historians have contributed to the narrative erasure of Indigenous peoples in US history and—­more to the point here—­to the relative absence of accounts of the mounds and Native peoples’ histories in St. Louis.7 I do not mean to suggest, however, that there are not progressive voices inside of the discipline, scholars who have embraced an anti-­colonial stance in their work and worked to counter these narratives. I want fellow St. Louisans and readers elsewhere to join me in a journey of exploration. I cover the themes I do because I want non-­ Indigenous readers, for whom this history may be surprising or new, to understand why they have not encountered it before and how that omission in their education—­as in my own—­has affected their sense of how Indigenous peoples, long ago and into the present, have shaped St. Louis’s history and identity. While this book does not transcend the colonial moment it records or fully meet the goals outlined by Indigenous scholars seeking to decolonize research related to Indigenous peoples, it does, I hope, shed some light on the “hows” and “whys” behind the processes through which the knowledge and histories of Native peoples in the region of modern-­day St. Louis have been marginalized and make some contribution to restoring Indigenous actors to the stage.8 Much work on the Indigenous histories of St. Louis remains to be done. In trying to explain how and why the mounds were destroyed and then appropriated as part of civic identity, my emphasis is often on the words and actions of white St. Louisans. Thus, some chapters focus mostly on those white St. Louisans who, through economic activity, were in the position to act upon the landscape and lead civic developments. White St. Louisans simultaneously destroyed and celebrated Indigenous cultural legacies. Part of the explanation for this seeming paradox lies in the idea of the “vanishing Indian,” a myth that white Americans promulgated and embraced in the nineteenth century and beyond. This notion functioned as justification for policies focused on the material dispossession of Native peoples from their lands and attacks on their cultures. Yet even as these ruinous practices targeted Indigenous peoples, the project of dispossession remained incomplete at every

Introduction 9

stage, including into the present. Persistence, resistance, and survival all describe Indigenous peoples and their histories. If there is any reason for optimism, it is that while Europeans and their descendants tried to banish Native peoples, they failed. Though white Americans leveled mounds and continue to do so, mounds still exist. And even in the St. Louis area, mounds still stand, and Indigenous groups and their allies are engaged in efforts to preserve them.9 Over and over, while doing the research for this book, I have been struck by how many times in the last 150 years the distant past of Indigenous peoples in St. Louis has been treated as a new discovery by non-­Indigenous writers. It is as though it is a surprise, and nearly every newspaper writer, blogger, or scholar—­me included—­uses the idea of discovering forgotten mounds as a narrative hook or jumping off point for some personal commentary or interpretation. Forgetting history—­or telling incomplete histories—­is an unfortunate and recurring facet of our American past and present, with narratives that have marginalized Indigenous peoples and cultures here and elsewhere the result.10 Perspectives that sideline Indigenous peoples or treat them in the past tense have also underpinned policies of removal, expansion, and genocide.11 But Indigenous histories are central to St. Louis, and the fact that St. Louis grew on a Native settlement site should not be a surprise to anyone. It does not, of course, come as news to Indigenous peoples. White American settlers built cities on Indigenous locales throughout the continent. Mounds covered the eastern half of the country, and white settlers often intentionally built on and among them. In St. Louis, as elsewhere, urban growth was tied to the removal of contemporary Indigenous peoples from their lands and the physical destruction of historic Native architecture. Those basic facts come as a shock to some. The wonderful new exhibits in the remodeled museum beneath the Arch present this history of territorial takeover clearly. When I visited the new galleries in 2019, a year after they reopened, I overheard a visitor criticizing how US history was being presented: too much emphasis on the land as “belonging to Indians” seemed to be the main issue. Rather than offering a narrative championing white pioneers who established new settlements, the displays made clear that gains for white Americans came at a tremendous cost to Indigenous peoples. A display representing

10 Introduction

“American Indian Lands” seized over time is headed by a pointed statement: “Over 500 treaties were made between the United States government and American Indians. All of them were broken.” As the acres and laws flit by on the huge screen, the ever-­shifting map shows that by 1820, over 295 million acres of land had been taken from Indigenous peoples since 1776. That figure soared to 788 million acres in 1870, one billion by 1884, and 1.5 billion today. As interpretive materials in the museum put it, “The West was Won” or “The West was Lost,” depending on whose perspective is featured. Many have forgotten that Missouri’s territory is Native land, and coerced treaties and policies enacted in the 1800s dictated Native peoples’ removal. In the case of the Big Mound and the other earthworks whose history and legacies I am examining, the same uncomfortable truth is there. The visible evidence of a centuries-­old, Indigenous, local history—­the Big Mound and the other monumental mounds nearby—­ has been destroyed, misrepresented, and largely either forgotten or appropriated outside of Indigenous communities and archaeological circles. Such neglect is not without political import. I acknowledge that my own approach may strike Indigenous readers as too focused on non-­ Indigenous sources and am aware that my decision to chart the afterlife of the mounds primarily through white civic culture may be only part of the story of Indigenous presence in the city, but it is an important story, nonetheless. There is much to be learned from thinking about how the white settlers who inhabited the city and their descendants interacted with Indigenous peoples, used and then razed the mounds that stood in the area, and then claimed the mantle of Mound City. It is thus a story of the place of imaginings of Indigenous peoples and histories in the city’s growth. It is also a story, however incomplete, of Indigenous peoples: those who lived originally in the area, those who came there to trade, those who were forced out of the region, those who immigrated to St. Louis in the 1800s and 1900s, and those who today labor to preserve the city’s Indigenous histories and spaces. In terms of the physical landscape, as in numerous instances across the country, Indigenous structures that are hundreds or thousands of years old have been obliterated by haphazard development as well as by the intentional efforts of city planners across the country. Early in the research for this study, I came across an article about the peculiar

Introduction 11

case of Circleville, Ohio. There, in 1810, white Americans founded a town on the site of an older Indigenous settlement, whose two circular mounds inspired its name, in an early example of the paradox of white Americans seemingly honoring a Native past while also appropriating it. Occupying an Indigenous site, these settlers built an octagonal courthouse at the center of their community, with eight streets radiating out toward the mounds. Soon, Circleville residents constructed their houses around and within them. Less than thirty years later, however, inhabitants grew tired of living in the round. In response, the Ohio state legislature approved the work of the Circleville Squaring Company, a firm whose sole purpose was to redesign the town on a grid pattern, a process that took until 1856 and led to the leveling of the distinctive mounds.12 Thus, an Indigenous past that was acknowledged in the town’s name was destroyed when that heritage became inconvenient. In less than five decades, white Americans had claimed the mounds as part of their identity and then leveled them. Contradictions abound. As late as the twentieth century, mounds were everywhere in Missouri. A state handbook for 1939–1940 referred to 28,000 then in existence in Missouri alone.13 And St. Louis is only one among many places in the United States nicknamed or known officially as “Mound City.” Communities named Mound City also appear in Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, South Dakota, and Missouri itself.14 In Illinois, an early local historian wrote of Pulaski County’s Mound City, “While other mounds are scattered over the place, this one, upon the river bank, gave the name to the location and afterward to the city.”15 These names harken to a distant Indigenous past, linking that past simultaneously to a modern community’s history and origin story. Throughout the country, there are local efforts to preserve mounds as well as institutions centered on them, beyond that at Cahokia. Numerous state museums and historic sites surround mounds, in places like Moundville, Alabama, and Etowah, Georgia.16 The Etowah site, the most intact one in the southeast, had 140 buildings, numerous mounds, borrow pits from which the dirt for the mounds was excavated, statues, and abundant artifacts, including ones imported from Cahokia. Closer to home, those interested in visiting Native sites throughout the state of Missouri do not need to travel far.17

Fig. 0.3: Publicly accessible archaeological sites of the medieval Mississippian world. Reproduced by permission from Timothy R. Pauketat and Susan M. Alt, eds., Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2015), viii.

Introduction 13

In records from the late 1700s and early 1800s, references to the mounds as landmarks, boundaries, and wonders were frequent. At some point, though, the earthworks were leveled, one by one, and I wanted to know when and why. A professional experience made me think more about the links between the distant Indigenous past and contemporary Indigenous peoples. For a dozen years, I was a member of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) committee at the university where I teach, California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). NAGPRA was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, and the committee on which I served was responsible for facilitating the identification and return of human remains and cultural artifacts in university collections. The committee’s Indigenous representatives of Southern California tribes, particularly the Tongva and Gabrieleño, worked tirelessly to secure the repatriation of sacred objects, artifacts, and human remains. Across the country, the skeletal remains of Indigenous peoples lie in museums, universities, and private holdings, a legacy of grave-­robbing practices and an ongoing source of profound grief and anger for Indigenous peoples. Many years of serving on the CSULB NAGPRA committee and meeting Indigenous community leaders and Indigenous scholars provided me a unique opportunity to witness the personal dimensions of contemporary heritage practices and issues, as well as the immediacy and depth of my fellow committee members’connections and commitments to their Ancestors. I am grateful to have supported, in however limited a role, their efforts. I wish to acknowledge that my university stands on occupied territory, the historic home of the Tongva and Acjachemen Nations, the former site of Puvungna. And as I hope will be abundantly clear to readers, I have undertaken this project with an awareness that my hometown of St. Louis developed on the ancestral lands of numerous Indigenous tribes, among them the Osage Nation, Illini Confederacy, and Missouria, and I respectfully acknowledge their historic and ongoing ties to the sacred spaces and places of Missouri. This project owes a debt to Indigenous scholars’ work in two major areas: studies of urban Native peoples and studies of how non-­ Indigenous Americans have appropriated aspects of Native cultures or symbols for their own purposes.18 An emerging body of scholarship has begun to chart the persistence of urban indigeneity—­where Indigenous

14 Introduction

people live today—­and the meaning of historical narratives that obscure Indigenous peoples, both ancient and contemporary, throughout the continent. Works like Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-­Over Place and Jean O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England illuminate how Native peoples and their historical connections to places have been appropriated and used for political purposes, both in the nineteenth century and subsequently. Non-­Indigenous peoples laying claim to Indigenous cultures has taken place across a wide range of social, linguistic, and commemorative contexts. Philip J. Deloria’s wonderful book, Playing Indian, unpacks the multiple and conflicting meanings in the performance of Indianness by white Americans, whether in the context of Campfire and Scouts, or among countercultural and New Age practitioners. Earlier, colonists masqueraded as Mohawk fighters in the 1773 Boston Tea Party or smoked a “peace pipe.” In embracing and at times criticizing aspects of Indigenous cultures and symbols, white Americans have, in Deloria’s view, sought to clarify and shape their own identities, on both personal and political levels. Meanwhile, both Indigenous and non-­native scholars have also described how histories that have excluded Indigenous peoples have taught Americans to think like early settlers and have urged the “unsettling of American history.”19 To explore the complex place of early and more recent Indigenous history in St. Louis, I have organized this study around the life, death, and afterlife of the city’s mounds, including episodes involving their commemoration decades after they were destroyed. The site was first and foremost an Indigenous place, both before and after European settlers arrived. The factors that drew Native peoples to the spot—­access to waterways, richly timbered and fertile lands, and abundant animal life—­appealed also to the later non-­native peoples who occupied it. And although the mounds had been abandoned before Europeans established a foothold, their presence, as well as that of the many Indigenous tribes in the vicinity, shaped the economic development, culture, and reputation of St. Louis in its colonial and territorial days and well into Missouri’s statehood era. St. Louis remained very much a place influenced by Indigenous trade in the 1800s. Then, as Walter Johnson demonstrates, it became a pivotal site for the staging and waging of military actions directed against Native peoples.

Introduction 15

While I focus at some points on the mounds, their destruction, and preservation, at other times the history of the mounds is in the background as other themes come to the fore. Each chapter opens with a vignette, a brief description of a scene designed to evoke a place, period, and players. I began this project by thinking about how, over the course of centuries, Indigenous peoples constructed and used the mounds; white settlers repurposed and destroyed them; artists, writers, and local boosters interpreted and commemorated them; and Indigenous peoples, in the present, together with certain settler historians and institutions trying to transcend old colonial legacies, are endeavoring to preserve and protect them. Several chapters focus on those topics, and others foreground other aspects of St. Louis history with little direct reference to the mounds, a reminder of the interplay between the distant past and recent developments, of the layers upon layers of the history of a place and the peoples who have inhabited it. Even as they have endured and resisted the assaults on their communities, cultures, and lands, Indigenous peoples have suffered greatly throughout the colonial and national periods of US history. Epidemic diseases and genocidal wars have laid waste to populations. Broken treaties, land seizures, and forced removals compound the legacy of loss. Landscapes once the sites of Indigenous monuments have fared little better. John E. Kelly, an archaeologist who devoted his career to studying the mound centers of the region and recently retired from Washington University, neatly summed up the impact of colonial settlers and their descendants: “An alien society of Euro-­Americans . . . brought with it a combined sense of curiosity, ignorance, and the rapid ability to destroy the monuments of the past.”20 Disentangling those intertwined elements of curiosity, ignorance, and destruction is part of what I hope to accomplish in this book. As St. Louis grew in the 1800s, beyond a few blocks hugging the riverfront, the mounds that were once its most distinctive feature were surrounded and razed. In the 1850s, a short-­lived preservation effort failed. By 1869, all but one of the mounds close to the river were gone, swallowed up by urban development. Today, one hundred thousand people drive daily past Sugarloaf Mound, the one mound that remains within city limits, though most may be unaware of it. Destroyed over a period of a few decades in the mid-­1800s as the city spread to the north

16 Introduction

and west along the Mississippi River, the mounds were memorialized by contemporaries. Combining civic boosterism and advertising, white St. Louisans took to naming everything from shoe firms and coffin companies to breweries and cured meats with a “Mound City” moniker. Why did non-­native St. Louis residents evoke and commemorate the mounds in this way? What purposes did such commercial and cultural uses of the Mound City name have, both for the short and long term? How did the process of remembering the mounds in this way—­while forgetting them in other realms—­work? The seeming paradox of white Americans championing Indigenous dispossession and removal while telling stories about mounds and their place in local history origin stories needs some unpacking. It is my hope that exploring these questions will refocus attention on the Indigenous histories of St. Louis and serve as a call to further research, writing, and engagement. As I have researched this project, I have mentioned the mounds to many St. Louisans. When they first hear of this project, many have asked me, as if gently correcting me, “You mean the mounds at Cahokia?” Those who pose that question share my early knowledge gap. As the great historian George Lipsitz wrote in a collection of essays published thirty years ago, “Few people think of St. Louis as a place where Indians lived”; unfortunately, his statement still holds too much truth.21 Although I do not begin to claim this is a comprehensive or exhaustive history of the Indigenous history of St. Louis, I hope it is a thought-­provoking starting place. There is more work to be done, I know, to center fully the experiences of Indigenous peoples. I use the term “Indigenous” or “Native” rather than “Indian,” unless I am citing sources, laws, or policies that use “Indian” intentionally. There is a vast amount of material about the meaning of various terms. Suffice it to say that I use “Indigenous” and “Native” to emphasize the status of the first peoples to inhabit the continent as the first stewards of this land, their presence over millennia, and their efforts to maintain their cultures, knowledge, and practices in the face of ongoing threats to their sovereignty and other rights. Despite the ceremonial practices, traditions, research, and publishing activities of many Indigenous scholars and individuals, archaeologists, and mound enthusiasts, knowledge of the mounds is not widely

Introduction 17

diffused throughout US society. Though largely absent from histories of the mounds written in the 1800s and beyond, Indigenous sources of knowledge of the mounds and ties to them have been continuous. There also exist extensive sources of the kinds historians tend to use: published sources in the form of both extensive newspaper coverage of mounds and a rich photographic record that details both the existence of the mounds and the steps involved in their destruction. These published sources constitute the bulk of my evidence and the focus of my analysis in this book. Indigenous peoples have known of, articulated, and preserved their ties to the mounds; how and why did white Americans not acknowledge them? I want non-­native readers to question their own ignorance of the mounds. Then I want them to go a step a further and ask why—­and to what effect—­Indigenous peoples’ pasts and presents have been relegated to the sidelines of US history. I want non-­Indigenous readers to think about how historical marginalization occurred and the role it has played in the political, economic, and cultural ambitions and agendas of earlier generations of westward-­ moving white Americans. For non-­native readers willing to go further, I hope they will join me in asking what are our responsibilities to the past, present, and future, to acknowledging the wrongs in our national heritage, and to redressing the tragedies and suffering stemming from ignorance as well as institutionalized racism.

Chapter ONE

Metropolis on the Mississippi The burial chamber was ready. Attendants ritually prepared the body of the man, a member of the ruling elite, and wrapped his remains in richly woven cloth. The mourners rested the shrouded corpse of the great chief gently on the ground, his head and feet aligned with the rising and setting sun. Around him were other bodies, similarly positioned: family members, servants, or sacrificial victims. Fine tools and beautiful ornaments were arrayed nearby. After the holy men concluded the funeral rites, news of the internment traveled to the capital city, several miles to the east, across the great river. Afterward, construction on the mound continued. Over the weeks and months and years that followed, workers piled basket after basket of soil above the tomb. They shaped the walls of the rising edifice into steep slopes. Eventually, twenty-­five feet of earth lay above the chamber. The largest sepulchral mound west of the Mississippi River was complete. Nearly a thousand years ago, untold numbers of people constructed huge mounds across the eastern part of what is today the United States. Settled on lands from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean, these Indigenous peoples built countless geometric earthworks, both large and small, over the course of hundreds of years. Some were designed to mimic the shape of animals, while others loomed above their surroundings as enormous, flat-­topped mounds, oriented to the cardinal points and the stars in the night sky. Their builders altered landscapes, designed religious sites, and created sprawling urban centers. In the process, they 19

20

Chapter One

engineered massive pyramids, palisades, and plazas and hauled millions of cubic feet of soil. The labor involved was staggering. The technical skills and astronomical knowledge required were sophisticated. And the political will that underpinned the efforts was immense, powerful, and effective.

Fig. 1.1. Cahokia, circa AD 1150, 1990, painting by William R. Iseminger. Courtesy of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

Influencing these communities after around 1050CE was a settlement at the site of Cahokia, today a small town in western Illinois. In the eleventh century, however, the community was not a minor village. Rather, it was a planned capital city of such magnitude that its creation changed the course of history in the Mississippi River Valley.1 As archaeologist Timothy R. Pauketat argues, Cahokia was the mother of Native North America, what he calls ancient America’s great city. It was monumental, dramatic, and extravagant. Around vast civic plazas,

Metropolis on the Mississippi

21

people carefully constructed monumental earthworks, at least 120 of them. Of various sizes and shapes, the mounds possessed religious and political significance. On their summits, architects erected public buildings, including ancestral temples and council houses, far bigger than any that had existed previously. They constructed residences, storage pits, and circular sweat lodges.2 Between 10,000 and 16,000 people lived in the immediate vicinity—­contemporary London held roughly the same number of inhabitants—­and another twenty to thirty thousand resided nearby.3 Including scattered farmers and smaller villages close by, the greater Cahokia region may have been populated by 25,000 to 50,000 people, whose economic activities and spiritual lives likely revolved around the trade and theatrical rituals of the great capital city.4 Eight miles to the west, on both banks of the Mississippi River, satellite precincts sprang up. On the site of contemporary East St. Louis, Illinois, forty-­five mounds were built, and more than two dozen were constructed just across the river in what is today Missouri, where St. Louis now stands, with many others throughout the metro area.5 Excavations suggest that the settlements at the sites of East St. Louis and St. Louis had between two thousand and three thousand inhabitants each.6 While their functions may have differed, these two mound centers were part of a religious, political, and administrative region and culture centered on Cahokia. In their connection to a dominant cultural capital, these satellites were far from unique. Indeed, the rebuilding of Cahokia in the mid-­eleventh century and its flourishing led to the spread of similar practices, artifacts, and construction styles across huge swaths of territory, far beyond the outlying, suburban mound districts along the Mississippi. Centered on the Mississippi River Valley, this culture, which has been labeled “Mississippian” by archaeologists, had far-­reaching and widespread influence. Vast networks of trade and mound sites existed throughout the Ohio River Valley as well. Building mounds was not new in the eleventh century. For thousands of years, since at least 3500 BCE, Indigenous peoples had constructed earthworks. Across the eastern half of the continent, Native peoples built tens of thousands of mounds, perhaps hundreds of thousands, both small and large, for residential, ceremonial, burial, and defensive purposes.7

22

Chapter One

Fig. 1.2: Location of Greater Cahokia and other Mississippian Towns. Reproduced by permission from Timothy R. Pauketat, Susan M. Alt, and Jeffrey D. Krutchen, Pauketat, “City of Earth and Wood: New Cahokia and Its Material-­Historical Implications.” In The Cambridge World History, Volume III: Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 439.

Modern Indigenous peoples have traditions regarding the mounds and their ancestors’ roles in constructing them; they continue to visit, pray at, and preserve these sites. Unrelated to those traditions, a set of terms has been developed by archaeologists to categorize mound-­building cultures chronologically, with labels such as Archaic, Adena, Hopewell, and Woodland.8 What is clear is that Native peoples built mounds over vast periods and distances, including geometric and animal-­shaped effigy earthworks. Perhaps the most famous of the surviving effigy mounds is Serpent Mound, in contemporary Ohio. At twenty to twenty-­five feet wide and one to three-­feet high, extending over 1300 feet in length, it is the largest serpent effigy mound in the world. Indigenous oral traditions name the Shawnee, Iroquois, Lenâpé, and Cherokee among descendants of the Ohio River Valley mound builders.9 There were prolific burial and effigy mound builders in what is today southern Wisconsin as well, and mound-­building traditions were widespread prior to 1000 CE.10

Metropolis on the Mississippi

23

Regardless of whether there were lulls in periods of mound building, Native peoples would have seen mounds built by earlier inhabitants, and oral traditions could have enabled them to transmit knowledge of those people, their engineering skills, and their construction techniques. Evidence of older as well as contemporary Indigenous knowledge of the mounds has often been sidelined. As Barbara Alice Mann and other Indigenous scholars have convincingly argued, archaeologists and historians have too often advanced interpretations that exclude or discount Indigenous knowledge, as with widely known accounts among the Shawnee, Iroquois, and Cherokee of their ancestors’ roles in constructing the mounds of the Ohio River valley.11 It is very difficult to make definitive statements about the state of common knowledge centuries ago from the distance of the early twenty-­first century. For archaeologists, the distances between mound sites—­both physical and chronological—­ have raised questions: How did Native peoples understand the construction projects of earlier eras? What meanings did they attribute to older mounds? What purposes did the mounds fulfill?12 While there are no uniform answers, it seems that prior to 1000 CE, early mound-­building peoples were not closely interconnected in a single culture. The settlement that developed around the site of Cahokia changed all that. Cahokia served as a unifying influence tying together other mound-­ building communities between 1000 and 1450 CE. Under the stimulus or perhaps the inspiration of Cahokia’s example, Indigenous peoples across vast territories constructed mounds that grew to new heights, while a new civilization—­connected by trade, religious beliefs, ritual practices, and possibly by politics and expansionist policies—­emerged. What happened? In July 1054, a brilliant celestial object lit the sky. The massive stellar explosion was a supernova, observed and recorded throughout the world, with Chinese, Japanese, and Islamic astronomers detailing its appearance. In North America, artists memorialized it with petroglyphs in Illinois and at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and elsewhere.13 The remnants of this exploded star, known as the Crab Nebula, are still bright and easily visible. SN 1054, as it is known, is one of eight supernovas identifiable through early written records. For those who lived in and around old Cahokia, the sudden appearance of a new and extraordinarily

24

Chapter One

bright celestial body may have prompted religious discussion. They were people whose spiritual lives were connected to astronomical calendars, and the spectacular phenomenon appearing in the heavens around the clock for a month and in the night sky for two years may have led the religious elite to reassess their lives and society. Did it prompt them to tear down, start from scratch, and rebuild? John Kelly and James Brown note other astronomical events that may have provided some impetus for the change as well, including Halley’s comet appearing around the time of the spring equinox in 1066, but suggest that the scheduling of annual community feasts at a central location may have played a significant role in Cahokia’s rise as well.14 Regardless of which celestial event or other factor triggered the changes in this period, they were rapid and dramatic. Around the mid-­ eleventh century, in what Pauketat calls a veritable big bang in the continent’s interior, a new and expansive phase materialized. At that time, Cahokia’s leaders destroyed the existing village, burning buildings to the ground. They then erected a new settlement over the ruins, imposing a new community plan. They employed the labor of tens of thousands of people to construct monumental mounds from heavy river-­bottom clay they mined.15 Over a relatively short period, Cahokia’s leaders replaced their big village with a town at least three times its size, its center a grand plaza, a fifty-­acre open space surrounded by numerous large pyramids constructed with alternating layers of dark and light clay.16 One can imagine involved discussions among engineers and architects as they envisioned their grand plans. Spiritual leaders’ voices were part of the chorus. Gazing in the directions of the rising and setting sun, they gestured toward the cardinal points, positioning their civic and religious building projects accordingly. They invoked their deities and strategized about how to realize their aspirations. Some of their ideas may have been influenced by the mound-­building practices of another group in the southern Mississippi Valley.17 Whatever their source, the concepts and planning behind the metropolis were embraced systematically, as leaders brought their dreams to life on a sweeping scale. One can only marvel, as with other great early construction sites—­such as the stone pyramids in Mexico, Central America, South America, and Egypt—­at both the ambition and the achievement.

Metropolis on the Mississippi

25

The most impressive surviving monument is the largest mound at Cahokia, called Monks Mound today, after the French Trappist monks who farmed on it in the early 1800s. It is the largest earthwork in the hemisphere, comprised of twenty-­two million cubic feet of dirt.18 Over a period of many years, mound engineers with specialized knowledge of soils directed its construction.19 On top of tons of deposited dirt, dug by hand and hauled in baskets, workers laid blocks of sod, enabling them to create a steep and stable façade.20 Standing one hundred feet tall—­the equivalent of a ten-­story building today—­and nearly one thousand feet long and over eight hundred feet wide, the great mound covers almost fourteen acres. Flat-­topped, or truncated pyramids, the mounds like those at Cahokia and elsewhere were topped by platforms large enough for dwellings or other buildings. At the mound’s summit, on the highest of its four terraces, archaeologists have found evidence of a five-­thousand square-­foot building, possibly fifty feet high. The amount of time and effort involved in executing plans for the great city is astounding, and the basket technology that underpinned it fascinating. The mounds and plazas were vast undertakings, with colossal quantities of sand and soil relocated, dug by hand with tools manufactured from local stone, and hauled in “burden” baskets. Terminology about “basket loads” has been used by archaeologists discussing both the labor and volume of dirt involved in mound construction.21 It first appeared in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, written by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis and published as the first literary output of the Smithsonian in 1848.22 Baskets remained a part of earthworks construction techniques into the nineteenth century, though white scholars discounted Indigenous sources of knowledge on the practice. Among the Cherokee in North Carolina in the 1880s, burden baskets were still in use, a reminder of the continuity and survival of mound-­building knowledge and heritage among Indigenous peoples. At the East Cherokee reservation, tribal elders informed ethnographer James Mooney, working for the Bureau of Ethnology, about mound-­building practices that took place in conjunction with harvest-­related green corn dances and ceremonies. They told Mooney that “it was customary to begin a mound on the occasion of this dance,” with representatives of the people bringing “baskets filled

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with earth, which was placed in a common pile with appropriate ceremonies and afterward added to by the labors of the common people.” In a striking example of a white scientist discrediting Indigenous knowledge, Mooney called his informant “somewhat unreliable,” even while adding that his testimony was supported by that of others.23 Casting doubt on an Indigenous source, Mooney engaged in a the too-­common practice of asserting a monopoly on knowledge and privileging his own authority. The scale of labor and the amount of dirt moved in Cahokia were immense. The land was mined for dirt for the central mounds, leaving massive holes, called “borrow pits” by archaeologists; refuse from public feasts filled at least one.24 For the largest plaza, laborers removed soil from the naturally undulating surface and added fine, sandy loam as landfill, useful for drainage. Even today, the plaza area’s slight grade—­ higher at the north end—­insures that rainwater does not pool on it.25 The labor involved is mind-­boggling: estimates suggest that it would have taken a crew of 100 people working for 316 days to construct the Grand Plaza alone.26 The grand civic spaces held spectacular public competitions. One of these was chunkey, a popular game played before gigantic crowds. Named for a circular disk made of finely crafted stone, chunkey could involve a thousand male players, who hurled hundreds of specialized sticks in the “chunk yard,” trying to land them near where the rolling stone would fall. Chunkey may remind those familiar with Indigenous sites elsewhere in the Americas of the ball game played on courts. The equipment was quite different, however, with the ball made of solid rubber.27 Chunkey hoops were made of wood, bark, or ceramics, and corn husks were turned into gear as well.28 Gambling may have been involved, and players were celebrated in works of art.29 In short, things in Cahokia were done on an epic scale, whether digging, dining, or dashing around a huge competition field. This impressive transformation of the urban landscape and physical environment propelled the outward expansion of the local culture, which spread from the Great Plains to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Archaeologists characterize Cahokia as both the center and the centerpiece of the Mississippian world, from its

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Fig. 1.3: Image of Chunkey Player Effigy Pipe, catalog # 12x83 Muskogee County, Oklahoma, ca. 1100–1200 AD flint clay, Dimensions: 8.46 x 3.86 x 5.31. In the Henry Whelpley Collection. Courtesy of the Saint Louis Science Center, St. Louis, Missouri.

“big bang” in the mid-­eleventh century until the capital’s abandonment by 1350 CE. Teasing out how and why its influence spread and affected other contemporaneous societies centered on mounds is complicated. Varied traditions exist among Native peoples, and competing theories abound among archaeologists. What is clear is that the movements of people, goods, and ideas across long distances all played a role. At its height, Cahokia’s fame was known far and wide, and people traveled to

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see it.30 Some outsiders became permanent residents, and an immigrant population contributed to the capital’s rapid growth. With at least 120 mounds and numerous plaza complexes, the city had much to impress the visitor. Its monumental scale reflected its leaders’ drive to build, and their ambitions in turn shaped the life of the community. They built and built and built—­mounds, plazas, palatial temples, thousands of wooden pole-­and-­thatch buildings, and defensive palisades.31 The residents also erected structures that reflected their precise knowledge of the stars, with a series of wood-­post circles, astronomical sun calendars referred to by archaeologists today as “woodhenges.” The name is a reference to Stonehenge, the monolithic stone circle in Wiltshire, England, erected between 3000 and 2000 BCE. At Cahokia, as at Stonehenge, the circular structures reflected deep astronomical knowledge and a cultural orientation toward lunar and solar calendars and rituals. Building was ongoing. Even the mounds themselves were built and rebuilt, with enlargements and modifications to the sides and tops. Construction and destruction went hand in hand, with laborers razing the temples and houses that topped the truncated pyramids, adding a layer or two more of earth, and then rebuilding the structures. In at least one case, they altered a mound annually.32 Walking through the settlement, a resident or visitor would have encountered the sights and sounds of large numbers of people engaged regularly in these enterprises and witnessed the hard physical work, the bustle, and the energy. The ubiquity of the mounds and their regular enlargement meant that laborers in Cahokia and outlying settlements were involved in almost non-­stop building projects throughout the period from 1050–­1150 CE. As Pauketat and Alt put it, it was a “new living landscape,” with most people in its sphere actively participating in its “continuous and symbolically charged rhythms.”33 As these settlements grew larger, so, too, did their mounds, which increased in both size and number. Such massive building projects echo those of other societies, past and present, and the efforts people put into their culture’s most valued spaces. The places where groups gather—­often the biggest structures—­ can symbolize the spirit of an age and the priorities of a people. It is

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interesting to note that at exactly the same time Indigenous peoples were building monumental mounds across the eastern half of the continent, European peoples were building cathedrals. In significance and functions, the structures share much. Built over hundreds of years and engaging much of the population in lengthy, communal projects, both involved untold numbers of common laborers, whose work was directed by architects and spiritual leaders. Both fueled and reflected the drive of elites attempting to realize social, religious, and artistic agendas. As in other cultures spanning large areas, those living in and around Cahokia were connected to people near and far through similar belief systems, trade, and foodways. Likewise, social structures transcended single locations. With hereditary chiefs, who were both religious and political leaders, communities like that at Cahokia had powerful religious elites, astronomers, artists, translators, warriors, potters, and large numbers of farmers. Close to the center of this world, those who resided within fifty miles of Cahokia lived within a single administrative complex. Like those farther afield, they shared in an expansive civilization whose people traveled—­most likely intermittently—­and traded. Over long distances, they journeyed and negotiated for highly prized exotic materials, including objects from the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. They sought out rare stones, shells, and copper for use in rituals or for fashioning into ornaments for the elite. Some of the most precious goods came from the vicinity of Cahokia itself. Nearby quarries yielded a useful type of quartz. Known as Mill Creek chert, this stone was shaped by artisans into utilitarian hoes and spades, as well as processed and polished for ritual clubs, maces, and other high-­status items. Large quantities of it were also exported.34 Over hundreds of miles, artifacts made from Mill Creek chert abound, including ceremonial weapons and figurines. In the designs of ritual objects, one can see signs of widespread beliefs about ancestors, the stars, and superhuman male and female beings. During Cahokia’s ascendancy, over the course of a couple of centuries, so-­called Mississippian settlements experienced population growth and prosperity. They also benefitted from the long-­distance exchange

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networks that helped to disseminate shared cultural practices. People as far north as today’s Minnesota and South Dakota had Cahokia “or Cahokia-­like” objects and architectural forms.35 At sites that have been excavated in Montana, Wisconsin, Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, only Cahokia-­style stone chunkey discs appear, suggesting that the rise of Cahokia and an expansionist, outward-­reaching culture were linked, with the adoption of Cahokia’s chunkey and its implements reflecting the great city’s influence. For hundreds of years, chunkey remained a popular game among Indigenous peoples, and white observers like Lewis and Clark, among others, described it. As late as 1832, artist George Catlin painted a scene of Mandans playing chunkey. Gradually, its popularity faded, as stickball, also known as lacrosse, replaced it over the course of the nineteenth century.36 Games and mounds, though important, were not at the core of the community’s ritual life. That honor fell to maize. Domesticated in southern Mexico ten thousand years ago, maize, later called corn by Europeans, spread throughout the hemisphere, becoming a dietary linchpin central to the cultures of many people, including those around Cahokia.37 While they also ate other foods obtained by fishing, gathering, and hunting, over time they increasingly depended on maize. Climate change may have been a factor. In the tenth century, an era labeled the Medieval Warm Period began, with wetter and warmer weather that favored intensive maize agriculture.38 Along with squash and beans, maize completed the basis of a balanced and nutritious diet. The farmers who produced these foodstuffs thus played a key role in making possible the population growth of Mississippi River valley settlements. In turn, the dietary centrality of maize elevated its ritual significance. In Cahokia and elsewhere, maize cultivation and control of the yield assumed political and spiritual significance. With each harvest, farmers gave a portion of their corn crop to the chief, who acted as its steward, preserving it to safeguard the community against famine. Control over surplus grain, the storage facilities that held it, and its distribution in turn reinforced the power and spiritual leadership of the chief. Intensification of maize agriculture may have simultaneously contributed to the potential for population growth as well as the formation of elite hierarchies and temple towns like Cahokia.39

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Fig. 1.4: Greater Cahokia, showing the capital zone and outlier towns and shrine complexes. Used with permission from Pauketat and Alt, eds., Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2015), 28.

Fueled by a steady food supply, the capital city at Cahokia grew, and Cahokia’s leaders looked outward. They planned satellite settlements nearby, along the mighty, meandering Mississippi River. As expressions of their culture of the eleventh century, these places were very much

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part of the “continuous residential sprawl connected to Cahokia.”40 Though significant sites during Cahokia’s heyday, the settlements along the Mississippi River were engulfed by European-­A merican cities in the 1800s, and their mounds were razed as a direct consequence of urban development. On the east bank of the Mississippi River, where East St. Louis, Illinois, stands today, an elaborate settlement emerged, with at least forty-­five monumental mounds and large numbers of buildings. It may have been a thriving settlement for nearly a century, and home to a few thousand people. Around the 1160s, however, much of the settlement was destroyed by fire, with little mound or building construction after that point, and much of the site was deserted.41 The histories of the East St. Louis mound group and settlement, like that of Cahokia, remain subjects of investigation and debate among archaeologists, even while preservation efforts regarding their sites continue. Nearly a thousand years ago, on the west bank of the Mississippi, laborers crossed the river to build a plaza and surrounding mound complex. Under the direction of engineers and architects, they constructed a series of mounds, “arranged nearly in a line from north to south,” a short distance north of where the Gateway Arch stands in downtown St. Louis.42 Twenty-­five mounds, mostly oblong squares, were constructed.43 Primarily situated symmetrically around a central plaza, these mounds ranged from several feet high to over thirty feet in height. The carefully arranged plaza grouping would have struck visitors from the capital at Cahokia as familiar, a visual and ceremonial link to the metropolis. To the south, they erected one large mound overlooking the river. Known as Sugarloaf Mound, it is the only identified surviving mound standing within St. Louis city boundaries, though others remain in the greater metropolitan region. Beyond the main plaza group were a couple of striking and distinctive large mounds, both designed to impress. Some mounds were conical, others square. Just to the south and east of the thirteen mounds arranged around the plaza, laborers built a large, terraced mound following the rise in the land from the river’s edge. Its three distinctive horizontal levels of equal length gave it an appearance very different from the other round or flat-­topped pyramid mounds. In the early 1800s, later residents of the area thought its tiers resembled an amphitheater and called it Falling

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Gardens. Speculation abounds as to its purpose, but it could have served well as a gathering place for observing river traffic, conducting ceremonies, or participating in community rituals. North of the plaza complex, over fourteen hundred feet away, mound engineers and laborers created a massive funerary mound, the largest on the Missouri side of the river, nearly one thousand feet up from the banks of the Mississippi. Later, French colonists saw in its shape a barn; English speakers noted only its size, designating it “The Big Mound.” The huge mound took years to complete.44 A ridge-­top mound, like others distinctive to the Cahokia region, it had a large rectangle at its base, a narrow ridge at its summit. Archaeologists theorize that the size, shape, and mortuary contents of such mounds reflected the political prominence and prestige of the deceased interred there: members of high-­status families, their servants, and sacrificial victims.45 From the top of the largest mound at Cahokia, the chief may have been able to see this immense mortuary mound gradually rise, as today one can easily see downtown St. Louis from the top of Monks Mound. With a local leader, possibly a relative, in charge of the satellite settlement, the paramount chief at Cahokia was also likely kept informed of progress on the mound’s growing dimensions. Over months and years, digging and hauling dirt in burden baskets to construct the enormous mound layer by layer, laborers moved tens of thousands of cubic feet of soil. Under the direction of their leaders, they built the sepulchral mound along a north-­south axis, in line with their religious beliefs. This public architecture linked the physical and spiritual realms. To create the burial chamber itself, workers introduced new materials. Using axes likely made from local stone, they chopped down trees and fashioned huge timbers for the walls and ceiling of a large tomb, a chamber of 1260 square feet, eighteen feet wide by seventy feet long. In that space, religious leaders oversaw the entombment of the remains of several dozen people, all placed in a reclining position, their bodies aligned with the sun’s course, heads to the east and feet to the west.46 Such massive mortuary monuments represented continuity between past and present, serving “as reminders that the community did not consist of the living alone, but the living and dead together in making

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up the clan or lineage identity.”47 The ancestors of the living were—­and remain—­important beings in the lives of Native peoples. On and around the corpses, reflecting the status of the dead, lay a variety of objects, both practical and ornamental. High-­status individuals in sumptuous garb were sometimes buried with elaborate capes made of shells and beads, feathered capes, and intricate headdresses. Fabric for the elite came from plant fibers, sometimes with dog or rabbit hair or feathers interwoven, and was dyed red; capes might be red, yellow, black, or brown.48 There were hoes and shell beads, the former hewn from local chert and the latter imported from the Great Lakes.49 On either side of the skull of one important figure were striking ornaments. Sometimes called long-­nosed god maskettes, representing deities and likely manufactured in Cahokia, they were extraordinary pieces.

Fig. 1.5: Drawing of an ear ornament found in the Big Mound but since lost. The drawing is reproduced from Stephen Williams and John M. Goggin, “The Long Nosed God Mask in Eastern United States,” The Missouri Archaeologist 18, no. 3 (October 1956): 10. Reproduced with permission from the Missouri Archaeological Society.

Onto each metal, shield-­shaped face, three inches high, an inch and a half in width, an artist carefully welded a protruding nose; such noses typically jutted out six inches from the face.50 Once all the dead were interred, with prayers and ceremonies befitting the occasion, the burial chamber was sealed, and workers began to pile more dirt above it, adding another twenty-­five feet of soil. News of the sacred mound’s completion

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reached Cahokia. From its summit, the builders may have seen the glow from the signal fires atop Cahokia’s mounds; eight hundred years later, the spires of St. Louis churches could be seen from Monks Mound.51 Though very much a secondary outpost—­one that could not begin to rival the capital—­the mound complex on the Mississippi’s western shores similarly displayed its creators’ ability to modify a landscape in significant, dramatic, and lasting ways. Throughout the region, on both sides of the river, the carefully planned landscape exhibited Indigenous peoples’ painstaking remaking of their physical environment. With mounds and plazas, they altered the topography, elevating their honored dead in artificial hills, and imposing a new order on the land. They transformed the physical environment to link their ceremonial spaces to a spiritual upperworld, middle world, and underworld, possibly taking into consideration natural features. The satellite site was very much framed by the area’s water features. From their position along the Mississippi River, several miles south of its confluence with the Missouri River, residents and visitors could see the parallel waters, the muddy Missouri running close to the western shore alongside the clearer Mississippi, the two merging to form one mighty waterway. They could monitor those traveling on the river, who in turn saw the great mound and plaza complex looming above. But the awe-­inspiring river was only part of the environment, the visible surface of a watery world.52 Over millennia, the inexorable force of water had created a series of caves, underground tunnels, and sinkholes nearby, and the siting of the mounds may have been linked to these places as well as astronomical features.53 Some questions remain difficult to answer precisely: How long exactly was the site on the western bank in use? To what extent did people dwell there as long-­term inhabitants or visit for ritual purposes? How exactly did this mound site function within the political-­religious world centered east of the Mississippi River? What is known is incontrovertible: after occupying the area and molding it to suit their cultural and spiritual beliefs, the builders of these remarkable earthworks eventually moved away from the largest sites. As mysteriously as the heyday of the society centered around Cahokia began, it ended. The capital was abandoned, as were the settlements on both banks of the Mississippi. In a relatively short period, the civilization that had reached such heights—­metaphorical and literal—­changed, and

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its people dispersed, moving away from their capital and the other great mound centers. After the turn of the thirteenth century, they no longer rebuilt their public buildings.54 Archaeological evidence suggests that by 1275, the capital had decreased in size and significance. By 1300, its inhabitants were leaving in large numbers. And by 1350, the settlement was deserted, altogether abandoned.55 One possible explanation for the exodus is that over-­reliance upon maize ultimately destabilized the culture. In his recent survey of ancient, sedentary societies centered on agriculture, Against the Grain, James Scott notes that such states were quite fragile, vulnerable to climate change, resource shortages, and demographic pressures.56 In and around Cahokia, maize was consumed daily, a key calorie source for the area’s increasing and sedentary populations, and thus an inherent weakness. While a bad harvest or two after floods or poor weather could easily be managed with stored grain, persistent crop failures, whether from climate change or decreasing soil fertility, could imperil large settlements. It comes as no surprise that a period of gradual warming, from 1150 to 1250 CE, coincided with turmoil; rising temperatures might have negatively influenced maize cultivation.57 Environmental crises—­whether related to soil degradation, changing temperatures, droughts, repeated floods, or the depletion of wood resources—­would have placed severe stress on large communities dependent on settled agriculture for food and wood for tools, building projects, and fuel. In the face of serious shortages, emigration would have been necessary. Indigenous sources point to political turmoil as a factor in the decline of Cahokia. Internal conflicts and external hostilities, the latter suggested by the construction of defensive palisades in the 1200s, could have made local leaders and elites vulnerable as well. Perhaps even the very scale of the settlement—­the tensions involved in creating it, mobilizing labor, and exploiting resources—­may have planted the seeds for its demise.58 One can imagine that ongoing demands for labor or tribute, threats posed by external enemies, and food insecurity may have made the resident population restive. Whatever the cause or causes, the great settlement and its satellites on the eastern and western banks of the Mississippi emptied. As peoples

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emigrated from urban centers, there emerged what some archaeologists refer to as “the vacant quarter.” While the term seems to imply that no one remained, archaeologists use it to describe not an area devoid of inhabitants but to indicate one where there were not large settlements surrounding ceremonial centers.59 The land remained peopled. Some remained in the region while others left, and outsiders also migrated into the area. Perhaps some emigrants formed new towns to the south and southeast. As in other sedentary grain-­based societies, “a ‘collapse’ at the center” was “less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.”60 After 1200 CE, more than a dozen new settlements were founded in Missouri and Kentucky. Occupied until around 1400, these communities possessed hundreds of inhabitants and were home to large pyramid-­shaped mounds around town plazas, as well as houses and palisades, a pattern of civic design reminiscent of Cahokia.61 building ancestors exist among Numerous traditions of mound-­ contemporary Indigenous peoples. Over the last few decades, materials drawn from Native oral history sources, as well as archaeology and linguistics, have been assembled to document the connections between the culture that flourished at Cahokia and those who spoke Dhegiha (or Degiha) Siouan languages, such as the Omaha, Kaw or Kansa, Ponca, Quapaw, and Osage.62 Dhegiha Siouan languages were spoken by inhabitants of a vast part of the continent, including the Mississippi River valley and Eastern Woodlands. One group of Dhegihan Siouan speakers, the Osages, migrated to western and central Missouri between 1300 and 1400 CE.63 Osage oral traditions of migration and storytelling, as well as artifacts and rituals indicative of shared cultural beliefs and practices, point to links between the contemporary Osage Nation and the mound builders of ancient Cahokia.64 Other connections and affiliations may yet become more widely disseminated by Indigenous peoples.65 What does seem to be well established now, as Dr. Andrea Hunter (Osage), Director and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Osage Nation, explains, is that the presence of the Mississippians—­the landscape they reshaped—­lasted after most left, and that some of their descendants remained in the region, though many moved west, north, and south.66

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Much of what happened in this period of collapse, relocation, and migration is incompletely documented. Critics of archaeologists’ narratives of Mississippian cultural history and population movements suggest the terminology is problematic and potentially misleading. The term “Mississippian,” they point out, was coined by scholars and can be too all-­encompassing of many different groups, blurring distinctions between different regions and periods. Some Indigenous critics point to it as a label imposed by outsiders that does not take into consideration their own accounts of their histories and linkages to the mounds. Another reason may have to do with memories: their creation, function, and preservation. After Cahokia’s abandonment, Pauketat asserts, it did not apparently generate the kind of “epic stories of a founding city” or commemoration in song “as was the case with Chaco Canyon” in New Mexico. The Hopi and Pueblo peoples, for example, have stories of their migration away from Chaco, where severe drought struck repeatedly from 1130 to 1180 and from 1250 to 1450 CE. In contrast, in the eastern US, he suggests, among some who sought to escape Cahokia, not enshrining its history in stories may have been part of their process of starting over.67 This is not to suggest that Indigenous peoples did not know of the mounds, nor to imply that knowledge was not transmitted across generations. In her review of mound-­building traditions in the Ohio River valley among the Iroquois, for example, Mann (Ohio Bear Clan Seneca) reported eye-­witness accounts of the construction of a burial mound in the 1630s and Chief David Cusick’s nineteenth-­ century description of the persistence of precise instructions about how to construct a defensive mound.68 And there were Indigenous accounts of Cahokia’s history reported by local Native peoples in the late 1700s, recorded by Euro-­Americans and then largely ignored. The centuries following the abandonment of the mound centers were ones of disruption. As the inhabitants of these settlements left, they became part of a midcontinent-­wide movement of peoples that started before 1350 CE. New immigrants from the north moved into the region after that date.69 In both the southwest and the southeast of the continent, major Indigenous districts collapsed, and their populations out-­ migrated. With inhabitants fleeing the capital of the mid-­continent, a

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period of demographic disorder followed, with peoples dispersing, joining other groups, and forming new communities. Geographic mobility, social upheaval, and climate pressures all contributed to a transition that ended the active occupation of the great metropolis near the banks of the Mississippi.

Chapter Two

Indigenous Migration and Early Europeans No one laughed, cried, prayed, or sang. No one farmed or feasted. The fields lay fallow, and the wooden palisades decayed and fell. On the summits of mounds, houses and temples collapsed into ruins. The people who built the great city had abandoned it, carrying with them their tools and beliefs. In new towns, they constructed mounds, raised crops, worshipped, lived, and died. Then bearded strangers, hungry and heavily armed men from distant lands, arrived. As they traveled, the invaders left a trail of carnage. In one village, the foreigners raised a wooden cross on the summit of a sacred mound and kissed its base. To the north, where the mounds stood amidst the silent ruins of a once-­thriving capital, changes were afoot. Over time, great herds of bison moved in from the west. They grazed on the long grasses of the plains, hunters at their heels. From the east, other people came, refugees from war. The newcomers made their homes in the region, building new villages. One day, men wearing black robes arrived; a new era had begun. From the moment the residents resettled away from their ceremonial centers, Cahokia and its satellites became vulnerable to the forces of the weather. With passing centuries, the winds and the rains eroded the carefully constructed elevations of the mounds. Seeds, carried by birds and breezes, germinated on platform summits. Bushes and trees sprouted and enveloped the earthworks in dense vegetation. As nature reclaimed the landscape, the built environment slowly began to change. Yet the mounds, untended by laborers, stood as unmistakable landmarks. Their 41

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imposing size and shape testified to the human hands, hearts, and minds behind their construction, bearing witness to their presence and power. While major settlements became ghost towns, the beliefs and artifacts of the people who built them survived, spread by the exodus of emigrants. Elsewhere, chiefdoms with similar cultural practices developed. In cycles reminiscent of patterns at Cahokia, these societies rose and fell from the late 1300s through the late 1600s. Both dramatic change and remarkable persistence marked the years between the abandonment of Cahokia and the earliest encounters between the region’s Indigenous peoples and European invaders. Although the population of the region fell to its lowest between 1350 and 1400 CE, it had recovered a century later and reached its highest number by 1650.1 Native peoples did not vanish, nor did their cultures. To the southeast of Cahokia, societies centered around mounds continued well into the sixteenth century. Within these Native spaces and settlements, with their modified physical environments, philosophies and practices with Cahokian elements endured and flourished. Such continuities survived into the period of contact with Europeans and beyond. Even in times of tremendous upheaval, disruption, and dislocation, important cultural influences shared among Native peoples spanned centuries and vast distances. Even a brief survey of the disparate peoples who lived in the eastern half of the continent shows how widely they shared artifacts, practices, myths, and ceremonies. As difficult as it is to establish exactly who was where during some parts of the period from 1400 to 1600 CE, ample evidence demonstrates that many societies were touched by the expansive reach of the civilization centered at Cahokia. Linguistic, oral, written, and archaeological evidence from both Indigenous and European sources provides rich documentation of that world. Significant settlements abounded in the southeast. Today some are sites of archaeological parks, including Parkin Archaeological State Park (Arkansas), Spiro Mounds (Oklahoma), Moundville Archaeological Park (Alabama), Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site (Georgia), and Emerald Mound National Historic Landmark (Mississippi). Though Cahokia’s influence on these settlements is difficult to measure, it remained an important religious and political site for hundreds of years. After it was abandoned, local

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tribes shifted their ritual center to the grand village of the Natchez, which contained platform mounds topped by a temple and the ruler’s house in the 1680s.2 At Etowah, a mound-­building society linked to the Muscogee Nation existed between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries; huge stone effigies and artifacts are on display in the site museum. At over 770 by 435 feet at ground level, Emerald Mound alone covers eight acres and is the second largest mound in the United States. Moundville, spanning the same period, was perhaps second only to Cahokia in its size and grandeur.3 An abundant, varied, and rich material culture distinguished these societies. Residents used large quantities of tools to build their mounds, temples, houses, and palisades, including chisels, knives, and adzes, all finely crafted from stone. They created functional and ornamental pottery, with red, black, and brown beakers used for drinking tea and spindle whorls for weaving.4 On some ceramics, they shaped animal and human effigies, with motifs reflecting a common understanding of the cosmos, as well as goddess and priestly figures and designs representing the four winds.5 Upper world and underworld realms, deities associated with the cardinal directions, legendary figures and heroes, and masculine and feminine forces all had a place. Among their ceremonial and decorative objects were stone figures, carved bones, beads, elegant swords, maces, and metalwork.6 Members of the elite wore dyed fabrics woven from plant fibers and animal hair, or beautiful cloth accented with turkey, goose, and swan feathers.7 Shared symbols, stories, and principles of beauty permeated this Indigenous world. To take one example, consider Red Horn, an Indigenous hero, celebrated in oral traditions from the 1100s into the present.8 This delicate hammered metal (or repoussé) portrait depicts Red Horn (Figure 2.1), the mythical warrior figure sent to earth by the Creator, also called Bird Man. Produced in Cahokia from copper likely mined in the Great Lakes region, the artwork was excavated at the Etowah mound site in Georgia, five hundred miles away from the workshop where it was created.9 A beautiful sandstone rendition of Bird Man (Figure 2.2), from around 1300 CE, was found in Monks Mound at Cahokia in 1971. References to this figure, episodes from his life, and tales of his adventures and battles

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Fig. 2.1: Red Horn, copper plate (human figure), A91117-­0, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution.

are widespread and have endured over long periods of time, including as part of Siouan oral traditions. For non-­native peoples, unfamiliar with this example of survivance, awareness of the ongoing relevance of Red Horn and Red Horn tales underlines the fact that the culture of

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Indigenous peoples was a living tradition at the time of European arrival and very much remains so. A noted early twentieth-­century version appeared in the autobiography of Sam Blowsnake, a member of the Ho-­ Chunk nation living in Nebraska, who tied elements of his own life and the founding of his clan to Red Horn tales.10 As literary scholar Phillip H. Round argues in his analysis of the copper portrait, “The persistence of the Red Horn story” and its enduring relevance among Indigenous

Fig. 2.2: Bird Man, sandstone tablet, 4 in. tall, c. 1300 AD, Madison County, Illinois. Courtesy of the Illinois State Museum.

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peoples should serve as a call to reintroduce this “past as a viable, living historical context for the people and events who shaped early America”; non-­native peoples need this reminder.11 Remembering such long-­term continuities is an important step in correcting and challenging common historical narratives and popular cultural interpretations of Indigenous peoples’ pasts and presents that non-­native peoples have created and embraced. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but the fact is that while Indigenous peoples have endeavored to preserve their cultures, others have sought to erase them. Outside of Native communities, Indigenous peoples’ cultures have often been targeted for destruction. The process began with the first European explorers, would-­be conquerors, and continued later with colonists, and still later with historians, civic boosters, and policy makers. The language white colonists and scholars have applied to Indigenous peoples has had the effect of marginalizing and misrepresenting the Indigenous past and present.12 To take one early example, European settlers along the eastern seaboard of North America pronounced the land a “wilderness” and called the people who inhabited the region “savages” who did not cultivate the soil or live sedentary lifestyles. White colonists did so despite observing and making use of fields tilled by Indigenous peoples, building on town sites Indigenous peoples had developed, and hunting in the park-­like forests Native peoples created and maintained through annual burning practices. To rationalize and justify land grabs, Europeans declared Native peoples “wild” and “uncivilized”; colonists characterized them as unworthy of possessing their ancient homelands and saw them as obstacles to progress.13 These assertions, concocted by the earliest European colonists and echoed and elaborated by later white American settlers, lay the groundwork for policies of territorial dispossession, military aggression, and cultural assimilation directed at Indigenous peoples. It is a grim story and an important one, for the language and focus of historical accounts shapes the representation or misrepresentation of actors in the past. One needs only to glance at textbooks and atlases to see how twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century maps of the colonial period replicate this perspective. In representing the colonial era, maps chart shifting divisions of the continent into Spanish, French, English, and other European

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Fig. 2.3: “Claims before and after French and Indian Wars,” map from Modern School Supply Company and E. W. A. Rowles, The Comprehensive Series, Historical-­Geographical Maps of the United States (Chicago, Ill.: Modern School Supply Co, 1919). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2009581137/.

territorial claims in conjunction with wars and treaties and the timing of colonial settlements. These territorial maps altogether exclude Indigenous peoples. The organization of the maps insists upon a European colonial landscape, as in these maps, which identify European “claims” and “possessions” before and after the French and Indian War of 1754–1763.

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LINGUISTIC STOCKS

Fig. 2.4: “Early Indian Tribes, Culture Areas, and Linguistic Stocks,” map from William C. Sturtevant and US Geological Survey, National Atlas: Indian Tribes, Cultures & Languages: United States (Reston, VA: Interior, Geological Survey, 1967). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov /item/95682185/.

Where are the hundreds of different Indigenous tribes, language groups, and territories? They do not appear on such maps but on others (Figure 2.4), which show where cultural groups of Indigenous peoples occupied plains, deserts, and other culture areas. There is no date, just a reference to “early Indian tribes.” Such maps, obviously designed to cover different content, treat the histories of European colonists and Indigenous tribes as separate. If contemporary non-­Indigenous students see maps that portray North America in the 1700s as largely devoid of Indigenous inhabitants or settlements, as in the first maps, it is not surprising that they perceive European imperial powers as entitled to carve an “empty” continent into pieces and consider European occupation inevitable. Furthermore, when Indigenous

For greater detail see: Driver, Harold E., and Massey, William C., “Comparative studies of North American Indians,” Am. Philos. Soc. Trans., new ser., v. 47, pt. 2, 1957, p. 172–174 Driver, Harold E., and others, Indian tribes of North America, Mem. 9, Internat. Jour. of Am. Ling., Baltimore, Waverly Press, 1953 Heizer, Robert F., Languages, territories and names of California Indian tribes, Berkeley and Los Angeles, Univ. of California Press, 1966 Voegelin, C. F., and Voegelin, F. M., “Languages of the world: Native America fascicle one,” Anthropo. Ling., v. 6, no. 6, 1964 —­ ”Languages of the world: Native America fascicle two,” Anthropo. Ling. v. 7, no. 7, 1965 —­Map of North American Indian languages, Pub. 20, Am. Ethnological Soc., revised ed., Menasha, Wis., George Banta Pub. Co., 1966

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peoples appear on maps linked to different environments and climates, it is understandable that some students may think of them as prehistoric peoples long since vanished or as linked to the continent’s natural history rather than to its national history. It is no surprise that many non-­Indigenous people in the United States have a very limited understanding of the place of Indigenous peoples, historically and geographically, in both the past and present. To put it bluntly, in too many histories of the United States, Indigenous peoples—­as well as the official government policies directed at removing, destroying, or controlling them—­are peripheral at most. Historians have been deeply implicated in this process, though recent scholarship has begun to address the problems head on, with books by both Indigenous and non-­native scholars, such as Ned Blackhawk, Philip Deloria, Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz, Kathleen DuVal, Daniel Richter, Pekka Hämäläinen, and many others. Though textbooks might suggest the continent was available for the taking, Europeans, at the time of their earliest encounters with Indigenous peoples, witnessed a different world, a Native world where Indigenous peoples vastly outnumbered colonists. In other words, Europeans’ firsthand experiences contradict the sense conveyed by modern maps. Beyond the vast city of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire in Mexico, there were fortified towns and densely populated regions elsewhere in North America, and Europeans encountered these Indigenous communities, including their mounds, less than twenty years after the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the southeast of what is today the United States, Indigenous societies with mounds at the core of their ritual life and political order continued to be built and occupied. When Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led the first European expedition from Florida westward, from 1539 to 1542, he and his party came across chiefdoms centered on mounds. Their social structures and artifacts reflected Cahokian influences.14 European documentation of mounds and mound-­centered societies emerged with De Soto’s expedition. De Soto was a veteran of the brutal Spanish assault on the Incan Empire in Peru, during which Francisco Pizarro captured and executed Atahualpa, the Sapa Inka (sovereign emperor). In 1539, De Soto started with a huge force of more than 620

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men and 220 horses on his expedition across the southeast. As they trekked from Florida to the Mississippi River, the Spaniards searched for wealth, particularly gold, and resources. They also encountered and attacked highly stratified, sedentary communities. Seeing the region before European infectious diseases had decimated Indigenous populations, De Soto’s men may have had “a last glimpse of many pre-­epidemic complex chiefdoms that had emerged after thousands of years of specialized adaptations and local growth.”15 Four chronicles written by members of De Soto’s expedition offer a window onto both mound-­building peoples’ societies and Europeans’ first perceptions of their cultures, both far to the southeast as well as closer to Cahokia in modern-­day Arkansas.16 Among those the Spaniards encountered was the Coosa chiefdom, in what is now Georgia, which lasted from around 1400 to 1600 CE; the Coosa faced two other expeditions in the 1560s. The Indigenous groups in these areas, partly recent immigrants to the area, had not long ago coalesced into new chiefdoms, under new elites, reflecting both the political instability and the reorganization efforts in the region.17 Like Cahokia, the Coosa capital had ties to a vast territory with a large population, covering three hundred miles from modern-­day eastern Tennessee to central Alabama.18 They had impressive plaza and platform mound structures. In October 1540, the paramount chief of the Coosa, Chief Tascalusa, and De Soto met atop a mound in Athahachi, the capital alongside the Alabama River, where De Soto demanded supplies and aid. Descriptions of Tascalusa’s appearance highlight the trappings of his elite status. Seated on cushions on a structure at the summit of a mound, he wore a headdress and a feathered blanket that fell to his feet.19 Surrounding him were attendants, one holding a sunshade that the chronicler described as like a flag bearing a white cross on a black field.20 Tascalusa sent De Soto on to the fortified Coosa town of Mabila, where large numbers of armed men lay in wait to defend their people from the invading Spaniards. At the subsequent battle of Mabila, both sides suffered large losses, and the Spanish forces killed most of the Indigenous men, possibly as many as three thousand, and burned down their village. De Soto’s forces then left the area, marching north and west, eventually crossing the Mississippi. In 1541, De Soto and his men arrived

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in what is today the state of Arkansas. There, in a densely populated and heavily cultivated region, the Spaniards encountered warring peoples, the Casquis and the Pacahas. As with the Coosa chiefdom, the Casqui chief ruled over vassal villages; he was on the lookout for any tools that might aid him. After he met with De Soto and heard about the Spaniard’s devotion to the cross, Chief Casqui instructed his men to build one, which De Soto indicated should be made out of two very tall pines.21 The next day, the Spaniards accompanied the Casquis to their town. The capital of the Casqui, thought to be at the site of Parkin Archeological State Park, had a defensive palisade and mounds.22 Built around one large platform mound with a building at its summit, the village had six smaller mounds as well, arranged around a central plaza. A chronicler of the expedition described it thusly: “Having arrived at the town, we found that the caciques [chiefs] there were accustomed to have, next to the houses where they live, some very high mounds [cerros], made by hand, and that others have their houses on the mounds themselves.” De Soto’s men erected the tall cross atop the central earthwork. “On the summit of that mound, we drove in the cross,” recalled the chronicler, “and we all went with much devotion, kneeling to kiss the foot of the cross.” According to this account, “the Indians did as they saw us do, neither more nor less,” and then made a wall around the cross with canes.23 This account simultaneously highlights the actions the Casqui chief undertook to enlist the support of the armed newcomers and the recognition of the Spaniards regarding the symbolic importance of the mounds. As Kathleen DuVal puts it, Chief Casqui incorporated the Spaniard and his men into an alliance against the rival Pacahas. Recognizing that De Soto, a weak and uninformed newcomer was nonetheless possessed of new and useful technologies, Chief Casqui controlled De Soto’s understanding of the local diplomatic situation to work to his advantage. In the face of the combined Casqui-­Spanish force advancing on their village, the Pacahas fled; their palisaded settlement was also home to ceremonial mounds.24 After De Soto’s expedition left the region—­he died in 1542 somewhere along the Mississippi River—­no other Europeans came to the Mississippi River valley near Cahokia until French missionaries arrived in the 1670s. Nonetheless, European trade goods made it to the

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continent’s interior, first appearing between 1580 and 1630. Imported wares came downriver from the western Great Lakes by the 1630s or 1640s, making it to what Europeans called the Illinois Country, a vast region in the Midwest populated by Indigenous peoples and claimed by France.25 Scholars characterize this era as part of the protohistory of the region, marked by indirect contact between Indigenous peoples and Europeans in different areas. The term protohistory typically refers to periods in which groups that use writing for recordkeeping begin to note, in their own accounts, the existence of groups that use other methods. The era also witnessed tribal reorganization and the new presence of European trade goods, particularly bits of scrap kettle brass, or wire.26 Such early objects likely fit initially into Indigenous prestige systems, as did other exotic trade goods.27 In other words, Indigenous peoples adapted them for their own social and cultural needs, rather than using them exactly as Europeans did. It was a period of dynamic change, fueled by Indigenous people’s participation in the fur trade, migration, and conflicts, particularly with the Iroquois, a confederacy of several groups regularly at odds with other Indigenous peoples. Known also as the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) confederacy, they joined forces in the northeast between 1450 and 1660. Also known as the Iroquois League, the Iroquois Confederacy, or the Five Nations, the Haudenosaunee included the Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, and Cayuga peoples. Over the course of several decades, with the backing of the Dutch and English, they engaged in what were known as the Beaver Wars against neighboring Huron and northern Algonquin-­speaking tribes and their French allies in an effort to monopolize European fur trade markets. The conflicts spread throughout the Saint Lawrence River valley and the lower Great Lakes, into the Ohio River valley. In the face of threats and devastating Iroquois attacks, many tribes moved out of the area, adding to the disruption of this era.28 In the mid-­ continent, the great Arkansas chiefdoms of Casqui, Pacaha, and others faded, in the familiar cycle seen in Cahokia and elsewhere. Archaeologists argue that a pattern of emergence, expansion, and collapse typified chiefdoms in the Southeast as it did at Cahokia, where the political order was organized around hereditary, kin-­based elites.29

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Epidemic disease, as well as environmental challenges, likely contributed to their decline. The effects on local populations were dramatic. Estimates for the population of the Arkansas valley east of the Plains range from three hundred thousand to one million in 1541. One hundred fifty years later, the French estimated fewer than twenty thousand people lived in the area.30 When the French arrived in the late 1600s, the Quapaws were the dominant group. There is evidence that the Quapaws also occupied the sites of mound settlements in the region. With origins in the Midwest and Ohio River valley, the Quapaws belonged to the Dhegiha Sioux, which split off into many groups at the time they left the Ohio valley. Ogaxapa, their name for themselves, means “downstream people” and refers to their migration south.31 The timing of the migration of Dhegiha Siouan tribes from east of the Mississippi is complicated. Oral histories suggest that the five tribes parted when they reached the Mississippi, one group traveling downriver, the “downstream” or Quapaw tribe, and the others, the “upstream” peoples of the Omaha, Osage, Ponca, and Kansa/Kaw, going north on the Mississippi until its confluence with the Missouri, settling in the Cahokia region before spreading north and then west as they settled; the Omahas and Poncas continued traveling to the northwest, on to the Great Plains.32 The migration of the Dhegiha Sioux tribes and separation of the Quapaws from other tribes likely took place well before the 1540s, when De Soto encountered them.33 In the early 1600s, in the face of Iroquoian peoples’ attacks, they and other Dhegiha-­Siouan speakers migrated westward, moving across the Mississippi River. According to Quapaw traditions, their ancestors lived in the region for a long period; remains of their settlements are along the Arkansas River in a dozen archaeological sites, and early French accounts describe their communities along the lower Arkansas River.34 Some of their villages included plazas, temple mounds, and house mounds.35 Nearer to Cahokia, in the period following its emptying, Indigenous communities grew up that were the result of Cahokia’s collapse “and the ensuing reconfiguration of frontiers across the region.”36 Indigenous societies and politics were disrupted, creating a “state of profound flux” across the continent at the time when Europeans arrived.37 Indeed, the large area of eastern North America that experienced instability

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from the late 1500s through the early 1700s has been characterized as the “Mississippian shatter zone” by archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians. The term describes interrelated and destabilizing forces undermining the structure of Indigenous polities, with the presence and activities of Europeans accelerating and worsening the instability. It takes into consideration Indigenous peoples’ experiences in the face of colonialism, their exposure to new pathogens, and the devastation of subsequent epidemics. Moreover, throughout North America, European involvement in Indigenous slave trade networks and the fur trade brought increasing violence.38 Indigenous slavery and hunting of fur-­bearing animals pre-­dated European colonization, with enslavement typically tied to warfare and those who were enslaved incorporated into the tribes of their captors. European weapons and demand for laborers and pelts, however, dramatically changed the scale, ferocity, and extent of these practices. Disruption, migration, and reorganization ensued. Though the great mound centers at Cahokia and its satellites remained empty, new Indigenous migrants moved into the area, and the population rebounded over the course of the 1400s, recovering its earliest peak by 1500 and then surpassing it.39 Some people came from the west. Hunting bison became an important part of their economies, tied to an eastward migration of herds that began in the mid-­fifteenth century, after the emptying of the last large settlements in Illinois; the out-­migration of peoples also may have opened the way for this eastward migration of animals.40 In the early 1600s, climate change also drove migration, with Algonquians from the Great Lakes region moving westward, where they developed a bison-­focused economy and became known as the Illinois.41 “Proto-­Illinois” Indians, they came from the woodlands south of Lake Erie and entered the grasslands of Illinois, finding prairies newly populated with bison in the 1500s. The bison likely had moved east because of climate events in the Plains or the scant numbers of people in the area. For Indigenous residents of the region, bison-­based foodways and economies simultaneously required large villages and enabled their growth.42 Near Cahokia, Indigenous peoples settled the prairies to both the east and west, creating permanent villages near floodplains and cultivating the all-­important triad of maize, beans, and squash.43 During

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the summers, they left their villages and fields to hunt bison, returning for harvest season.44 Thus, the factors that likely drew Native peoples to these locations many centuries before—­access to water, fertile lands, abundant wildlife, and timber—­attracted new Indigenous inhabitants, and later, European colonists and European-­American settlers. Such migrations contributed to the emergence and location of tribes collectively referred to as the Illinois or Illinois Confederacy by scholars, for the cultural and linguistic connections among the subgroups. Among the dozen tribes that comprised the confederation and spoke dialects of what linguists label Miami-­Illinois, the largest groups were the Cahokias, Peorias, Kaskaskias, Michigameas, and Tamaroas.45 These Native peoples had settled in the area by the time a French missionary party visited the Illinois Country in the 1670s. Splinter groups of Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Potawatomi, Miami, Ottawa, Huron, and Petun refugees from the Iroquois Wars had relocated to the region as well, fleeing into what is today Wisconsin and the western Great Lakes in the 1650s.46 Both Siouan-­and Miami-­Illinois-­speaking tribes were present in the so-­called Prairie Peninsula, the eastern prairies that extend from the western Mississippi River valley to southwestern Michigan; some were descendants of long-­time residents of the region, others recent refugees and migrants.47 Among them, the Siouan speakers had longer-­ term connections to the Mississippi River valley.48 In sum, during the centuries after Cahokia was abandoned, Indigenous people were on the move, with long-­distance migration taking place in different directions over long periods. The point of this brief overview of Indigenous peoples, their settlements, and their movements is a simple one: neither the cultures of the Indigenous world nor the Indigenous peoples of North America vanished. Cycles of development and decline, fueled by many factors, led to new settlements and new societies. Indigenous traditions record histories of migration, with movements taking place over long distances and involving many groups. In the mid-­sixteenth century, men on the De Soto expedition recorded their impressions of Indigenous peoples. Over a century later, when a French expedition down the Mississippi River reached Arkansas, and new accounts were produced, further demographic and social upheaval had taken place. But the roughly

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130-­year break in Europeans’ accounts is not evidence of a disappearance of Native peoples or their cultures. Gaps in stories do not mean breaks in continuity; rather, they represent holes in the state of scholarship, holes that may reflect earlier practices of excluding Indigenous knowledge sources. Those Native people living at Cahokia at the time the French arrived in the area, and the source of the settlement’s name, were relative newcomers to the area. The twelve tribes known to the French as the Illinois or Illiniwek, and another group, the Miamis, were living in the Mississippi River valley in the 1670s.49 Algonquian-­speaking Illini lived in villages in both the Illinois and Mississippi River valleys in the late seventeenth century.50 Their location and their numbers drew the attention of French authorities, both civil and religious, among them Father Jacques Marquette, or Père Marquette as he is usually called, the Jesuit who undertook a famed voyage down the Mississippi River. Born in France in 1637, he served in Trois-­Rivières, about halfway between Quebec and Montreal, where he studied Indigenous languages. After he was transferred to the western Great Lakes and heard reports of a great river, Marquette sought and received permission to make an expedition. French-­Canadian explorer Louis Joliet and five French voyageurs accompanied him. Sailing south from St. Ignace, in what is today Michigan, in May 1673, the missionary and his companions traveled up the Fox River, where local guides pointed them toward the Mississippi. Included among the group was Jacques Largillier, a fur trader and later a Jesuit missionary and scribe.51 The seven men transported the two canoes two miles overland to the Wisconsin River and paddled downstream, entering the Mississippi River on June 17. Over the next month, Marquette’s party traveled downstream, south toward the Gulf of Mexico, past the confluences of the Mississippi and many other large rivers, notably the Missouri and Ohio. In mid-­July, at the mouth of the Arkansas River, the expedition turned back. Marquette noted the confluence of the continent’s great rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi, calling the former by its Miami-­Illinois name, Pekitanouï. He was fearful of the sight: “I have seen nothing more dreadful. An accumulation of large and entire trees, branches, and

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floating islands, was issuing from The mouth of The river pekistanouï, with such impetuosity that we could not without great danger risk passing through it.” Marquette wrote, “Pekitanouï is a river of Considerable size, coming from the Northwest, from a great Distance; and it discharges into the Missisipi. There are many Villages of savages along this river, and I hope by its means to discover the vermillion or California sea.”52 Farther south, after numerous alarming encounters with armed Indigenous or Spanish men, Marquette and Joliet decided to end their quest and return upriver. Throughout the journey, Marquette preached to, sought information from, and tried to learn about the many Native peoples who inhabited the continent. He recorded densely populated areas, including thirty-­eight Shawnee villages to the east of the Mississippi.53 Marquette met Illinois Natives —­the Peorias —­at a settlement on the Mississippi near its confluence with the Missouri. In the 1670s, the Illinois tribes counted approximately ten thousand people living near the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers in three areas of villages, one near Starved Rock, Illinois, one at Cahokia near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, and one at Kaskaskia, near the confluence of the Kaskaskia River with the Mississippi. It was among the Kaskaskias that Marquette established a mission in 1675. From the French perspective, the presence of Indigenous peoples was crucial: they were the source of furs and the focus of missionary work, and both French traders and clerics sought them out.54 Several years later, another French explorer completed the journey begun by Marquette and Joliet. A one-­time Jesuit, French explorer Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle had explored the Great Lakes in 1669. Several years later, he led an expedition down the Mississippi, canoeing south and claiming the Indigenous territories he saw as territory for France. On the way, he and his men encountered, documented, and traded with many Indigenous peoples; the reports of their journey excited further French interest in the region.55 Two years later, La Salle led another exploratory party to the Gulf of Mexico; he was charged with building a settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Failing to find the spot, the French expedition proved a disaster, with one ship sinking, a second running aground, a third lost to pirates, and La Salle himself murdered

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by one of his mutinying men. Nonetheless, the voyage became the basis for French claims to the area, and subsequent decades witnessed further French efforts to establish outposts in Indigenous territories in the interior of North America. The French wanted converts and riches, so colonizing the continent’s great river valleys seemed a promising avenue to realizing those goals. In 1699, French missionaries from Canada established a foothold in the Mississippi River valley when they founded the Church of the Holy Family in Cahokia. Over the course of the next several decades, French colonial settlements grew in number and size. They were populated by both French farming folk moving south from Canada and the Great Lakes and Indigenous converts to Christianity. The two groups intermarried, with the result that these outposts of the French empire, located on Native ground, developed societies heavily influenced by their mixed-­race, or métis, residents and Indigenous cultural traditions. The settlements dotted the Illinois Country, including the villages of Fort de Chartres, Prairie de Rocher, Cahokia, Medoc, and Prairie Du Pont. In turn, these French Illinois settlements east of the Mississippi gave rise to offshoots on the Missouri side of the river. The first reported European settlement west of the Mississippi in the area was that of Jesuit missionaries Pierre Gabriel Marest and Jacques Gravier, who established the short-­lived St. Francis Xavier Mission in 1700. It was situated on the north bank of La Rivière de Père, or priest’s river, today’s River Des Peres, where it emptied into the Mississippi in Carondelet, a few miles south of present-­day downtown St. Louis. Their mission was originally built to serve the Kaskaskias, then settled at the site. Conflicts between tribes had prompted relocations in the area, and Kaskaskia Chief Rouensa had moved his people to the western bank of the Mississippi.56 Though the settlement was short-­lived, one significant legacy of it was a dictionary of the Miami-­Illinois language. With the help of Indigenous informants, Jesuit missionary Pierre-­François Pinet, assisted by other Jesuits, worked on it until his death at the village in 1702.57 Using that and other early dictionaries, Indigenous scholars and linguists at the Myaamia Center at Miami University, directed by Daryl Baldwin and other citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, are working to restore not only the Miami language but other forms of

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cultural knowledge and revitalization among Myaamia descendants.58 Such Indigenous preservation efforts and knowledge-­making exemplify “survivance,” a term coined by Anishinaabe critic and writer Gerald Vizenor to counter portrayals of Indigenous peoples as powerless victims. “Suvivance” emphasizes cultural endurance and active traditions among Indigenous peoples.59 In 1703, the Kaskaskias moved back east across the Mississippi, settling farther to the south in modern-­day Illinois. The Jesuits closed their mission and followed their flock. Establishing posts primarily on the eastern side of the Mississippi, the French proceeded to build villages or fortifications over the next several decades at several locations to the south, including Kaskaskia and Vincennes in today’s Illinois and Ste. Genevieve in contemporary Missouri. Over the course of most of the eighteenth century, Jesuit missionaries flourished on the Illinois side of the river.60 This early period of interaction between Indigenous peoples, primarily the Illini tribes, and the French offers numerous examples of cooperation, co-­habitation, and peaceful trade. Early in the eighteenth century, for example, French newcomers and Missouria peoples lived in proximity and harmony. The countryside of the Missourias was, according to one visitor, the most beautiful in the world, “les plus beaux pays et les plus beaux terrains du mondes,” and full of wild animals, in such huge quantities as to surpass one’s imagination.61 There, in the 1720s, the French constructed a fort close to the Missouri village near the confluence of the Grand and Missouri Rivers in north central Missouri, in order to gain an advantage over Spanish competitors in the fur trade.62 Missionary villages, forts, religious conversions, intermarriages, and bicultural offspring, along with the thriving fur trade, deepened the personal and cultural ties between the peoples.63 Just as missionaries were interested in harvests of souls, so too their countrymen wanted to be in the area for economic returns from raising crops and trading furs. This area has provided rich farmland for millennia; known as the American Bottom, this well-­watered region extends along the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, covers 175 square miles in Illinois, from just north of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri to the south for thirty miles, and at its widest, encompasses eleven miles from east to west.64 Over the centuries, well-­drained areas have remained

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very productive agriculturally. Poorly drained areas, as well as swamps, have supported woodland growth.65 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, forested areas and waterways were home to large numbers of the fur-­bearing animals prized for their pelts: beaver and deer, among others. French farmers and traders delighted in the economic possibilities. Small in numbers, they were able to reside in this Native region because Indigenous peoples were willing to tolerate their presence. While the French made inroads, the Mississippi River valley remained very much an Indigenous world. Indigenous peoples had long shaped the landscape, cultivated its soils, hunted its wildlife, and built its settlements. Though the cyclical rise and fall of chiefdoms had led some ceremonial centers to be abandoned, others had emerged. These cultures, influenced by the Mississippians, continued to shape the Indigenous world Europeans encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.66 And though long-­distance migration brought new peoples, who developed new societies and trading networks, their communities were part of the products of an era of change that included the abandonment of Cahokia.67 Even as disruptions triggered by the arrival of Europeans wrought havoc upon the lives and cultures of inhabitants of the Mississippi shatter zone, the European presence remained tenuous, and Indigenous peoples continued to occupy the region and control its economy. Far outnumbered by Native peoples, the small numbers of European clerics and traders who first came to the area recognized and understood that fact. Indeed, their desire for harvests—­of souls and furs—­could be fulfilled only in an Indigenous setting. The latter goal inspired the establishment of St. Louis and brought the French to settle on the site of Cahokia’s satellite mound complex in the 1760s.

Chapter Three

War and the Missouria Foundation of St. Louis It was mid-­summer, and the men and women of the Missouria tribe were weary and worried. They were far from home and at war. Their powerful enemies, the Big Osage, were threatening to attack them with a mighty force. Seeking help, they had journeyed to Fort de Chartres, a French outpost on the eastern shores of the Mississippi River. With limestone walls fifteen feet high and three feet thick, the fort promised refuge. No less important, its commander was well known to them, a man experienced in the affairs of their people. The tribe’s leaders asked the Frenchman to intercede with the Big Osage. He promised he would do all he could and urged them to return to their homes along the Missouri River. After a month’s stay at the fort, the Missouria began the journey to the north and west, crossing the Mississippi. There, several miles south of the mouth of the Missouri, they came upon a small group of Frenchmen, busy chopping down trees and putting up small wooden buildings for a new trading post. The possibilities stopped the Missouria in their tracks. Here they might find what they sought: a ready supply of goods, much-­needed weapons, and useful allies. The members of the tribe weighed the options and came to an important decision: they too would settle here. For many years, in the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, there hung a huge painting, nine-­feet long by seven-­and-­a-­half feet high. Known as The Settlement of Saint Louis, or The Founding of Saint Louis, it presents the city’s establishment as an event blessed by God.1 61

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Angels hover above founder Pierre Laclède, looking as though he has just stepped out of a drawing room. Their shields bear the fleur-­de-­lis, the symbol of the French crown. After all, Laclède named the settlement after the sainted thirteenth-­century monarch, King Louis IX, and in honor of his king, Louis XV.

Fig. 3.1: The Settlement of Saint Louis or The Founding of Saint Louis, painting by Fernand LeQuesne, undated. National Park Service: Gateway Arch National Park, St. Louis, Missouri.

An Indigenous leader, several paces behind Laclède, wears an elaborate feather headdress and carries a calumet, a ceremonial pipe used for religious and diplomatic purposes. He, like the rest of those gathered, gazes at the heavenly heralds in awe. In French artist Fernand LeQuesne’s design from the late 1800s, Indigenous people and their dwellings, though present, are peripheral to the main actor and action. On display in St. Louis during the 1904 World’s Fair, the painting presents a highly romanticized and Eurocentric view of the founding, one that altogether ignores the fact that the monumental mounds on the site testified to a

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much older Indigenous settlement. LeQuesne’s interpretation of that moment was recognized as fanciful at least as early as 1905, when publishers of a book on the fair accompanied a reprint of the image with this caption: “However remote from fact it may be, this composition, symbolizing the birth of the World’s Fair city, was a singularly appropriate Exposition picture.”2 Yet the founding of St. Louis was much less about the divine arrival of French civilization or one man’s ambitions than it was about international politics, the movements and conflicts of Indigenous peoples, and the dynamics of the fur trade. Moreover, rather than being supporting actors, consigned to the edges of the stage, the Missourias and other Indigenous peoples were central figures in the founding drama. To understand how, a bit of the backstory is in order. St. Louis began when and where it did because of Indigenous peoples. Established in February 1764, it was set up by Europeans who wanted to be close to Native peoples, or at least near enough to do business with them. Colonial traders, though they did not know the geography well, wanted access to a profitable marketplace of Indigenous consumers, hungry for European wares. A large Indigenous presence was essential to that dream, and St. Louis was intentionally planted on Native ground to achieve it. Not only were there many tribes in the Mississippi River valley, but farther to the west and north, villages lined the Missouri River and its tributaries. In settlements oriented around mounds, built centuries before, trade along waterways linked distant communities. And when St. Louis was founded, contemporary Indigenous peoples in the region were already practiced in European trade; there was a market in place. For Europeans, supplying Indigenous peoples with manufactured imports seemed a sure-­fire path to wealth. Establishing St. Louis where they did made perfect sense to them. The fur trade was the raison d’être of St. Louis. Quite simply, North American furs fueled French colonists’ commercial ambitions. French merchants wanted contact with Indigenous peoples who hunted fur-­ bearing animals so that they could obtain pelts for European markets. In Europe, consumers could not get enough of tall beaver felt hats or fur-­ trimmed clothing. Here, in the continent’s interior, Indigenous people traded with Europeans who promised a reliable flow of goods. Part of the reason Indigenous peoples tolerated French traders is the material and military advantages that could accrue to a tribe settled near

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a trading post. In the short term, small numbers of European traders did not pose the existential threat to Native peoples that waves of European settlers, particularly farmers, did. When Europeans wanted trading partners rather than land, the presence of Indigenous peoples—­not their removal—­was the European objective. For a time, the world of trade shaped the ways Indigenous peoples and European colonists negotiated with and judged each other. For Native peoples in the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys in the late 1700s, French traders meant a supply of desirable imported goods: knives, needles, firearms, pots, mirrors, blankets, beads, vermilion, combs, and cloth. Not long after its settlement, St. Louis became a place where large numbers of Indigenous peoples gathered to meet with government officials and merchants. In turn, Native peoples—­both resident and visitor—­shaped the politics, economy, and society of early St. Louis. It was an Indigenous place, with significant numbers of Native residents, and surrounded by signs of Indigenous settlements, both contemporary and past. Those signs included, of course, the mounds that stood to the immediate north and south of the colonial village, reminders of the region’s earlier inhabitants. Why, in the depths of winter, in mid-­February 1764, did the French select the specific site on the banks of the Mississippi? Imperial maneuvers during the French and Indian War determined the location of St. Louis. In 1762, when British victory in that conflict seemed inevitable, French diplomats secretly met with their Spanish counterparts to discuss a land swap. To avert huge swaths of North American lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples from falling into British hands, the French and Spanish monarchs agreed to the Treaty of Fontainebleau, a secret treaty ceding French claims west of the Mississippi to Spain. Cousins Louis XV of France and Charles III of Spain agreed that Spanish control would be far preferable to a British takeover. When the Treaty of Paris formally concluded the war in February 1763, Britain thus gained putative control—­from a European, but most definitely not from an Indigenous perspective—­of lands east of the Mississippi, including formerly Spanish Florida. For Indigenous peoples, the close of the French and Indian War did not conclude the fighting. The end of one war blended into the beginning of another, as Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi

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tried to fend off British colonists and troops. Native peoples from the Great Lakes, the Ohio Country, and the Illinois Country, including members of the Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Miami, and other tribes, joined in a loose alliance to combat British occupation. Unlike the French, the British treated Indigenous peoples dismissively, as conquered subjects without rights, rather than as potential trading partners or allies. British colonists also wanted Indigenous peoples’ lands. The war that erupted, called Pontiac’s War, was led in part by Pontiac (or Obwandiyag), an Ottawa leader, and spread as far west as Illinois. During Pontiac’s War, Indigenous forces destroyed eight forts and attacked British settlements. In textbook maps, the conflict is often noted by “British forts captured” and “British victories in Pontiac’s Rebellion,” the terminology emphasizing the British perspective and minimizing Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and history. Calling the war a “rebellion” suggests that Indigenous peoples were defying a dominant authority or an established government. Great Britain was neither. The British and their land-­hungry colonists were unwelcome invaders. The fighting prompted a dramatic shift in British policies. In October 1763, Great Britain’s monarch, George III, issued a royal proclamation declaring an Indian Reserve in the Ohio Country. The reserve was vast, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. It infuriated British colonists who wanted more land, land they thought they had gained in the French and Indian War. Under the proclamation’s terms, colonial settlers had to leave the Indian Reserve or get permission from the government to stay. But British colonists refused to accept these requirements and obstinately moved west across the Appalachians, into lands where monumental earthworks dotted the landscape. Of more concern throughout the mid-­continent in the 1760s, the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War disordered both European and Indigenous worlds. In various locales, some French colonists and Native peoples “went about their business” with few changes in the postwar period, but unsettled relations and upended settlement patterns were more the norm. Territorial realignments disrupted dealings “between colonists and colonial authorities, between colonists and Indians, and between Indians and Indians.”3 While the conflict of Pontiac’s War

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basically concluded with a stalemate in 1764, Indigenous resistance to the British continued, and the British moved slowly to take possession of their western land claims in the Illinois Country. After the French and Indian War ended, French colonists and Indigenous peoples with whom they lived in the Illinois Country had to make decisions quickly. Under the 1763 peace treaty, colonists unwilling to stay in the newly claimed British territory could move to other French colonies. For many, an exodus to the west bank of the Mississippi River seemed a good option. Many families, both Indigenous-­ French and French, quickly decamped, eager to leave Illinois before the British arrived. Roughly two thousand people left Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Fort de Chartres to resettle in modern-­day Missouri, among them Christian converts from Illinois tribes who had intermarried with French colonists.4 This Illinois Country emigration helped to give early St. Louis a significant population of experienced French colonists, Indigenous people who had embraced Christianity, and their children. From the late seventeenth century on, Indigenous peoples had allowed the French to establish missions, forts, and villages on the eastern side of the Mississippi, and many had engaged in the fur trade. Long-­standing relationships between Indigenous peoples and French colonists were part of the backdrop to the territorial conflicts of the 1760s. As Robert Michael Morrissey has shown, the Illinois Country was a region characterized by self-­determination and collaboration between and among groups of Indigenous peoples, fur traders, Jesuit missionaries, and colonial authorities.5 It was against this backdrop that Great Britain and Spain attempted to establish control in the postwar era. Given this history of Indigenous-­French cooperation, it comes as little surprise that many tribes “resolved not to Suffer the English to come into their Country.”6 In the fall of 1763, a group of Iroquois, Delaware, and Shawnee Indians told the French of their opposition. They showed up at Fort de Chartres and requested military aid.7 Though French officials tried to persuade their former allies to accept the English, these Indigenous men saw no reason to do so. They were defending their homelands. As leaders of the Osage, Illinois, and Missouria nations declared to a

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Fig. 3.2: A Plan of the Several Villages in the Illinois Country, with Part of the River Mississippi &c, map by Thomas Hutchins, London: J. Almon, 1778, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

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British officer at a 1765 meeting in Illinois, “Why do you, Englishman, not remain on your lands, while the red nations remain on theirs[?] These belong to us. We inherit them from our ancestors. They found them by dint of wandering. They established themselves there and they [the lands] are ours; no one can contest them. Leave, depart, depart, depart, and tell your chief that all the red men do not want any English here.”8 Such statements, even filtered by translators, testify to these Indigenous peoples’ long history in the region, their stories of migration, and their deep connections to the land. These men strongly objected to being treated as pawns in European rivalries. They wanted to continue their trade relationships with the French, and the French wanted to maintain trade with Indigenous peoples as well, though the Illinois Country was no longer open to them. It did not help the situation that British policies further antagonized Illinois tribes. Unlike the French, accustomed to the ceremonial exchange of gifts dictated by Indigenous peoples, the British cut the budget for such goods. The absence of such inducements to trade and alliances was a sore point for Indigenous peoples: the British refused to operate by Native rules of engagement. While conditions in the Illinois Country remained unsettled, ongoing discussions of postwar trade were taking place among French officials in New Orleans. The director-­general of the colony, Jean-­Jacques Blaise D’Abbadie, purportedly came up with economic initiatives involving the Illinois Country. Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, a local merchant and veteran of the war, claimed he received “an exclusive privilege for the Indian trade at the Illinois Post” in recognition of his war-­time service in defense of Louisiana. With monopolies antithetical to free trade and unpopular among merchants, it is doubtful that D’Abbadie granted such a privilege. Regardless, Maxent invited two other French colonists, Pierre Laclède and Jean-­François Le Dée, to join in a trading venture. Together, they formed the firm of Maxent, Laclède, and Company, with Laclède and Dée holding twenty-­five percent ownership.9 None of the men had been to the Illinois Country; they had no experience with the region’s Indigenous population. The one who took charge of the risky expedition upriver was Laclède. In August 1763, he traveled north to consult with the French commandant at Fort de Chartres and to establish a new trading post, location to be determined.10

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When Laclède left New Orleans, he took with him large quantities of goods destined for Indigenous consumers. Laclède was accompanied by Auguste Chouteau, barely a teenager, his de facto stepson. On November 3, the party reached Ste. Genevieve, the only major French settlement in the Illinois Country on the western shore of the Mississippi. Laclède found nothing there that suited his commercial needs. There was no building large enough for him to store his goods. Moreover, the village was too far from the mouth of the Missouri, the point of access to the Indigenous consumers of its watershed. During his stay in Ste. Genevieve, Laclède received word from Fort de Chartres, on the eastern side of the river to the north: the fort had enough space to accommodate his wares. A few days later, he attended an auction in Kaskaskia, where he bid on a complex of buildings, a sign that he seriously considered establishing his trading post there. Soon thereafter, he went on to Fort de Chartres, where he purchased a house, barn, and livestock, another indication that he planned to settle on the eastern side of the Mississippi.11 Only a few weeks later, however, and the record is silent as to why, Laclède changed his mind. With Chouteau in tow, he began to explore the region between the fort and the Missouri River for a new site for his trading post. As Jay Gitlin has noted, “The conception of St. Louis owed a huge debt to native groups,” with its location not only at the confluence of river systems but “a primary crossroads of native peoples.”12 According to Chouteau’s narrative of the founding, penned decades later, they set out for this region in December 1763. Carl Ekberg and Sharon Person surmise that Laclède was guided by long-­time residents of Fort de Chartres, men who knew the area and local tribes well. Their meticulous research on the earliest years of St. Louis attributes much of the development of the village to these experienced French inhabitants of Illinois. Such seasoned colonists would also have had familiarity with the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to the north, known of the dangers of flooding at that spot, and been able to recommend settling some distance from it. To the south, the site where St. Louis was planted was preferable. Bluffs stood above the flood plain, it was well timbered, and it had plentiful streams. Cabins of hunters, trappers, and loggers may have stood on the site.13 Though there is no mention of mounds in Chouteau’s account of the expedition, he and Laclède undoubtedly

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saw those of Cahokia and the dozens of monumental earthworks at its satellite ceremonial centers on both sides of the river. Laclède was “delighted to see the location,” recalled Chouteau. It was ideal for his needs—­and beautiful. In his romantic retelling of the scene, Chouteau described Laclède “inspecting everything” and then deciding “on the place.” Supposedly, Laclède made notches on some trees “with his own hand” to mark the spot. Before they left, the older man said to his teenaged companion: “Chouteau, come here as soon as navigation opens. Have this place cleared to make our settlement, after the plan I shall give you.”14 According to Chouteau’s uncorroborated account, Laclède then returned to Fort de Chartres, where he enthusiastically told the French commander, Captain Pierre-­Joseph Neyon de Villiers, of his discovery. Chouteau recalled Laclède saying “that he had found a site where he was going to establish a settlement that might eventually become one of the finest cities of America, so well did [it] combine the advantages of locality and central position for creating settlements.” As the winter progressed, according to the memoir, Laclède set about procuring men, provisions, and tools for the new trading post. In mid-­ February, 1764, Chouteau and a work party returned to the site, and the next day, the 16th, they “began the storehouse, which was built in a short time, and the little cabins.”15 When Laclède arrived to inspect the progress in April, he decided on the location for his house, and, according to Chouteau, “made a plan of the village, which he named St. Louis in honor of [King] Louis XV, whose subject he expected to remain for a long time,” implying that Laclède believed the territory was still French. Chouteau went on to write that Laclède did not imagine he was a subject of the King of Spain. It is likely, however, that word of the Treaty of Fontainebleau transfer had already spread through the tightly knit mercantile community of New Orleans before Laclède undertook the journey north.16 The transfer of colonial land claims from France to Spain (west of the Mississippi) and England (east of the Mississippi) caused difficulties for both French colonists and Indigenous peoples. As Laclède prepared to decamp to the west bank of the river, the French were preparing to leave the Illinois Country as well. The military commander, Neyon de Villiers, headed south for New Orleans in June 1765, leaving another

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officer, Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, in charge of a skeleton crew at Fort de Chartres. The French convoy of vessels—­twenty-­one bateaux and seven pirogues—­carried six officers, sixty-­three soldiers, and an unknown number of inhabitants seeking “refuge in the French possessions.”17 St. Ange was tasked with the unenviable job of awaiting the British forces who would take over the fort and relieve him of his command. Most likely, he was chosen for this role because of the wealth of negotiating experience he had with Indigenous peoples in the region. He may have had more personal experience as well. Although St. Ange was unmarried, evidence suggests that he had two long-­term relationships with Indigenous women, Lizette and Angélique, with whom he likely also had children.18 Such intimate connections between colonizers and Indigenous people were important and not unusual in the Illinois Country and elsewhere.19 Given the long-­term ties between Indigenous peoples in Illinois and the French as well as St. Ange’s personal reputation and history, it is not surprising that many Native delegations, among them members of the Potawatomi and Shawnee tribes, sought him out at this time. As St. Ange reported, “All the nations come to tell me of their situation and misery and to pray me to assist them.”20 One such group was the Missouria people, who, in the summer of 1764, came to Fort de Chartres to enlist St. Ange’s help as a negotiator. Recently, the most powerful Indigenous tribe in the region, the Big Osages, with whom the Missourias were at war, had sent three hundred men to attack them. Renowned for their formidable fighting, the Big Osages made “reiterated threats,” according to St. Ange’s account, to pursue and attack the Missourias with an even larger force. Seeking a safe haven, if only briefly, the Missourias arrived at Fort de Chartres on July 17, 1764, “with their wives, children, arms, and baggage.”21 There, they entreated St. Ange to act as a mediator. Could St. Ange successfully broker a peace between them and the Big Osages? The French officer faced several dilemmas. He had few men at his disposal and inadequate resources. The remaining colonists were on edge, and St. Ange doubted their tolerance for a large group of long-­term Indigenous visitors. For a month, the Missourias stayed at the fort, with St. Ange promising to do all he could “to pacify” the Big Osages. “It remains to be seen if I shall succeed,” he acknowledged, “but what is certain is that I shall omit

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nothing that will enable me to pacify that nation and make it live in good understanding with all the nations of the Missouri.”22 In recounting the incident to superiors in New Orleans, St. Ange reported that he had persuaded the Missourias “to return to their land in order to avoid a greater expense to the King and to give peace to our inhabitants.”23 And so, at St. Ange’s urging, the Missouria party left the fort, heading north in the direction of their territories up the Missouri River. They did not, however, journey directly home. Rather, once they had crossed the Mississippi River, the Missourias stopped at Laclède’s new trading outpost, just under construction.24 The sole source describing this early meeting of the Missourias and the French at the birth of St. Louis is the Chouteau narrative. Its content and timing make reconstructing exactly what happened in 1764 very difficult. When Chouteau recorded his recollections decades later—­he died in 1829—­St. Louis was a dramatically different place. His version of events may have enlarged not only his own role in the city’s founding but also embellished or altered the details of his and Laclède’s first dealings with the Missourias. Barely in his teens in 1764, Chouteau was, he stated, placed in charge of implementing Laclède’s plans for building the trading post. It seems unlikely that a fifteen-­year-­old boy would be ordering around a seasoned group of men, and Ekberg and Person have offered an alternate hypothesis regarding the founding, with Laclède likely following the lead of long-­established French inhabitants of Illinois, men like Jean-­Baptiste Martigny, who may have spearheaded plans to relocate across the river.25 In that scenario, Chouteau would have accompanied Martigny and others who were putting their own plans into execution, rather than been the one giving the orders. Other French colonists were already inhabiting the area. A 1767 map suggests that a man named De La Joie was living along a stream flowing into the Mississippi north of downtown; the De La Joie River continues to flow through the pipes of the St. Louis sewer system.26 Either way, the settlement was neither large nor well established when the Missourias arrived. A smattering of residents and a small work party of perhaps three dozen men were busy constructing shelters. Thus, when the Missourias arrived, counting at least 150 adult men and an unknown number of women and children, they vastly outnumbered the

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French colonists. The French believed that the Indigenous group came in peace. Yet, though the Missourias “did not appear to have any evil intentions toward [the French],” their presence was a problem, according to Chouteau. He recalled the Missourias making “constant demands for provisions.”27 It should not need to be said, but it bears repeating that it was the Europeans, not the Missourias who showed up at the building site, who were the intruders. It is altogether unsurprising that Chouteau’s celebratory narrative fails to acknowledge Indigenous territorial rights and presents the Missouria tribe as interfering with the French. In his telling, the site was an empty one, belonging to no one. In his view, it was Laclède’s inspired vision alone that gave birth to a great city. Chouteau did not acknowledge—­perhaps because he did not perceive the fact—­ that building an outpost was possible only because the Missourias and other tribes allowed it. Further, Chouteau’s narrative ignores the context of gift-giving practices in Indigenous-­French relations. The Missourias’ requests for supplies would not have been at all unusual. In short, to the extent that Chouteau’s account is helpful in understanding this period, it reveals the presence of Indigenous people, Europeans’ discomfiture, and the demands of the Missourias for the European goods and foodstuffs they wanted, needed, and expected. It also makes clear that Chouteau, a young person new to the area, was ill-­equipped to address the Missourias’ requests for short-­term assistance. He was utterly flummoxed when they announced their long-­term plans. According to Chouteau’s narrative, in the late summer of 1764, Missouria leaders declared their intention to settle their people permanently around the new building site. The outpost was then little more than a scattered collection of freshly constructed dwellings. There was not a lot there. But beyond the natural physical advantages of the site, the tiny settlement promised a novel attraction: a European trading post. In other words, just as Laclède and the others sought a location with good access to Indigenous consumers and trading partners, so too the Missourias apparently tried to act on possibilities that might improve their own comfort and security. If they felt threatened by the Big Osages, the Missourias might have seen an opportunity to strengthen their position significantly by making St. Louis their home. There, they

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would have ready access to European wares and allies. “They told us repeatedly,” wrote Chouteau, “they wanted to form a village around the house [Pierre Laclède’s storehouse] we intended to build and that it would be the center.”28 When word of the Missourias’ settlement plans spread throughout the village, the mood among the French colonists changed. Many of the newly arrived French residents from Cahokia packed up. Having initially crossed the Mississippi to avoid living among the British, they underwent a rapid change of heart when faced with hundreds of Missourias as potential St. Louis residents and recrossed the river with their belongings. Apparently, they preferred the British to the Missourias as close neighbors. This crisis prompted Chouteau to seek help: “All this talk troubled me greatly, which made me resolve to send for Laclède,” still at Fort de Chartres.29 He sent word and then waited for Laclède to arrive. In the meantime, Chouteau turned to the Missourias for assistance in fulfilling his orders. What followed was a remarkable event in the founding of St. Louis. Deputized to supervise work on Laclède’s home and store, Chouteau requested that Missouria women and children provide labor for the construction project. They agreed, and using wooden platters and baskets “which they bore upon their heads,” excavated a basement for the storehouse. These baskets may have resembled those used for hauling dirt for mound construction projects, such as the replica model from Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park; William Iseminger notes that burden baskets, using head straps or straps across the shoulders, may have varied regionally, by size, and by materials being transported but likely had similar forms.30 The episode simultaneously links Indigenous people to the site’s new structures and its earlier mounds. In an unheralded echo of the hauling and building Native peoples had done centuries before, Missouria women and children used a familiar technology—­baskets—­to assist in a construction project of central importance to the surrounding community. An Indigenous work force and Indigenous technology literally helped build both the early and modern settlements at the site of St. Louis. For their labor, Chouteau paid the Missourias with imported goods, both practical and ornamental. There were metal awls and pigments highly

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Fig. 3.3: Burden basket (replica). Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park. Photograph courtesy of  William R. Iseminger.

prized for personal adornment and ceremonial purposes: vermilion, for brilliant reds, and verdigris, for vibrant greens.31 Laclède’s return to St. Louis led to a confrontation and negotiations. As soon as Laclède arrived, according to Chouteau, “the chiefs of the Missouri came to see him to hold a council.” They announced their intention to settle permanently on the spot. They declared that they found the site of St. Louis appealing and thought no place “more favorable than where they were.” Although the conversation continued at length, the theme did not vary. The Missourias “desired to settle where they were.”32 One wonders if the Missourias and Laclède assembled at the natural gathering place and amphitheater of Falling Gardens, the tiered mound to the north of the village site or immediately around the trading post site. Unfortunately, Chouteau’s summary makes speculating as to what exactly transpired difficult and determining where

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any conversations took place impossible. Who was responsible for representing the Missourias is not clear either. Comparing French and Indian diplomatic protocols, Kathleen DuVal has noted at least superficial similarities, with “men responsible for greeting outsiders” and a particular man having “the primary authority to speak during ceremonies of contact.”33 Who acted as translator is also unknown. There is no reason to think that either Laclède or Chouteau possessed the linguistic skills to communicate in a Native tongue at that point, and they likely depended on either French, métis, or Christianized Indigenous residents newly relocated from Illinois. What is clear is that by declaring their intention to establish their homes in the vicinity of a French trading post, the Missourias acted as did other Indigenous peoples. They were seeking access to imported goods and an alliance with French authorities. Further, given that the bitterly cold winters of the area could make river travel difficult, the Missourias could anticipate real advantages from locating their main village at the site. By doing so, they could incorporate French traders and colonists into their world, in effect reasserting their historic connections to, or as one scholar has put it, emplacement in the region. 34 On other occasions, the Missourias declared their incontestable inheritance and historic occupation of the territory, though Chouteau does not record any such statement at this encounter.35 The Missourias were long associated with the area. According to an early French missionary, Father Gabriel Marest, the Pekitanoui River was also known as the Missouri River, because the people of that name “are the first who are found there.”36 Their name has been understood as meaning the people of the wood canoes, or the “people at the river’s mouth.”37 In the face of the Missourias’ declarations about settling at the trading post, Laclède deliberated, delaying his response until the following day. Then, gathered near the great river’s banks, he and the Missouria chiefs met again. According to Chouteau, when Laclède spoke, he began by summing up the previous day’s meeting: “You told me yesterday that you were like ducks and geese who traveled until they found a beautiful country in which there was clear water where they might rest and make an easy living” and that “you wished to form a village around my house, where we would live together in the greatest friendship.” Chouteau described Laclède as speaking “with his usual firmness”38

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“I will reply to your speeches in a few words,” Laclède reportedly announced. His response took the form of a warning. Outlining the Missourias’ future, Laclède anticipated an assault by the Big Osages, a follow-­up to the earlier attack by three hundred men.39 “Those who have waged war against you for a long time are in great numbers against you, who are few,” he stated. “They will kill your warriors, because they will want to defend themselves,” he summed up. With the men dead, the women and children would become slaves. The threat of slavery was no idle one. The colonial slave trade increased incentives for violence, with Native warfare shifting from incorporating captives into Indigenous communities to selling them to the French.40 The moment of a renewed Osage attack, Laclède warned, was “not far distant” if the men “‘persist[ed] in wanting to settle here.” To back up his dire predictions, Laclède told the Missourias that six or seven hundred warriors were gathered at Fort de Chartres, there “to wage war against the English.” 41 If they heard of the Missourias’ presence at the trading post, Laclède opined, the Big Osages would hurry to the new village to massacre them.42 Whether Laclède was intentionally hearkening back to a bloody 1752 conflict in the area or not, it is clear that his grisly prophecies of dismemberment, death, and slavery were designed to drive the Missourias to flee. For both groups, the situation was high stakes. Laclède could neither force the Missourias to leave nor afford to alienate them. He needed their trade and cooperation, but he did not want them as neighbors. He had no troops at his disposal to offer them protection, and their presence was leading the village to hemorrhage French settlers. With superior resources, St. Ange had turned away the Missourias, and now Laclède tried to do the same. He asked for their decision before he returned to Fort de Chartres. That evening, “the whole nation—­men, women and children,” approached Laclède. They broke the news. After deliberating, the members of the tribe had resolved to leave. It is likely that they evaluated the small numbers of French and the aid they might provide in the face of an attack on the village by the Big Osages and found them wanting. In presenting their decision, the Missourias stipulated conditions, which Chouteau characterized as petitions for aid. In what was clearly a counter-­offer, the Missourias requested provisions for the journey as well as ammunition for both hunting and defensive purposes. Laclède

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stalled and said he would get back to them the following day. He quickly obtained more maize from Cahokia and then distributed “a large supply” to the Missourias. He also gave them “some powder, musket shot, knives and a few other small wares.” The following day, after two weeks in the village, the Missourias left. As Chouteau recalled, “The entire village of Missouris departed to go up the Missouri and return to their former village” in north central Missouri.43 Once the prospect of living outnumbered by next door Indigenous neighbors had been averted, the French colonists who had decamped returned, crossing the Mississippi with their belongings for the third time. As Chouteau remembered, “The people who had fled to Cahokia upon the arrival of the Indians returned as soon as they learned that they were gone.”44 So, the Missouria men, women, and children left, and St. Louis developed as a French colonial outpost in territory claimed by Spain, with a sizeable, if not a majority Indigenous population and an economic orientation toward Indigenous peoples and their trade. Before returning to their village up the Missouri River, the Missourias had provided essential labor for the central construction project of the newcomers’ settlement: Laclède’s trading post. As had countless others before them, they dug into the earth and hauled it in baskets. Though they helped construct a cellar rather than a mound, the foundation the Missourias made was at the center of the founding of St. Louis.

Chapter four

The Indigenous World of Eighteenth-Century St. Louis The Kaskaskia chief told the soldier that his ancestors built the mounds of Cahokia and constructed palaces on them. The American did not doubt his Native informant: “This is their tradition, and I see no good reason why it should not be received as good history—­at least as good as a great part of ours.” Going to Cahokia to see the earthworks for himself, the American reported signs of a vast town, full of mounds. St. Louis, centered around the trading post that the Missourias helped to construct in the 1760s, matured in a predominantly Indigenous world, where Native peoples were more numerous and more powerful than colonists. For millennia, Native peoples had lived in the Mississippi River valley and throughout the Missouri River watershed. Their ancestors’ monumental earthworks dominated the horizon. Their long-­distance trading networks continued to underpin commerce, with European colonists and American settlers in St. Louis dependent on their willingness to engage in the fur trade. As elsewhere in the continent, Indigenous peoples held the balance of power for a time.1 Given this dynamic, it is not surprising that European and American policies developed in response to Indigenous peoples’ customs and actions. The region’s Indigenous politics and demographics influenced how the village of St. Louis developed. To profit from trading with Indigenous peoples, colonists had to learn about their world, navigate inter-­tribal diplomacy, and gain familiarity with Indigenous practices and languages. And, as they gathered information on local peoples and explored the region, some white observers began to comment on and use the mounds. Thus, throughout the first decades of St. Louis’s 79

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history, Native trade and agendas dictated the terms of engagement. As Kathleen DuVal has shown in The Native Ground, Indigenous peoples along the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, to the south and west of St. Louis, incorporated white explorers and colonists into their own networks and practices, until overwhelming numbers of settlers arriving in the early 1800s overturned those arrangements.2 The same was true for St. Louis. For Native peoples, St. Louis was variously home, a place of enslavement, a center of commerce, and a venue for diplomatic meetings. Indigenous peoples lived in and around St. Louis, recent arrivals and long-­ term residents. Settlements of Indigenous peoples bordered St. Louis in its earliest years, with a Native village appearing on the first European map of the area.3 Created in 1767, the map (Figure 4.1) shows the colonial village, with three streets, perched on bluffs along the Mississippi

Fig. 4.1: Detail from Map of the Mississippi River from Pain-­Court to Cold Water Rock, 1767, map by Guy Soniat du Fossat. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

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River. Just to the south of the small waterway called the “R[ivière] de Pain-­Court ou de St. Louis,” later Mill Creek, stands the “vilage des sauvages Peorias.” The Peoria settlement spanned the Mississippi, with another part of “La Nation des Peorias” on the east bank. Also on the eastern shore, directly across from St. Louis, was Cahokia. The village was once home to both Tamaroa and Cahokia peoples, and the French established a mission there in 1699.4 These Native settlements likely held more residents than did St. Louis. And though the cartographer, Guy Dufossat, did not explicitly label the monumental earthworks, he did note a series of hills, likely the Big Mound and some of the other adjacent mounds. They lay to the north of the village, beyond the stream where a Frenchman by the name of La Joie had settled earlier, today’s Hyde Park neighborhood.5

Fig. 4.2: Plan de la Ville de St. Louis des Illinois sur le Mississippi avec Projets de la Fortifier, map by George de Bois St. Lys, 1796. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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Fig. 4.3: Detail from a map showing mounds to the north of the colonial village, Nicolas de Finiels, 1797–1798. Photograph from Abe Nasatir, courtesy of Carl J. Ekberg.

Near St. Louis, mounds and contemporary Native settlements appeared on maps that reveal an Indigenous built environment, both old and new. A 1796 map (Figure 4.2) shows two large mounds just to the northwest of the village. 6 The following year, Nicolas de Finiels, a French officer serving under Spanish command, prepared a detailed map (Figure 4.3) of the Mississippi River that includes several mounds just to the north of the village.7 In an era in which the village of St. Louis had not yet surrounded the mounds, the French inhabitants appear to have viewed them primarily as landmarks and referenced them as boundary lines for real estate. Pierre Chouteau’s and A. P. Chouteau’s land claims cut across the Big Mound, abutting those of other early French settlers and an African woman, Esther.8 The earliest written American commentary about local mounds—­ those around Cahokia—­is based on Indigenous knowledge sources. In 1789, the American Magazine published a speculative account, in which Noah Webster, famous as a language reformer and spelling book author, attributed the mounds to the men of De Soto’s expedition. When he read Webster’s Spanish origins theory, George Rogers Clark, the Revolutionary War hero and brother of William Clark, penned a response. “I think the world ought to be undeceived on this point. So

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great a stranger to the western country as Mr. Webster appears to be, ought to have informed himself better before he ventured to palm conjectures on the world.”9 In a lengthy account drafted, but unpublished, at the time, Clark described mounds in detail.10 Referring to the Ohio River valley, he reported that there was “not a place on the Ohio that we have attempted to fortify, from Pitt down, but we find ancient works.”11 Clark thought himself a reliable reporter: “I don’t suppose there is a person living who has actually had the chance of knowing from personal observation, the geography and natural history of the back country better, if so well, as I do myself; it having been my study for many years.”12 He pointed to Indigenous histories. “The Indian traditions give an account of these works,” he explained. “They say they were the works of their forefathers; that they were as numerous as the trees in the wood.” Kaskaskia chief Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, who supported the Americans during the Revolutionary War, “gave [Clark] a history of this.”13 The source of this Indigenous tradition, Chief Ducoigne, was known in political circles in the US capital. The son of a Kaskaskia woman and a French-­Canadian trader, Ducoigne allied himself with the Americans during the Revolutionary War. On one occasion, he participated in a diplomatic mission to the Chickasaws, acting as Clark’s emissary; he also helped to supply venison to Clark’s men who were part of the Kaskaskia force that saved an American garrison in 1780.14 In 1781, he traveled to Virginia to meet with General Lafayette and also met with Thomas Jefferson, then governor.15 The Virginia meeting between the two leaders became the occasion for Jefferson’s first address on Indigenous affairs and has been seen as foreshadowing much of the policy approach of his administration.16 Not only was Ducoigne a source of Indigenous traditions regarding the monuments, he was also a vocal critic of the United States and its peoples’ intrusions into Native territory. Ducoigne denounced US expansionism, decried the violence and criminality of whites, and petitioned for protection. As part of a delegation of Illinois and Wabash leaders in 1793, he delivered a speech before President George Washington; Jefferson transcribed the French interpreter’s translation.17 Ducoigne declared his history of support for the United States and urged the President to stop Americans from injuring his people. “I am of Kaskaskia, and have

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always been a good American from my youth upwards,” he declared. “Yet the Kentuckians take my lands, eat my stock, steal my horses, kill my game, and abuse our persons. . . . My nation is not numerous. No people can fight against you father, none but the Great god himself. All the red men together cannot do it. But have pity on us. I am now old. Do not let the Kentuckians take my lands nor injure me; but give me a line to them to let me alone.”18 Ducoigne’s significance to this narrative lies not only in his pointed critique of the US and its peoples but in his significance as an Indigenous source of knowledge about Cahokia and its mounds. Ducoigne told George Rogers Clark that his ancestors were responsible for constructing the earthworks near the Mississippi and Kaskaskia Rivers “when they covered the whole (country) and had large towns.” Smaller mounds once held “palaces,” and the great platform mound once was topped by the house of the great chief. 19 After hearing Ducoigne’s accounts, Clark visited Cahokia and penned a description of the complex: “I one day set out, with a party of gentlemen, to see whether we could discover signs of such a population.” Finding plenty of evidence, they easily “traced the town for upwards of five miles in the beautiful plain below the present town of Kahokia.” The conclusion was inescapable. “There could be no deception here,” Clark wrote, “because the remains of ancient works were thick—­the whole were mounds.”20 Given such obvious evidence of previous settlement and credible accounts from local Native peoples, Clark thought those who speculated about the original inhabitants deluded. He declared, “I think the world is to blame to express such great anxiety to know who it was that built those numerous and formidable works, and what hath become of that people.”21 Their descendants were in sight. “They will find them in the Kaskaskias, Peorias, Kahokias .  .  .  , Piankashaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and such old nations, who say they grew out of the ground where they now lived, and that they were formerly as numerous as the trees in the woods; but affronting the Great Spirit, he made war among the nations, and they destroyed each other.”22 In summing up, Clark stated, “This is their tradition, and I see no good reason why it should not be received as good history—­at least as good as a great part of ours.”23 Clark’s report was finally published in the 1850s by ethnologist Henry

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Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) in his six-­volume collection, Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. Schoolcraft noted that opinions differed on who created the mounds, whether “another race” or “the ancestors of the Indians,” pointing out to readers that Clark attributed the earthworks “entirely to the ancestors of the present race of Indians,” on the basis of his “extensive personal knowledge” and “the additional testimony of Indian tradition.”24 As Native scholars have noted critically, Indigenous authorities like Ducoigne were routinely left out of non-­ native histories of the mounds.25 While historic Native architecture abounded around Cahokia and bordered the northern limits of early St. Louis, contemporary Indigenous peoples influenced the social, economic, and political developments of the village. Indigenous peoples lived in St. Louis, some sharing family ties with French colonists, others enslaved and laboring alongside other unfree Native peoples. Visiting Indigenous delegations and individuals regularly engaged in trade and diplomacy. Village demographics and the fur trade informed both Native and non-­native villagers’ everyday awareness of Indigenous peoples and cultures.26 What brought people to settle in the village of St. Louis varied. In the earliest years, some Native people came from across the Mississippi River as part of Indigenous-­French families. They had converted to Christianity and intermarried with French colonists, baptizing their children and living in culturally diverse communities. For French settlers, moving to St. Louis was a voluntary if not entirely enthusiastic decision, as in the case of those who were fleeing British occupation to the east. Other French settlers hailed from Canada, France, or New Orleans.27 Enslaved and free Blacks lived in colonial St. Louis as well, almost always arriving in bondage. At the periphery of European empires, St. Louis in the late 1700s had a diverse population of Native peoples, Europeans, and small numbers of Africans and mixed-­race individuals. Many Native people came to St. Louis as slaves, their point of origin seldom recorded. While Native practices of taking captives existed for millennia, the arrival of Europeans changed the scope and effects of Indigenous slavery dramatically. A significant, illegal trade in Native peoples evolved in response to European economic practices and labor

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demands, with the result that raids for slaves became a destabilizing and destructive practice in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.28 Its illegal status complicates estimates of numbers trafficked, but it is possible that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native people were enslaved in North America north of Mexico between the 1500s and 1800s.29 Unfree people of color made up a significant part of the population of early St. Louis. In St. Louis, a sizeable enslaved Indigenous population was in place at least as early as May 1766. Among 332 total residents, seventy-­five “slaves,” many likely Indigenous, accounted for twenty-­three percent of the population; the census taker did not indicate their race. Many Indigenous people lived in slavery in St. Louis for years, though the Spaniards had prohibited trading “any Indian slave” in 1769.30 The Spanish decision not to outlaw Indigenous slavery outright created a loophole, contributing to an ambiguous status for those already held in bondage.31 And St. Louis continued to be a hub of an illegal slave trade.32 With Indigenous peoples from the Missouri River valley the main—­and comparatively accessible—­source of unfree laborers, enslaved Indigenous people outnumbered enslaved Africans in early St. Louis.33 What it meant to them—­to be Native peoples held in bondage in a settlement dependent on Native trade, to see free Native peoples daily as neighbors or visitors, to know of Native peoples held captive by other tribes as well as by Europeans—­we do not know. Enslaved Indigenous women, children, and men lived throughout the village. In July 1770, every St. Louis resident who held Native slaves was required to report them for a census. Among the five hundred inhabitants, thirty-­seven French men and women did so, and they lined up at government headquarters, and one by one, they told officials the number, age, and cost of each of the sixty-­nine Native people they held in bondage. Adding to this number, fourteen individuals who had recently arrived as slaves but whose status was ambiguous, eighty-­three enslaved Native people accounted for nearly seventeen percent of the population, a higher proportion than that of any other European settlement in North America.34 Nearly one out of every five villagers was an enslaved Native; few among them lived in intact family units.35 More common were family groupings of mothers and children. Two Native

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mothers and their four children lived in the household of Pierre Laclède. Six enslaved Indigenous people lived with St. Ange, a lifelong bachelor; one of the women, Lizette, about forty, may have been in a long-­term sexual relationship with him.36 Twenty-­three other enslaved Native people lived in French colonists’ households on their own, thus lacking the immediate domestic companionship of other Indigenous people. Other information is wanting: only seventeen enslaved Natives living in St. Louis prior to 1785 were identified by tribal affiliation, including six listed as Paducas.37 Among enslaved adults, the sex ratio was skewed, with more than twice as many Indigenous women as men.38 What emerges is a picture of a small village where enslaved Native peoples constituted a significant portion of the population, where their coerced labor was critical to the maintenance of the community, and where, for the women, sexual exploitation by European men was likely. In this world where Native peoples and colonists co-­ existed, Indigenous and métis women, both free and enslaved, had sexual relationships with Europeans, both within and outside of marriage. Take, for instance, Maria Rosa Villalpando and Jean Salé. Born into a family with Indigenous and Spanish roots, she married a Taos man in the 1750s and had a son. In 1760, when their New Mexico settlement was attacked by a force of three thousand Comanche men, her husband was killed and she and her son taken prisoner. She was enslaved, as often happened with women captured in raids.39 For the next decade, she remained in captivity, first with the Comanches and then with the Pawnees, and had a second son. Living in the Pawnee village, she met Salé, a St. Louis trader born in France, began a relationship with him, and had a third son. In 1770, the pair came to St. Louis, where they signed a marriage contract and had their child baptized.40 Other Indigenous-­French families came from long distances as well. Angélique, a Sioux woman, came to St. Louis with Canadian trader Jacques l’Arrivée, who purchased her, and the couple had two children, Joseph and Hypolite. Mother and children were baptized in 1774, as was a subsequent child.41 Angelique Courtemarche, also an Indigenous woman, came to St. Louis, where she gave birth to four children fathered by Frenchman André Roy. When she returned to her Iowa village with two of the children, Roy cut her out of his will. Her story, tantalizing in the few details we have, suggests

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that some Indigenous women in St. Louis retained close ties to their original communities. Roy later reversed the decision and left his Ioway wife the family home and made provisions for other children he had with Indigenous wives, “des femmes sauvagesses.”42 Indigenous, French, and It is clear that St. Louis inhabitants—­ African, as well as their offspring—­lived in close proximity and had intimate relationships. In The Many Hands of My Relations, Tanis C. Thorne documents interracial relationships and children, as well as the church and legal practices that obscured the métis identity of the children.43 Some intimate ties developed beyond St. Louis, with Indigenous women entering liaisons with French traders when the men visited Native communities. Auguste and Pierre Chouteau, both of whom had large French families in St. Louis, likely had Indigenous families as well, and Paul Loise, an Osage man also known as Paul Chouteau, was a son of one of the Chouteau brothers.44 In some cases, these connections smoothed the way for alliances and close economic partnerships. Such relationships underline St. Louis’s status as an Indigenous crossroads and how some Indigenous communities incorporated French newcomers into their societies. These ties should not, however, obscure the violence and coercion that lay at the core of other sexual relations and the enslavement of Native peoples. Added to the Native residents were Indigenous peoples from near and far who spent significant amounts of time in St. Louis. Some came from the south, traveling north to St. Louis to sell meat or crops. They were members of eastern tribes that had recently resettled on the Mississippi’s western shores, refugees fleeing British incursions, Iroquois hostilities, and later, American occupation of their lands. Other Indigenous visitors hailed from the northwest. From homes along the Missouri River and its tributaries, they made the journey to St. Louis in groups both large and small. These trading delegations met with officials, exchanged gifts, and did business. Some made the trek annually, others more frequently. They camped around the village, and their regular, if short-­term, stays meant that St. Louis routinely had very sizeable numbers of Indigenous people present. In any given year, hundreds of Native peoples came to a village that numbered only in the hundreds of European, African, and Indigenous residents itself. While in the village, these Indigenous visitors negotiated trade and diplomatic matters with officials and merchants.

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As they labored, traveled, and traded, Indigenous peoples shaped the economy of early St. Louis, leading Spanish administrators to focus, not surprisingly, on Indigenous affairs. Governors designed policies they hoped would promote prosperity. In St. Louis, that meant treating tribal delegations well, paying a just price for furs, and attempting to keep visits to the village brief.45 From their headquarters in New Orleans, the colony’s early governors repeatedly instructed subordinates in St. Louis to do what they could to support peace, which made trade possible, among the region’s Indigenous peoples and to follow St. Ange’s lead in negotiations. Well known among local tribes and seen as possessing “practical knowledge” of them, St. Ange tried to prepare Spanish officials for the annual visits of tribal delegations.46 He explained that after they completed spring planting, people from many different nations would travel to the village. As predicted, a large influx of tribes appeared in 1768, with 240 Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Chippewas, Ottawas, Sacs, and Foxes converging in St. Louis in early May.47 From September 1767 until May 1768, twenty-­one chiefs and delegations from fifteen different tribes visited. Multiple delegations of the Missourias came, and at least one group of Peorias crossed the Mississippi.48 The frequency and numbers of Indigenous visitors underline the village’s placement on Native ground, with European colonists there on sufferance. Indigenous visitors came to St. Louis with high expectations for trade, anticipating that government officials would provide goods as part of establishing peaceable relations. After offering large initial presents, in accord with Indigenous diplomatic practices, Spanish officials were supposed to deliver smaller gifts at subsequent meetings. On one occasion, St. Ange instructed Lieutenant Governor Francisco Ríu, the ranking Spanish official, about protocol and the distribution of medals to particular chiefs. No Osage leader had been so recognized, and St. Ange thought it would be advantageous to distinguish someone in that fashion. Native visitors met Ríu, with interpreter Louis Deshêtres at his side, and received practical, decorative, and ceremonial gifts. There were blankets, feathered hats, mirrors, vermilion, and long-­stemmed pipes. Guns, knives, powder, and shot had practical purposes in hunting and the fur trade, as well as being tools of war.49 Indigenous affairs occupied all of Ríu’s time, a situation he found at times unmanageable. He complained to superiors that tribal delegations

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did not come to the village only once annually, as he had been informed, but more frequently, with some tribes visiting almost constantly.50 Occupying Indigenous territory, Spaniards faced tribal delegations coming to the village when it suited them. To prepare, Spanish officials gathered intelligence. In his November 1777 report on the tribes of the Missouri River, for instance, Lieutenant Governor Francisco Cruzat carefully recounted those “who generally come to receive presents at this post.” He included “the number of their warriors; the name of the principal chief of each tribe; the districts where they are located; their distances and directions from this village; in what each one is occupied; the profit or harm derived from each tribe in the past; and the enemies of each one.”51 Among ten tribes hailing from the Missouri River and its tributaries, the closest were the Little Osages, with 350 to 400 warriors, whose occupation he listed as “the hunt.” The Missourias hunted as well and produced eighty to ninety packets of furs annually. Farther away were the Kansas, who planted maize and hunted, producing 180 to 200 packets of furs per year.52 Those regularly in St. Louis also included contingents of Iowas, Pawnees, Omahas, Big Osages, and Sioux. They were all Missouri River peoples receiving presents. Numerous groups from the English side of the Mississippi came to St. Louis as well, including the Foxes, Winnebagos, Mascoutens, Ottawas, Peorias, and Kaskaskias. Among the latter, the Ottawas reportedly were contemplating relocating west of the river.53 Such reports reveal a region densely populated by Indigenous peoples and a complex political and economic context. Native peoples were diverse, with differing populations, economies, and connections. Competition with the British for Indigenous trading partners was an ongoing problem for the Spanish officials. At times, tensions erupted, interrupted the flow of goods, and caused diplomatic wrangling and official sanctions. In 1773, Piernas reported that 130 Big Osages came to St. Louis, bringing with them a Big Osage leader accused of killing three Frenchmen on the Arkansas River in 1772.54 Ultimately, before the end of 1773, the Little Osages, Big Osages, and Missourias entered into a formal extradition agreement with Spanish authorities, promising that anyone responsible for the death of a vassal of the Spanish crown would be delivered to the commander in St. Louis to be punished by death. When the ceremonies surrounding the

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agreement concluded, Piernas distributed gifts and agreed to send out traders to Native villages.55 Such news of the reopening of trade would have been welcome both to the region’s Indigenous consumers and to St. Louis’s merchants, who were always ready to travel to distant villages.56 The following spring and summer of 1774 were full of only good news about the fur trade.57 But the following year concluded with tidings of inter-­tribal conflicts: the Kansas stopped traders from going farther up the river, and five Sioux chiefs who had received medals from the Spaniards were killed traveling home.58 Trade required peace, and official correspondence from Spanish authorities contains extensive coverage of Indigenous politics.59 Throughout colonial reports, however, there is no acknowledgment of Spain’s status as invaders, or of the violence and disruption caused by Europeans’ demands for slaves and furs. Spanish records are equally void of references to the region’s mounds. Such silences are part of the creation of a colonial mentality that dismissed Indigenous peoples’ histories and sovereignty. When the rebellion of British American colonists against George III turned into a bigger war in the late 1770s, Spain, France, and Indigenous peoples as far west as the Mississippi River valley were affected. Increasingly, Indigenous peoples made their way west, crossing the Mississippi to seek temporary or permanent refuge from the war and American aggression. Newly arrived in St. Louis in 1778, Spanish Lieutenant Governor de Leyba complained about the flood of Indigenous refugees. In addition to the usual visitors coming down the Missouri River, there were others from the east who were fleeing the war and “terrified by the Bostoneses.” They came to St. Louis, he believed, “under the pretext of asking for advice” but primarily in search of food. On any given day, the government was distributing rations for between fifty and two hundred Indigenous refugees.60 Officials in New Orleans objected, insisting that de Leyba should try to limit Indigenous visitors’ stays to no more “than three or four days, and not [the] two weeks,” which some had stayed.61 The situation was impossible, as the war wrought havoc on Indigenous people’s lives and livelihoods. The following year, on May 26, 1780, the Revolutionary War reached St. Louis in its westernmost theatre. After George Rogers Clark and Virginia militiamen captured British towns in Illinois in 1778 and

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defeated British forces at Vincennes in 1779, British officials decided to try to recapture the West and set in motion plans for a three-­pronged attack, with attacking forces from the Gulf of Mexico, Detroit, and Michilimackinac planning to converge on Clark’s headquarters.62 With Spain declaring war on Great Britain in 1779, British hostility grew, and the outpost at St. Louis eventually became a target as well. After hearing rumors of a planned assault of combined British and Indigenous forces from the north, de Leyba ordered last-­minute efforts to build up the settlement’s defenses with cannon, a fortified tower, and additional men from Ste. Genevieve, an older French settlement to the south. These measures saved the inhabitants from the onslaught of 750 men, including men from the Dakota, Winnebago, Ottawa, and Potawatomi tribes, all interested in deepening their alliance with the British, and Sac and Fox men who may have participated reluctantly and under threats, as well as a few dozen Canadians and Englishmen.63 Led by Wabasha (Dakota), Matchekwis (Ojibway), and Charles de Langlade (Ottawa-­ French), the force headed south along the Mississippi in early May.64 Their attempt to destroy the village failed, but the casualties from the Battle of St. Louis were high: seventy-­nine St. Louis residents wounded, killed, or captured out of a population of roughly seven hundred. Though the attackers did not return, other Native peoples visited the village soon thereafter. Less than six weeks after the battle, delegations of Little Osages, Missourias, and Otoes came to St. Louis, asking for military aid for their own conflicts with other tribes.65 The summer of 1780 also witnessed George Rogers Clark lead an expedition against the Shawnees to the east, with land-­hungry Americans engaged in an attack on Shawnee territories in today’s Ohio, targeting Native villages and burning cornfields as they traveled through land full of Indigenous mounds, the signs of older settlements and contemporary communities abundant. The end of the war signaled a new era for Indigenous peoples. In an August 1784 letter to his superiors, Cruzat reported on the arrival, two weeks earlier, of 260 Indians, “belonging to the Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Loup nations.”66 Their six-­day stay in St. Louis was dramatic and newsworthy. “Among them were a great number of important and prominent chiefs,” Cruzat noted, with whom

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he met in a “great council.”67 That meeting was conducted “with all the formalities customary upon such occasions,” included the exchange of gifts and speeches. After presenting Cruzat “with several large collars of porcelain beads,” a chief delivered a powerful statement on behalf of the assembled group. The unnamed chief ’s speech, translated by an unknown person, offers a searing indictment of American aggression. Summarizing recent history, the Indigenous leader explained that once they knew they were losing their “French father” and would have the Spanish as their “neighbors,” his people sought “a sincere friendship” with the Spaniards. He decried the results of American nationhood: “That event was for us the greatest blow that could have been dealt us, unless it had been our total destruction. The Americans, a great deal more ambitious and numerous than the English, put us out of our lands, forming therein great settlements, extending themselves like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio River which we inhabit.” Those Ohio River valley territories were full of earthworks, monumental structures, defensive and sepulchral, into which the newcomers poured. Americans brought death and destruction: “They treat us as their cruelest enemies are treated, so that today hunger and the impetuous torrent of war which they impose upon us . . . have brought our villages to a struggle with death.” Seeking relief, the chief said that they had come to request an alliance. “You may be assured that we shall always clasp your hand, and you will find us always ready to shed our blood for the Spanish flag. . . . This is our word of honor, which we accompany with these collars, and we call heaven and earth as witnesses of the sincerity of our heart.”68 The Americans, the Indigenous leader added, had told them not to rely on the Spaniards. Cruzat responded with promises of help and hospitality, declaring that St. Louis’s residents would welcome the visitors warmly. “All the inhabitants, my children, whom you see here, and whom you treat as your brothers, will receive you in their homes as if you all belonged to our nation.”69 He hoped that their experience in the village would demonstrate Spanish good will. “You will be able to judge, while you are in this town,” Cruzat declared, “whether the Spaniards deserve the evil opinion which the Americans endeavor to inspire.” To some extent, Cruzat insisted, his options for aid were limited, as the tribes lived to

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the east. In contrast to Laclède, who had urged the Missourias to leave the infant settlement of St. Louis, Cruzat may have felt he could declare that St. Louisans would welcome them. Cruzat may have made reassuring remarks either because he thought the villagers were prepared to trade or because he did not think they would stay long enough to have much interaction with locals. Knowing that the visitors wanted help in their own territories, his words were largely a sign of Spanish attitudes rather than a concrete promise. He presented the delegation with a gift designed to convey Spanish generosity and friendship.70 As the chief had accurately noted, American land hunger placed tremendous pressure on Indigenous peoples and brought more violence to their territories. Former British colonists, now Americans, viewed Indigenous peoples as obstacles to settlement, even as they built their own new towns on and around countless mound sites. For Native peoples, Americans’ westward movement ushered in large-­scale occupation, targeted removal, and increased violence. In this context of American expansion in the 1780s and 1790s, Indigenous migration grew and Spanish policies for Upper Louisiana evolved. Spanish officials encouraged Delaware and Shawnee migrants from the Ohio valley and Illinois tribes to relocate west of the Mississippi, “where they could serve as a buffer between hostile Osage and Spanish settlements.”71 Leaving ancestral burial grounds, mounds, and territories was no easy decision, yet hostilities with Americans prompted Indigenous resettlement, as in August 1786, when an Abenaki chief and fifty-­seven men came to St. Louis requesting permission to settle out of dislike for the Americans.72 American hostility toward Indigenous peoples became ever more problematic. In 1790, reports circulated that two American armies, one with five hundred men, were on the move, marching to destroy Ouabache and Miami peoples.73 These Americans may have seen the mound today called Miamisburg Mound, high on a ridge above the Great Miami River and among the largest conical mounds in the east: eight hundred feet in circumference, sixty-­five feet tall, and containing over fifty thousand cubic yards of earth.74 Other American settlers saw Indigenous communities like that, where contemporary Native dwellings stood among the mounds constructed by their ancestors hundreds of years before. Closer to home, hostilities between the Osages and Spanish forces contributed to instability in the St. Louis region in the 1790s. When

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Native peoples resisted occupation and colonial violence, colonists complained, and authorities threatened trade prohibitions. When Zenon Trudeau arrived in St. Louis to take over as lieutenant governor in 1792, he met with an Osage leader who had been in the village for two months awaiting his arrival. The Spanish governor, Francisco Luis Héctor, the Baron de Carondelet, had declared war on the Osages. Estimating that the Osages could field over twelve hundred men, Trudeau told the governor that victory would not come easily.75 In early 1793, fourteen Little Osage leaders came to the village to address a diplomatic crisis. Learning of their presence, two hundred armed men from the Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, Mascouten, and Pus tribes came to St. Louis. They surrounded the building where the Osage men were quartered, staged a demonstration, and threatened to kill them. A stalemate, with both groups in the village, lasted for ten days.76 In the midst of deteriorating relations in the 1790s, Trudeau declared to the governor that Spanish forces had to “annihilate the Indians or stop irritating them.”77 With Trudeau’s blessing, fur trade impresario Auguste Chouteau, who had well-­established ties with the Osages, went to New Orleans to seek approval for building a fort among them. It would replace a temporary trading post they had constructed along the Osage River, in today’s western Missouri, several years before. The outpost was commanded by Auguste’s younger brother, Pierre. In exchange, he asked for a six-­year monopoly on trade with the Osages and maintenance fees.78 Though St. Louis traders objected to the Chouteaus being the sole beneficiaries of Osage trade, and some Indigenous tribes, like the Miami, protested the favoritism, a period of calm followed the construction of a fort among the Osages.79 Spanish authorities and Osage leaders welcomed the involvement of the Chouteaus. As successful traders, the Chouteaus had good relations with both government officials and the Osages. Brothers Auguste and Pierre Chouteau had spent significant time among the Osages, and they had intimate relations with them.80 The fort, in effect a trading post, brought peace to the region, and reassured villagers returned to their fields. The Chouteaus further used their influence to obtain medals to distinguish the Osages. In a bit of political jockeying, Pierre Chouteau requested large medals that went to Pawhuska (also known as Payouska, Cheveux Blancs, or White Hair) and several other leaders.81 With

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the Spaniards agreeing to distinguish Chouteau’s favored ally thusly, the Chouteaus achieved cementing both their position and that of Pawhuska, shown here with Indigenous ornaments as well as European coat, shirt, and medal.82 At the same time Spanish authorities worried about Osage hostilities, they were also concerned about internal village affairs, namely the lack of population. Trying to augment numbers, Spanish leaders tried to attract German, Dutch, and French settlers, though such initiatives met with little success.83 In 1795, St. Louis numbered 976 inhabitants in total, with 679 free and 297 enslaved people.84 In 1798, Trudeau reported a population of 948.85 In 1799, when smallpox first appeared in St. Louis, the census showed only 925 inhabitants.86 In 1800, the population topped one thousand for the first time, reaching 1,039. Given this relatively small and stagnant population, Native visitors and delegations remained important to the social fabric and shifting demographics of the village. Ongoing issues with shortages, the complexities of Indigenous diplomacy, American aggression, and unsuccessful efforts to recruit white settlers all contributed to Spain’s willingness to return the Louisiana Territory to France in the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso. Before long, however, Napoleon’s dreams of a new American empire had failed spectacularly, and the French offered to sell their vast Louisiana claims to the United States. In France in 1803 to secure rights to New Orleans, American negotiators leapt at the unanticipated offer. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed in Paris, and news reached the United States that summer. With the United States now claiming the vast Missouri River watershed, a continental empire lay in the offing, with profound repercussions for Indigenous peoples in St. Louis and beyond. It was in the context of this propulsive westward expansion that white Americans lay claim to Indigenous lands and appropriated the historic architecture of the mounds to create a national culture.

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Fig. 4.4: Payouska (Pawhuska, ca. 1752–1832), Chief of the Great Osages, drawing by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-­Mémin, ca.1806, charcoal with stumping, Conté crayon, black pastel, and black and white chalk over graphite on pink prepared paper, 22 3/4 x 17 1/8 inches. New-­York Historical Society, 1860.92.

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Claiming the Mounds for the Nation Deeply curious about local earthworks, the young lawyer wrote about the St. Louis complex. “There are a number of Indian mounds, and remains of antiquity;” he declared, “which, while they are ornamental to the town, proves that in former times, this place had also been chosen as the site, perhaps of a populous city.” Describing them as some distance beyond the town’s fortifications, he wrote, “They consist 1st, of ten mounds disposed in such a manner as to form three sides of a square, enclosing about four acres, and the open side towards the west, guarded, by five small mounds placed at intervals, in a circular manner, round the opening.” Another mound nearby, comprised of multiple levels, was “the most beautiful remains of antiquity” he had seen. It could provide an “elegant” location “for a house and garden.” As white Americans pushed westward in the years after the United States was founded, they occupied Indigenous territories, taking physical control of land and claiming the right to do so. Some settled on Native lands obtained through treaties, which were often secured through coercion. Others squatted on lands recognized by the US as Native, denying Indigenous sovereignty while flouting their nation’s laws. Whether they acted inside or outside of US law, white Americans moving west shared one goal: land. Proclaiming themselves the continent’s rightful tenants, they saw themselves as the heirs to its former glories and as the architects of its future greatness. Such notions rested upon false and racist characterizations of Indigenous peoples, their histories, and their mounds. 99

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White Americans’ assumptions that Native lands were theirs for the taking raises questions as to how they characterized Indigenous histories and cultures. The complicated and multi-­layered answer starts and ends with race. European colonists and later white Americans labeled contemporary Indigenous peoples and their economies, foodways, family practices, and cultures as inferior and uncivilized, and would-­be scientists categorized them accordingly. Considering “improving” land through cultivation a legitimate basis of property ownership, settlers also criticized or discounted Indigenous farming techniques, insisting that Native peoples failed to use or improve the land appropriately or fully.1 The doctrine of discovery, coupled with racist hierarchies of cultures, lay the basis for assertions of European and then white American title to American lands. How white Americans viewed Indigenous peoples in the 1800s has much to do with the history of the mounds and the timing of US nation-­building efforts. For decades after the country was founded, many people were preoccupied with the status of American culture. Self-­conscious and insecure about their nation’s standing, political and cultural leaders labored to create an American identity, culture, and history to rival those of longer-­established nations across the Atlantic. They wrote epic poems, celebrated founding figures like George Washington, and sought an ancient history. From their perspective, the greatness of other nations stemmed in part from their antiquities and the admirable qualities of the ancient civilizations that had produced them, evident in such architectural wonders as the pyramids in Egypt and the Colosseum in Rome. Where, if anywhere, could comparable antiquities be found in the United States? The opening of the trans-­Appalachian West brought the answer: monumental earthworks. As they moved into these lands, white American settlers, military leaders, and officials surveyed, drew, and wrote commentaries about the mounds they encountered. These reports ended up in government offices and eastern news publications.2 To take just one example: in 1785, traveling to Fort Finney, near present-­ day Cincinnati, for treaty negotiations with the Shawnees, General Richard Butler saw Grave Creek Mound, in today’s Moundsville, West Virginia, and was deeply impressed by the ancient, large conical mound that stood over sixty feet high and over 240 feet in diameter.3

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With pride, white Americans likened these monumental earthworks to the antiquities of other nations. Enthusiasm for mounds explains why the members of the American Philosophical Society’s natural history committee urged research on “ancient Fortifications, Tumuli, and other Indian works of art.” The group included Thomas Jefferson, then president of the society, and Charles Willson Peale, the artist, naturalist, and founder of the Peale Museum, the first institution to exhibit an ancient mastodon skeleton. With their call for research, these men sought to increase the knowledge of Indigenous peoples both “ancient and modern.”4 Like others, these men firmly believed that history, recent and distant, was an important component of the nation’s evolving origin story and identity, evidence of its virtues and achievements. It was also key to establishing a claim to Native lands and legacies. Jefferson had firsthand knowledge of a mound, and his account of it testifies to both contemporary Indigenous peoples’ ties to mound sites and to whites’ utter disregard for those connections. Jefferson recalled a band of Indigenous mourners visiting a burial mound near Charlottesville, Virginia, close to the site of a former Monacan town, Monasickapanough.5 In his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Jefferson reported that the mound was “of considerable notoriety among the Indians.” A passing party “went through the woods directly to it, without any instructions or inquiry,” clear evidence of their pre-­existing knowledge. “Having staid about it for some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow,” Jefferson wrote, “they returned to the high road, which they had left about half a dozen miles to pay this visit, and pursued their journey.”6 Their visit and actions at the burial ground indicate the site was a place for grieving and honoring the dead, a living and meaningful cultural practice that connected the Native mourners directly to those who built the mound centuries before. Despite this proof of contemporary Native peoples’ ties to a mound cemetery, Jefferson did what many whites did; he dug into it.7 Forty feet at the base and originally twelve feet high, the monument had been reduced to seven and a half feet after being plowed for a dozen years. Jefferson made a “a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow,” exposing large quantities of human remains. He estimated that

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the mound contained the skeletons of a thousand men, women, and children, whose bones were deposited in layers, separated by earth.8 As he touched the skulls, not at all hesitant to disturb human remains, many fell apart in his hands. Destructive digs like Jefferson’s became increasingly common in the 1800s, fueling the growth of archaeology.9 In turn, such excavations fueled speculation about the mounds and their builders, theories that excluded Indigenous knowledge on one hand and influenced political and cultural debates about Indigenous peoples, their place, and their destinies in the United States on the other.10 In a sense, before they physically deconstructed the mounds, white American engaged in their own building project: figuratively constructing a story about what the mounds were and whose they were. White observers seldom reported Indigenous information about the mounds. George Rogers Clark’s relaying of Chief Ducoigne’s account was the exception rather than the rule. Rather than indicating Indigenous peoples’ unfamiliarity with the mounds, however, the limited information recorded by white settlers suggests other possibilities, including that Indigenous peoples kept their knowledge of sacred places and practices private, or that whites dismissed or failed to write down what they learned from Indigenous informants. By leaving out possible links to “an obviously ancient human past,” white American writers denied contemporary Indigenous peoples “their history as well as their legitimate claim to the land.”11 A willingness, even an intention, to discount Indigenous knowledge systems and the links between centuries-­old mounds and contemporary peoples informed white characterizations of Indigenous peoples as ignorant of the mounds. Treating earlier Native peoples as members of a race distinct from contemporary Indigenous peoples, white Americans perpetuated theories that underpinned land grabs and wars against Indigenous peoples.12 Discussions about mounds took place in the context of rapidly evolving scientific developments and expansionist politics. White settlers viewed the massive earthworks as inscrutable mysteries, their ages and origins unknown and unknowable, and white scientists claimed the authority to explain them. For expansion-­minded settlers, mounds also posed practical issues, standing in many cases in the same places they were building towns. Indeed, urban America today largely occupies the

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sites of former Indigenous communities, most of them on territory that was either unceded or obtained through coerced treaties. In the nineteenth century, there was no consensus about either the histories of the mounds or their fates; what white Americans largely agreed on was that the mounds were part of their own national heritage. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, white Americans’ and Europeans’ fascination with the past inspired the development of entire new fields of inquiry, most notably archaeology and anthropology. In Europe, the French and British were enthralled with ancient Egypt, and Egyptomania ran rampant. In Greece, between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, oversaw the removal of roughly half of the ancient sculptures from the Parthenon and other temples in Athens, which to this day remain, controversially, on display in the British Museum in London. A rage for the ancient past crossed the Atlantic. Acting in accord with the standards promulgated by white scientists of their day, those who dug into the mounds engaged in practices that seem crude and shocking today and developed theories based on assumptions of racial hierarchies broadly accepted at the time among white Americans and Europeans.13 Throughout the 1800s, Indigenous peoples were the primary focus of American anthropology.14 As a result of some of their findings and arguments, “misguided anthropological theories” were deployed to “validate manifest destiny, and excuse an equally exploitative and coercive Indian policy,” among other goals. In his detailed study of the field’s growth, century archaeologists saw Terry Barnhart explains how nineteenth-­ things differently and engaged in what was careful science according to their standards.15 Their violation of burial sites and removal of human remains angered and grieved Native peoples. Native peoples in the 1800s protested the desecration of graves, and contemporary tribes are engaged in efforts to repatriate their ancestors’ remains. Most whites viewed the monumental earthworks of the continent’s interior as antiquities. In 1774, Virginian John Rowzée Peyton, captured by Spanish authorities and jailed in Santa Fe, escaped from New Mexico and made his way to St. Louis. The route was full of signs of “a previous and extinct civilization.” The mounds, he thought, were “evidently the sepulchral tombs or burial places of former generations.” Despite his hurry to reach St. Louis, Peyton “delayed two hours to

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make an excavation,” near the Rio Rouge (or Red River) in modern-­day Arkansas. He found “bones, shells and pieces of pottery,” pronouncing their creators “people of an advanced civilization, as compared with the Red Skins of to-­day.”16 In praising earlier peoples while belittling contemporary Indigenous peoples, Peyton was among the first white commentators to characterize the builders of earthworks as part of a lost, advanced civilization, and members of a distinct race. In 1792, American cleric and historian Jeremy Belknap put the argument in more detail: “The form and material of these works seem to indicate the existence of a race of men in a stage of improvement superior to those natives of whom we or our fathers have had any knowledge.”17 Fantastical theories took hold among historians, with views of “bloodthirsty savages ravaging the peaceful, agrarian and civilized moundbuilders” informing damning and damaging characterizations of contemporary tribes.18 If the ancestors of contemporary tribes were responsible for destroying the culture that built them, so the idea went, they stole the land their descendants occupied and thus lacked title to it.19 Other theories held that the builders of the mounds were the ancestors of modern Native peoples, but that their cultures had degenerated from their epoque of greatness.20 This cultural decline argument became linked to assertions that contemporary tribes were declining and disappearing due to alcohol and disease.21 Still other theories expounded the idea of connections between mound builders and ancient Mexican history. These varied views shaped debates among white Americans over who created the earthworks and were concepts that “delegitimized Native aboriginal claims.”22 Though fantasy rather than fact, the mound builder myth of a lost civilization unrelated to contemporary Native peoples proved tenacious among white Americans until at least the early 1890s.23 Theories as to who the lost race were changed over time, with the Welsh, Viking-­ descended “Toltecs,” Israelites, people of the mythical continent of Atlantis, and Malaysians, among others, proposed.24 Curtis Dahl describes the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, as the most famous and most influential work of “Mound-­Builder literature.”25 Fascinated by Native peoples, Joseph Smith claimed a Native angel told him in 1823 of a historical record, on golden plates, of ancient Native peoples, which

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he translated and published as The Book of Mormon. Its pages tell the tale of two families of Israelites who settled in the ancient Americas and describe how one group, the savage Lamanites, ancestors of contemporary Indigenous peoples, destroyed the more civilized Nephites and their Mound-­Building civilization.26 The central premise of these theories—­that the ancestors of contemporary Indigenous peoples had not built the monumental earthworks—­ was flat-­out wrong. Barnhart notes that while many white authors discussed the mounds from a flawed perspective that pitted “Mound Builders” against “American Indians,” other early authors “emphatically did not.” In his analysis of writings about the mounds, he points out that even those who denied that contemporary Indigenous peoples or their ancestors built the mounds “always had to explain away the ‘Indian theory’ first before they could advance their alternative theories.”27 White Americans’ familiarity with these ideas and mound builder sites often came from essays published by learned societies and books devoted to “American antiquities.” For the most part, these works contained images and text that described mound builders and treated them as disconnected from contemporary Native peoples, thus “negating Indigenous claims to the continent and its histories.”28 A typical example appears on the title page of Josiah Priest’s 1833 American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, an oft-­reprinted and inexpensive volume that made mound builder narratives easily accessible to white readers: the subtitle describes the book as “an exhibition of the evidence that an ancient population of partially civilized nations differing entirely from those of the present Indians peopled America many centuries before its discovery by Columbus, and inquiries into their origin; with a copious description of many of their stupendous works, now in ruins, with conjectures concerning what may have become of them.” 29 Priest’s comments about the earthworks in the St. Louis region echoed white comments about a populous former society. He noted the mounds at the junctions of many rivers, “as along the Mississippi,” with “very numerous” mounds, “amounting to several thousands,” in the west, “none less than ten feet high, and some over one hundred. One opposite St. Louis measures eight hundred yards in circumference at its base.”30 As he described the mounds in the St. Louis vicinity, Priest did so without any

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reference to Indigenous knowledge sources and in fact declaring there were none. Referring to Ohio valley sites, Priest wrote: “We can see their vast funeral vaults, enter into their graves, and look at their dry bones; but no passage of history tells their tale of life; no spirit comes from their ancient sepulchres, to answer the inquiries of the living.”31 In the purported absence of such knowledge, Priest and others argued, their writings provided evidence, explanations, and answers. The area around St. Louis was clearly “once the seat of empire,” so abundant were the signs of settlement. “There is no doubt but in the neighborhood of St. Louis must have been cities or large towns of these ancient people; as the number and size of the mounds above recounted would most certainly justify,” he declared.32 From many white Americans’ perspective, the important point was that ancient peoples throughout the world had raised monuments and that the continent’s mounds provided the basis for the United States to be counted among the great nations of the world. For many settlers, it was a short step from noting the existence of the mounds to describing themselves as having much more in common with presumably long-­ gone “Mound Builders” than did contemporary Indigenous peoples. Carrying forward the “Mound Builders’” aspirations into the future, so the idea went, white Americans would bring progress to a land that had been blighted by modern tribes, whom they portrayed as destructive. As the mound builders had vanished in the face of savage attacks, so too would Native peoples vanish before the advance of white civilization. American society would thereby redeem the promise, potential, and progress of an the ancient “Mound Builders’” civilization. Thus, “western frontiersmen became the heirs to a classical civilization destroyed by invaders who were not truly native Americans.”33 In this reading, white Americans would restore civilization as they replaced barbaric contemporary tribes.34 This notion was part of what Jean O’Brien describes as “firsting,” a process of white Americans using local histories to claim Native lands and legacies as their own. In St. Louis, as elsewhere in the United States in the 1800s, advertisers, artists, writers, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists, and others described an older civilization of “Mound Builders” as “vanished” and contemporary tribes as “vanishing.” Importantly, the “disappearance” of

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contemporary Native peoples in the face of white American “civilization” was treated as a necessary preamble to American modernity; they were peoples destined to die out.35 The “myth of the vanishing race” spread widely, seeping into popular culture, including novels, and in the last century, movies and television.36 It has played a destructive role in presentations of Indigenous peoples as inevitably disappearing from a “wilderness” that gave way to “civilization.” It has also overlooked Native peoples’ presence in “unnatural” areas, that is, cities, though the works of numerous scholars demonstrate that urban America is Indigenous America as well.37 In short, while Native peoples have too often been written out of histories of both urban and non-­urban places, they are no more past tense today than they were in the 1800s. According to the 2020 federal census, nearly ten million Americans identify as fully or partly Alaskan Native or American Indian. What is clear is that dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their lands and monuments, culturally and physically, went hand in hand with narrative erasure of the Indigenous past and present by white Americans. The mounds attracted white visitors who wanted to see antiquities, the sites they believed lent distinction to ancient American history, especially the Big Mound. Their admiration reflected central features of Romanticism, an intellectual, artistic, and literary movement that emerged in eighteenth-­century Europe and reached its heights in the first half of the nineteenth century. Romantic thinkers viewed Native peoples as more connected to nature and linked to an idealized past. But contemporary whites’ attitudes toward Indigenous peoples were far from uniformly positive. White Americans, as Philip Deloria put it, “built the nation on contradictory foundations” regarding Native peoples, with views of a positive “Indian Other” uncorrupted by modern society coexisting with depictions of Native peoples as “savages lurking outside societal boundaries.”38 In St. Louis, what scholars call “settler colonialism” took shape in the context of nineteenth-­century urban expansion and narratives of civilization and modernity. These forces constituted powerful vehicles for marginalizing, removing, and dispossessing Indigenous peoples socially, geographically, politically, and historically. In the 1800s and later, St. Louis’s white residents, leaders, boosters, and historians minimized or

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left out Indigenous peoples in stories of the city’s growth or appropriated their histories for their own purposes. In a seeming paradox, white American residents and visitors lauded the distinctiveness of the mounds to the riverside landscape, and local inhabitants referred to them as landmarks and praised their beauty. Others planned for their practical repurposing, highlighting their real estate potential with a sort of mounds boosterism. White St. Louisans obviously knew of the mounds from the moment they settled on the spot: they could see them, walk among them, and climb them for panoramic views of the Mississippi River. The American takeover of the Louisiana Territory provided an occasion for an official account of the mounds. While the Corps of Discovery was camped out in Illinois in the winter of 1803–1804, William Clark explored Cahokia. Perhaps his brother shared Ducoigne’s knowledge or his own firsthand observations. Writing in his diary on January 9, 1804, Clark described “an Indian fortification comprised of nine moun[d]s forming a circle” and nearby “great quantities of Earthen ware & flints” as well as “a Grave on an Emenince.” This brief account prefigured others Clark penned on the expedition to the northwest, as when he characterized mounds and their graves as “Strong evidence of this Countrey having been thickly Settled.”39 His comments indicated that he understood the mounds to be created by Native peoples. Amos Stoddard, sent to St. Louis to handle the transfer of the Louisiana Territory, created a map (Figure 5.1) in 1804, showing several mounds to the north of the village.40 In a chapter on antiquities in his Sketches of Louisiana (1812), Stoddard referred to the mound group at St. Louis only briefly, mentioning several and noting that two were quite large, “one of them form[ing] nearly a square, with a flat open space on top.”41 The earliest published account describing the mounds of St. Louis and Cahokia in detail was that penned by Henry Marie Brackenridge in the 1810s. In his geographic mobility and interest in Indigenous earthworks, Brackenridge was not unusual. Like other Americans who moved westward, he encountered both contemporary Native peoples and widespread evidence of much older Native settlements. Brackenridge was born in Pittsburgh in 1786, and he acquired deep personal knowledge of the west in his youth. His father sent him, at the age of five, to learn French in Ste. Genevieve, where, for the next three years, he

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Fig. 5.1: “Copy of a map of St. Louis village, ca. 1804–05. Now in possession of U.S. War Dept., Washington, D.C. [Stoddard map],” Norbury L. Wayman, 1953. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2005625349/.

went to school and reputedly forgot how to speak English.42 After becoming a lawyer and practicing in Maryland and Pennsylvania for a time, Brackenridge returned to the west in 1810, settling in St. Louis, practicing law, and writing for local papers, including a series of articles on the Louisiana Territory in 1810–1811.43 In January 1811, the St. Louis Missouri Gazette published his account of Cahokia Mounds, then called Cantine Mounds, and the monastery of La Trappe. Brackenridge noted that monks lived in four or five cabins “on a mound about fifty yards from the large one, and which is about one hundred and fifty feet square,” with their other buildings on the plain below. Brackenridge added that the monks had plans “to build on the terrace of the large mound”; Monks Mound was the name whites gave to the largest earthwork.44 In March 1811, editors printed his description of the mounds adjoining St. Louis. Of primary interest to this history is Brackenridge’s book Views of Louisiana: Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811, published in 1814. In a chapter devoted to

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“Antiquities in the Valley of the Mississippi,” Brackenridge reproduced the description of St. Louis’s mounds.45 “By his writings,” a newspaper editor noted, Brackenridge had “contributed to make known abroad the high character of Missouri.”46 His work was a source for Priest’s account of the mounds as well. Brackenridge’s detailed accounts celebrated the symmetry, age, and beauty of the St. Louis mound complex. “There are a number of Indian mounds, and remains of antiquity;” he declared, “which, while they are ornamental to the town, proves that in former times, this place had also been chosen as the site, perhaps of a populous city.” In addition to a four-­ acre plaza surrounded by mounds, there was “a large mound, about six hundred yards higher up the river, 30 feet high, 150, in length, shaped like a grave, five-­feet wide on the top, and with a large terrace or apron, on the side towards the river.” Besides these two striking earthworks and groups, another mound stood “below the 1st, a gentle elevation, four feet higher, than the second bank, with an acre for a handsome house and yard, being 150 feet wide, and falling to the plain of the first bank, by three regular gradations, the two first, ten feet, and the last five. It is called the falling garden.”47 This brief newspaper report neatly, and with

Fig. 5.2: Diagram of the St. Louis mound group, Henry Marie Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana: Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811 (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear and Eichbaum, 1814), 189.

concrete numbers and measurements, sketched out the locations of the mounds: the plaza complex, the immense Big Mound, and the tiered earthwork called Falling Garden. Brackenridge saw himself as following a proud tradition of exploring mounds. He even wrote to Thomas Jefferson directly about their mutual

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fascination with “the primitive inhabitants of America”; Brackenridge told the former president that reading Notes on Virginia as a boy had “first awakened” his own interest in the subject.48 Brackenridge further shared his view that evidence suggested “a more ancient and advanced population, than the state of the country or the character of the tribes inhabiting it, when first visited by Europeans, would seem to indicate.” In his writings, Brackenridge likened himself to Jefferson, naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton, and Bishop James Madison, in that he had “considerable curiosity” about remains along the Mississippi. But he characterized himself as a greater expert. He believed that many of the writers whose theories were in circulation had “a very imperfect acquaintance with these remains.” Of the earthworks in the area, “but few [had] been described by others with accuracy.”49 He emphasized his eyewitness presence and firsthand measurements, as after a visit to New Madrid, in the far southeastern part of Missouri. Brackenridge described it as having one as “one of the largest Indian mounds in the western country: as near as I could compute, it is twelve hundred feet in circumference, and about forty in height, level on the top, and surrounded with a ditch five feet deep, and ten wide. In this neighbourhood, there are traces of a vast population.”50 Contemporary Indigenous practices convinced Brackenridge that those who attributed the remains to Welsh or Danish colonists were way off base. An important piece of counterevidence he cited was the practice, “general among the northern tribes,” of building palisades or otherwise fortifying villages.51 In other words, despite the time that had elapsed since the construction of the continent’s largest monumental earthworks, clear cultural traditions and building projects linked their creators and contemporary Native peoples. As did other writers, Brackenridge remarked that mounds stood in ideal locations for towns. Marrying an awareness of past communities with a consciousness of contemporaries’ expansionist ambitions, he noted, “It is worthy of observation that all these vestiges invariably occupy the most eligible situations for towns or settlements; and on the Ohio and Mississippi, they are most numerous and considerable. There is not a rising town or a farm of an eligible situation, in whose vicinity some of them may not be found.”52 The abundance of walled towns, fortifications, burial sites, mounds, and pyramids proved that “an immense

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population” had “once been supported in this country.” 53 Barrows like those described by Jefferson, he wrote, were always found near sites of villages. In short, Brackenridge praised mound engineers’ site-­planning activities, saw them as guided by values and criteria similar to those of his compatriots, and fully ascribed the monumental earthworks to Native peoples. Brackenridge compared North American antiquities favorably to those of Egypt, celebrating the organization and labor involved in their creation. Among antiquities, those near Cahokia were the most remarkable in his view. When he visited them in the Fall of 1811, crossing over from St. Louis, he walked among the mounds, measuring them as he paced. Impressed by their number and size, he was awestruck at the sight of “the principal assemblage.” Recalling the moment, he wrote, “When I reached the foot of the largest mound, I was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids; and could not help exclaiming, what a stupendous pile of earth!” Building it, he guessed, must have taken years “and the labors of thousands.”54 He added, “Were it not for the regularity and design which it manifests . . . and the other mounds scattered around it, we could scarcely believe it the work of human hands.”55 In the 1817 version of his book, Brackenridge amended that sentence to conclude that the mounds were all the more surprising “in a country which we have generally believed never to have been inhabited by any but a few lazy Indians.”56 The racist slur jumps out from an otherwise praise-­filled passage. He was certain a great city once stood there, with the mounds the sites of temples “or monuments to great men.”57 Works like Brackenridge’s on St. Louis and those of other writers on Ohio River valley sites contributed to discussions of mounds as extraordinary monuments but not to their preservation. Admiration did not deter development. In St. Louis, as in Cincinnati and elsewhere, white Americans repurposed the mounds quickly for real estate plans. Even Brackenridge’s first description of St. Louis’s Falling Garden suggested such a link. “It affords,” he opined, “an elegant site for a house and garden. It is the most beautiful remains of antiquity I have seen.”58 Brackenridge thus positioned contemporary Americans as the heirs

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to the monuments, ready to raise new residential construction on the “beautiful remains of antiquity.” The bucolic setting and vistas of the St. Louis area’s mounds appear in some of the first images created of the village, a series of sketches by artist Anna Maria von Phul. In the late 1810s, Von Phul came to St. Louis from Lexington, Kentucky, remaining there until her death. While living with family members, she created drawings and watercolors of local scenes, including Indigenous and French creole residents and visitors, caves, buildings, and the earthworks that distinguished

Fig. 5.3: Drawing of Big Mound, Anna Maria von Phul, ink drawing, ca. 1818. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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Fig. 5.4: View of a Mound Near St. Louis, Anna Maria von Phul, ink drawing, ca. 1818. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

the locale. The mounds appear untouched, though a fence surrounds one, and she clearly climbed another to sketch the view. The mounds’ isolation from urban development, suggested by these images, did not last. As the city expanded to the north, new streets and buildings encroached upon the earthworks. Indeed, in the 1810s, land sales and new housing highlighted the mounds’ appeal and status as landmarks. In 1816, executors for the estate of Jacques Clamorgan announced a sale of his

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Fig. 5.5: View from the Top of the Mound, Anna Maria von Phul, ink drawing, ca. 1818. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

property, including “a tract of two by forty arpens of land near St. Louis from the Mississippi to the hills, near about the big mound,” bounded on the north and south by land grants belonging to other French St. Louisans.59 When they visited in 1819, Dr. Thomas Say and naturalist and artist Titian Ramsay Peale noted that the nearly square mound they labeled number eleven, 179 feet long at its base, had already been affected by construction: “A brick house is erected at the S.W. corner.”60 It

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was likely the two-­story home of postmaster Colonel Elias Rector, built in 1816, which soon became a local landmark.61 In 1818, a notice appeared in the Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser for three arpents of land—­one French arpent was roughly equivalent to one acre—­between the lots of Col. E. Rector and F. Bates, esq., “near the mounds, at the upper end of St. Louis.”62 After Rector’s death, his property—­including a house, barn, stable, and carriage house, all of brick—­was auctioned. The notice opened with its distinguishing feature: it was “That beautiful seat at the MOUNDS.”63 Clearly, the mounds functioned as reference points. In 1819, John Mullanphy advertised that he needed bricklayers and carpenters to construct a house with a stone cellar “at the big mound,” noting that the mound was “half a mile north of this town.”64 Governor Alexander McNair had a two-­story brick home built near the first mound in 1819–1820.65 At this point, with the mounds beyond the main settlement, their appeal to developers resided in part in their distinctiveness as landmarks. An estate sale in 1825 was “Located at the mounds just north of St. Louis.”66 In 1825, an important year in land development, the city appointed Theodore Hunt to head a commission dedicated to resolving conflicting land claims from the period of US takeover of the Louisiana Territory.67 Land dealers used mounds to advertise properties they were selling outside of the city as well. In 1819, when William Long announced a sale of town lots in Fenton, fifteen miles from St. Louis, he listed typical qualities that would appeal to white settlers: good water, fertile soil, abundant timber, proximity to salt springs, and a good harbor. Harkening to the location’s former uses, Long argued that the situation of the town merited development, as it “must have been of considerable magnitude and strength” in the past. He added, “The numerous mounds situated in different directions, and a quantity of graves in which some of the human race has been so particularly and singularly interred, renders it worthy of the attention of any traveler to examine.”68 Natural resources, combined with mounds’ “curiosities,” held a broad appeal. The message was clear: one people had built an impressive civilization in the region, and now another people—­white American settlers migrating from the east—­was about to do the same. The newcomers would assume

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the mantle of past greatness by exploring and building on the sites of earlier peoples’ monuments and cemeteries. Mounds in St. Louis and their exploration elsewhere received regular coverage in early newspapers. The numerous accounts in the 1810s in the Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser suggest that publisher Joseph Charless believed that mounds interested St. Louisans and that readers understood them to be antiquities, with regular reports on “dwarf skeletons” in mounds in New Madrid; artifacts being excavated from mounds in Zanesville, Ohio; and updates on efforts to explore earthworks.69 When a major expedition to explore the Upper Missouri set out from Pittsburgh in 1819, the Gazette heralded the promise of “much useful information.”70 Among the crew were engineer Major Stephen Long, zoologist Dr. Thomas Say, and artist Titian Ramsay Peale, a brother of Charles William Peale. The report of their travels explicitly linked American antiquities to those of Egypt and Greece. “Although the Missouri is not embellished by such stupendous monuments of art as is the Nile,” the article noted, “her Indian mounds afford much interesting disquisition; and although no Thebes . . . yet some clue may yet be discovered to assist our historical researches into the ancient manners of the Aborigines.”71 The primary goal of the men’s expedition was to create “a correct military survey” of the Missouri River and to “fix upon a site for a military establishment.” They also planned “to enquire into the trading capacity and genius of the various tribes through which they may pass.”72 In the expedition account published in 1823, Edwin James, the botanist and geologist, reprinted the expedition’s instructions: “You will conciliate the Indians by kindness and presents, and will ascertain, as far as practicable, the number and character of the various tribes, with the extent of country claimed by each.”73 With their steamboat, the Western Engineer, destined for Indigenous territories, it is perhaps unsurprising that vessel’s flag promoted diplomacy. According to the Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, Peale painted the flag with images of “a white man and an Indian shaking hands, the Calumet of Peace and a Sword.”74 The boat itself had an unusual appearance. Seventy-­five feet long, thirteen feet across, and only drawing nineteen inches of water, its figurehead was a large serpent, its mouth an opening for steam.75

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When the Upper Missouri expedition of Long, Say, and Peale was delayed in St. Louis by mechanical problems, they used the stopover to visit the mounds. “Tumuli, and other remains of the labours of nations of Indians that inhabited this region many ages since,” they noted, “are remarkably numerous about St. Louis. Those tumuli immediately northward of the town, and within a short distance of it, are twenty-­seven in number.”76 They measured the mounds, prepared a detailed report (not published until the Smithsonian did so in 1862), and created a map that was more precise, if not altogether accurate, than previous suggestive efforts, with the distance of the Big Mound from the others appearing less than it was.77 They measured the Big Mound as 319 by 158 feet at its base and 34 feet high, with the top approximately 136 feet by eleven. In the mound plaza area, they counted fifteen mounds, some of them quite large: one was 214 by 188 feet at the base and twelve feet high, and another had a base of 187 feet and was 23 feet high. Not content with simply measuring the mounds, Long, Say, and Peale dug into them, as did countless other white scientists. On the summit of the Big Mound, they noted several graves and “opened five of them.” They reported finding “a solitary tooth, of a species of rat, together with the vertebrae and ribs of a serpent of moderate size, and in good preservation.” Though they “could not determine” whether the animal “had been buried by the natives, or had perished there,” they evoked ancient Egypt in their comments, speculating that if intentionally buried, the snake’s remains suggested “that rattlesnakes were formerly worshipped by the natives of America, and their remains, like those of the Ibis of Egypt, religiously entombed after death.”78 Members of the expedition also dug into burial mounds just outside of St. Louis, removing an infant’s skull and the remains of a middle-­aged man. Settlers informed them “that many similar graves had been found along the summits of most of the neighbouring hills.”79 When they dug into cemeteries to remove bones and artifacts, excavators engaged in acts they saw as constructive of new knowledge but which were manifestly destructive. Whites generated what they considered new information by graverobbing. No investigator acknowledged these acts as disrespectful or desecration; whites did not view the sites as sacred. A willingness to remove human remains from graves extended

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Fig. 5.6: “Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1819,” T. R. Peale, Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, . . . 1861 (1862), 387.

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to white cemeteries, with white Americans exhuming the long dead, the recently dead, the anonymous, and the celebrated, even when such bodies lay in sanctified ground.80 Though such practices suggest that the dead had few defenders, Native peoples protested the vandalism of Indigenous cemeteries as did whites when recently interred corpses of other whites were stolen for medical dissection. The difference was that while many whites condemned the opening of white graves for the sake of medical science, they did not censure the opening of Native graves. The mounds became St. Louis’s claim to fame. In 1821, the first directory listed a “MOUND GARDEN,” belonging to Col. Elias Rector, “and kept by Captain James Gray, as a place of entertainment and recreation.” A “delightful and pleasant retreat from the noise, heat and dust of a busy town,” the public garden was ornamented with flowers and shrubbery and stood “adjacent to the large mound nearest to the town.”81

Fig. 5.7: Detail from “Plan of St. Louis,” Lewis C. Beck, A Gazetteer of the States of Illinois and Missouri (Albany: Printed by Charles R. and George Webster, 1823). Internet Archive.

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The mounds were notable, designated as “ANCIENT WORKS” on early maps, such as that in Beck’s Gazetteer of 1822 (Figure 5.7). The Big Mound was the vantage point for a duel in 1823, when Thomas Rector and Josiah Barton fought with pistols on Bloody Island, a small island in the Mississippi in front of the mound. Standing atop the Big Mound, Rector’s relatives were relieved to see him wave his hat to them in victory; Barton died.82 Into the 1830s at least, the Big Mound retained its colonial era nickname: as a newspaper account noted, “The big mound near St. Louis is known as The Grange.”83 The St. Louis Republican celebrated the mounds in the vicinity of St. Louis. Reprinted from the Western Monthly Review, the 1827 article on “Indian Mounds” opened with an allusion to Europe’s great monuments, ruins, temples, and castles, all of which served “to connect the imagination and the heart with the past.” The author argued that “our great country might at least compare with any other in the beauty and interest of its landscape.” Of particular “interest” were the “Indian mounds.” These reminders “of the busy multitudes” that once lived on an “uninhabited prairie” inspired “deep thought.” Urban centers had their mounds as well, continued the author. “There are many interesting mounds near St. Louis, a little north of the town,” he began. “Some of them have the aspect of being enormous stacks. That one of them called the Falling Garden, is generally pointed out as a striking curiosity.” Among the many mound sites, “the most numerous, and by far the most interesting group of mounds . . . is near Cahokia.”84 A “very impressive” mound, containing “great quantities of human bones” was levelled in the center of Chillicothe, Ohio. Another Ohio town, Circleville, took “its name from its position” inside a circular mound. Such sites showed how “the most dense ancient population existed precisely, in the places, where the most crowded future population will exist, in the days to come.”85 For residents, the mounds were noteworthy. They were the focus of inquiry, speculation, and admiration. In excavating, writing about, and building upon them, white St. Louisans, historians, and visiting scientists used them for their own evolving purposes. To stand tall among other nations, their young country needed deep historical roots, and monumental earthworks provided those. To develop new towns, they

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needed good sites, and mounds stood in ideal locations. With enthusiasm for their own agendas, white Americans appropriated the mounds for their own purposes.

Chapter six

The Indigenous Reputation of “Red-Head’s Town” The clerk announced that a Kickapoo delegation had arrived. Required to negotiate with tribal leaders, the host excused himself and invited his guests to observe the meeting. The diners eagerly followed to the council room, where “forlorn-­ looking” Kickapoo men sat on a bench. Recounting the scene, the writer described “the principal Indian” as speaking with a “mournful appealing tone” and the general as exhibiting an “air of sympathy and paternal kindness.” The walls were “completely coated with Indian arms and dresses,” part of an impressive collection. There were great peace pipes, finely crafted tools and weapons, portraits of famous chiefs, cradleboards, snowshoes, and even two canoes. On the crowded mantelpiece sat a striking three-­headed ceramic vessel of great age. In this chamber, the visitor found on display the human beings and objects he and other tourists came to St. Louis to see. Two distinct notions about St. Louis as an important place for encountering the Indigenous past and a disappearing Indigenous present emerged in the early 1800s. As the mounds on its northern periphery gained fame beyond the city, St. Louis also acquired a reputation among white travelers as a place to learn about and possibly see contemporary Indigenous peoples. The association made sense: St. Louis was an important center of the fur trade and Native diplomacy and as such drew both Native visitors and white traders. But while Indigenous delegations came to St. Louis to engage in negotiations regarding pressing and ongoing concerns, white American and European travelers, artists, natural 123

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historians, and even officials often viewed them as representatives of a vanishing people, doomed to extinction. This myth of the vanishing Indian fueled tourists’ interest in St. Louis, practices of collecting and displaying Native goods by non-­native peoples, and the American appropriation of Indigenous earthworks and lands. It was this cultural milieu and political moment that hurried whites interested in Indigenous peoples to St. Louis. Not coincidentally, St. Louis was the seat of the territorial government before Missouri became the twenty-­fourth state in March 1821, and an important US Army installation after the establishment of Jefferson Barracks in 1826. One key to the city’s Indigenous reputation and histories of appropriation was William Clark, architect of removal in Missouri and possessor of a vast collection of Indigenous artifacts. His nickname, “the Red-­ Headed Chief,” stemmed from the regular official meetings he held with Native leaders and had a geographic counterpart; some Native peoples referred to St. Louis as “Red-­Head’s Town.”1 Clark played a pivotal part in Indigenous affairs and was not only the most famous person residing in St. Louis in this era, but the one with the most impact on the fate of Native lands. Indeed, Clark’s significance for the history of Indian Removal and the histories of St. Louis and Missouri would be difficult to overestimate. Yet in popular histories, his early fame as co-­leader of the Corps of Discovery’s 1803–1806 trek has largely eclipsed these later roles. Fortunately, several recent biographies have highlighted the complexity of Clark’s life and career.2 After the Louisiana Purchase expedition, Clark negotiated numerous land cessions, perhaps most notably the 1808 Osage Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Fort Clark. In negotiating his first treaty, Clark may have been “overanxious to demonstrate to the government his abilities as an Indian agent” and so pressured the Osage chiefs Pawhuska and Nichenmanee (Walking Rain) to agree to its terms.3 Under the treaty’s provisions, the Osages would gain protection from eastern tribes fleeing American expansion who wanted their lands, secure American trade with a trading post on the Missouri, and obtain a blacksmith, mill, and plows.4 In exchange, they ceded fifty thousand square miles of territory, east of the fort and south to the Arkansas River, to the United States.5 After negotiations had concluded, the Osages objected that they had only agreed to share hunting grounds, not to relinquish their lands.

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But their protests were largely ignored by American officials. Though Meriwether Lewis met with an Osage delegation in the fall of 1808 to revise some parts of the treaty, the land cession remained, a permanent blow to the Osages in the region, who lost much of the territory that became Missouri and Arkansas.6 An 1893 map of Missouri that appeared in a government publication on “Indian Land Cessions in the United States,” makes clear that the state entirely rests on the historic homelands of Native peoples, primarily the Osages.

Fig. 6.1: “Indian Land Cessions in the United States (Plate 144, Missouri),” in Charles C. Royce and Cyrus Thomas, Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896–97, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899).

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The Osage lands shaded yellow and green, north and south of the Missouri, were part of the 1808 Treaty, and the pink, just north of St. Louis, along the Mississippi, was Sauk and Fox Territory ceded in the notorious 1804 Treaty of St. Louis. Troubled by his role in the 1808 treaty, Clark called it the “hardest treaty on the Indians he ever made” and reportedly told an aide years later that “‘if he was to be damned hereafter, it would be for making that treaty.’” The aide declared that the treaty “really seemed to weigh upon his conscience.”7 Though Clark did not officially become superintendent of Indian Affairs until 1813, when President James Madison appointed him territorial governor—­a role that included superintendency—­he unofficially performed its duties from 1808 to 1813 and served as territorial governor from 1813 to 1821.8 In these roles, he juggled what he considered the best interests of Indigenous peoples and the demands of white settlers. Clark appeared to support Native peoples in a December 1815 order: “I do hereby require that all white persons who have intruded and are settled upon the lands of the Indians within this territory, depart without delay.” Those white persons who neglected to follow “this last and peaceful warning” would find themselves compelled to do so by “military power.”9 The threat was an idle one, however, as Clark lacked the troops to enforce eviction and repeatedly sought Indigenous peoples’ removal from their homelands through treaties, a strategy he thought to their ultimate benefit in the face of tidal waves of whites moving westward.10 Clark excelled at negotiating treaties. By 1818, as Jay Buckley notes, Clark aided the US government in “extinguishing Indian title to seventy thousand square miles of land in present-­day Missouri and Arkansas.”11 Clark signed more treaties than any other government official, negotiating thirty-­seven which Congress ratified, fully one-­tenth of the treaties between Indigenous nations and the US government during the era of treaty-­making from 1778 to 1871.12 Artist George Catlin’s portrait of Clark captures the centrality of Clark’s treaty making, with his right hand resting upon a treaty he was negotiating with the Ioways; on the table sits a volume of Indian Treaties. “The context of Indian removal treaties was the political canvas” on which Catlin painted the portrait.13 Though he lost the title of governor when Missouri became a state, Clark remained in a leadership role. In 1821, when the US Congress

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Fig. 6.2: William Clark, by George Catlin, oil on canvas, 1832. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

abolished government fur-­ trade factories and established the US Superintendent of Indian Affairs post in St. Louis, Clark was the appointee. Having this sole position made Clark’s efforts to fulfill his duties less complicated in some regards. No longer did he have to reconcile the opposing agendas of expansionist-­minded American settlers and Indigenous peoples trying to protect their homelands. Instead, as

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superintendent, his role was to protect Native peoples from illegal traders, from treaty infringements, and from settlers moving into their lands in violation of US laws.14 For Clark, protecting tribes meant distancing them from whites, whether east of the Mississippi or in Missouri. But what protection meant to him and other white officials was not straightforward. Paternalism and racism shaped the US goal of assimilating Native peoples. To achieve assimilation, policymakers believed, Indigenous peoples had to be removed from corrupting influences that would hamper their incorporation into American culture and society. Peaceful separation from their lands through treaties was seen as key to insuring Native peoples time and space to adapt to white civilization, with resistors targeted for forceful removal. In self-­serving terms, white policymakers characterized removal as a humane intercession on behalf of Native peoples otherwise destined for either assimilation or extermination, an intellectual sleight of hand that justified their appropriation of Indigenous lands.15 Expecting that Indigenous people who solely pursued agriculture on small farms would need less land than they had when engaging in both hunting and planting, policymakers anticipated that excess lands would be freed up both for tribes being removed from east of the Mississippi River and for white settlers.16 Accordingly, Clark used Indian Office funds to assist the westward movement of Indigenous peoples. In one week in 1821, for example, he paid for the transportation fees of 222 families and their 264 horses across the Mississippi.17 Clark considered such help an important part of supporting Indigenous peoples’ survival. On another occasion, in 1824, he accompanied a delegation of Sac, Fox, and Iowa leaders to Washington, DC, where they signed a treaty ceding their lands in Missouri for a small amount of cash ($500) and an annuity.18 Clark’s position in St. Louis put him on the front lines of enacting government policies and made his voice an important one in deliberations in Washington. In 1826, the Secretary of War, James Barbour, forwarded a report from Clark to the House Committee on Indian Affairs, detailing the latter’s views on “the Preservation and Civilization of the Indians.” In it, Clark emphasized the government’s responsibility to “the Indian tribes” was “to save them from extinction.” Removal was key, and he was both eyewitness to and

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proponent of the process. “A constant tide of Indian emigration is now going on from the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, to the west of the Mississippi,” he wrote. “They cross at St. Louis and St. Genevieve under my superintendency; and my annual accounts with the Government show the aid which is given them.”19 The fur trade complicated Clark’s role in Indigenous affairs as well as diplomatic and commercial matters. As it had been in the colonial era, the fur trade continued to drive white Americans’ economic ambitions and official government policies, particularly fears over British competition, and Clark was not exempt from its financial lure. In 1809, when Manuel Lisa organized the Missouri Fur Company, he had the support of prominent St. Louisans like Auguste and Pierre Chouteau as well as Clark. Though officially responsible for overseeing trade, Clark also engaged in commerce privately himself, supplementing his government salary by running a store in St. Louis where he sold goods to both Indigenous customers and company traders.20 Conflicts of interest aside, handling fur traders could be dicey, as the fur trade drew many white men who rejected restrictions on hunting on Indigenous lands, cared little for the niceties of diplomacy with Native peoples, and acted with violence and sexual predation toward Indigenous communities. Throughout his years in government service, Clark maintained offices at his two-­story home at the southeast corner of Main and Vine, a hub of Indigenous activity as well as a tourist attraction. It was a site where the spectacle of cultural appropriation was intertwined with the implementation of territorial dispossession. A brick extension, connected to the street by a stairway and within the house to Clark’s study and public office, housed a council chamber, one hundred feet long by thirty feet wide, where Clark met with tribal leaders and delegations.21 The walls of Clark’s “Indian museum,” as it was known, were covered with Indigenous artifacts and natural history objects, and the collection was in place from roughly 1818 until Clark’s death in 1838.22 As a collector, Clark partook of a practice that had developed over a few centuries, as travelers returned home with remarkable items from other cultures in distant lands and put them on display. Though there were African and Asian collectors in other parts of the world, Europeans predominated, and such collections gave rise to early museums.23 Across the

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Atlantic, white Americans like Thomas Jefferson, Charles Willson Peale, and William Clark embraced the practice. In Peale’s museum, founded in Philadelphia in 1784, the “world in miniature” he assembled was designed to imbue Americans with a sense of their identity. His son’s watercolor study of the museum reveals the combination of images of heroic men, ancient and contemporary animal life, and, on the left side, in a small cabinet between cases of birds, Indigenous artifacts.

Fig. 6.3: The Long Room, Interior of Front Room in Peale’s Museum, by Charles Willson Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale, watercolor over graphite pencil on paper, 14 × 20 3/4 in, 1822. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Director’s Discretionary Fund, 57.261.

Some seventy Indigenous objects from Lewis and Clark’s expedition were deposited in Peale’s museum within three years of their trek.24 Their inclusion highlights how such museums presented Indigenous culture as part of white Americans’ inheritance and identity. Painted in the early 1820s, at the same time Clark’s St. Louis “Indian museum” was gaining

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fame, the image suggests how collectors might arrange objects to educate and entertain visitors. The spotlight Clark’s councils and collection focused on Native peoples helped to make St. Louis a destination for white American and European travelers, scientists, and artists.25 Clark created a space with very different meanings and experiences for the Native and white visitors who frequented it.26 For Native peoples, it was a council chamber where they addressed a range of difficult issues from white invasions of their territories and thorny commercial relations to judicial matters and treaties. They dealt with Clark, the representative of an intrusive, aggressive, and powerful government. Some had known Clark for years, while others met him for the first time in St. Louis. Interpreters translated their speeches. How Native peoples felt when they saw objects on display that they or their people had given or recognized individuals in portraits, we do not know. Might the walls covered with Indigenous arts and crafts provided a welcome familiarity, or might the collection of objects from disparate peoples, both friend and foe, have added to a sense of unease? Some Native visitors may have been involved in the selection and presentation of the objects given to Lewis and Clark to convey friendship; chiefs of various nations, for example, made presents of feathers cut from the crown of “War Caps” as part of diplomacy.27 There were also objects that Lewis and Clark obtained such as garments and hats. Journals from the expedition suggest Lewis and Clark did not seek out particular objects but that Native peoples offered items they considered appropriate as presents or for trade, such as calumet pipes, used in intertribal and cross-­cultural diplomacy, and robes.28 Clark’s possession of these objects was in effect a reminder of US possession of Native territories. A physical archive, Clark’s “Indian Museum” was a place where Indigenous goods and peoples were on display as subjects of US expansion. Clark’s council chamber was famous locally and abroad. In 1818, former Virginian Henry Vest Bingham observed in his diary that “General Clarke keeps a Council Chamber for the Indians In which they Generally meet to make Treaties or Sign them,” full of curiosities, “many of them well worth seeing.”29 The term “curiosities” meant items that were rare, unique, or unusual in their point of origin, craftsmanship, or materials.30 The editor of the 1821 St. Louis Directory praised Clark’s as the “most complete Museum of Indian curiosities to be met

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with any where in the United States.”31 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the noted American ethnologist, geologist, and geographer, saw it in 1818 and described “numerous splendid Indian dresses, warlike instruments, skins of remarkable animals, minerals, fossil-­bones, and other rare and interesting specimens.”32 In 1823, an interest in Indigenous America drew Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg, to St. Louis. He admired the “weapons, ornaments, and garments which Mr. Clarke has collected from a large number of nations on his journeys. This collection is very complete.”33 Initially doubtful about the museum, having seen too many American collections containing little more than a stuffed crocodile or an old organ, Frenchman Eugène Ney was pleasantly surprised: “General Clark’s collection is very valuable; it contains all kinds of the rarest furs, costumes of savages, weapons, portraits of Indian chiefs, minerals, fossils, etc. The general collected most of it himself on his travels; the rest were given to him as a present by the various Indian tribes, all of whom have great reverence for him and call him their father.”34 Ney’s published account lumped together natural objects in the same category with Indigenous peoples’ cultural products, enabled foreign readers to learn of St. Louis’s Indigenous attractions, and perpetuated the idea of a paternalistic relationship between Clark and Native peoples. Clark’s collection and the descriptions of it suggest both appropriation and consumption. Clark assembled objects he had acquired for display, and white American and European tourists visited his “Indian Museum” to see the evidence of peoples and cultures distinct from and distant from their own, including clothing, tools, and tobacco pipes from “different tribes.”35 As they gazed at the objects, sometimes marveling at them, white visitors interpreted and categorized what they saw. Some objects directly documented the history of the Native world they intended to possess: “medals which the Indian chiefs [had] received at different periods from the Spanish, English and American governments, and the portraits of various chiefs, who have been at St. Louis to conclude treaties with the governor.”36 An Irish tourist, thrilled with his visit, described “Indian costumes and implements of war, with some minerals and fossils, a portion of which he collected while on the expedition to the Rocky mountains with Lewis.”37 Clark’s “Indian Museum” and the mounds on its northern edge fed St. Louis’s reputation as a place for white tourists to encounter Indigenous

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peoples’ present and past. In his council chamber, white visitors might come face to face with tribal delegations. Curious whites had a last-­ chance-­to-­see mentality, seeking in Clark’s chamber or distant territories a glimpse of peoples whom they saw as the vanishing representatives of a unique and Native America. White Americans and Europeans who came to see the earthworks viewed them in the same light. Thus, by the 1820s, for travelers to the Far West, stopping in St. Louis to see Clark’s hall of artifacts, possibly Native delegations, and the mounds was both mandatory and revelatory. Such were the reputations of the mounds and the museum that the Marquis de Lafayette, Frenchman and American Revolutionary War hero, visited both during his brief stop in St. Louis in 1825.38 His secretary recalled that “the inhabitants of St. Louis knew that General Lafayette could only remain a few hours with them, and they took advantage of the short time he had to dispose of to show him every thing which their city and its environs contained worthy of notice.”39 Not wasting a moment, Lafayette “rode out in a carriage to visit on the banks of the river those remains of ancient Indian monuments which some travellers call tombs.”40 Though Lafayette’s companion, Auguste Levasseur, was not particularly impressed by those at St. Louis—­“nothing but mounds covered with green turf ”—­he did acknowledge that mounds were “all over the states of Missouri, Indiana, and upon the borders of Ohio,” an indication “that this world which we call new, was the seat of civilization, perhaps long anterior to the continent of Europe.”41 Though Levasseur wished to see the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, “the time of the general was so calculated that we were obliged to forego the pleasure”; they were in St. Louis for less than a day.42 Instead, after seeing the mounds, they returned to town to see Clark’s “collection of Indian curiosities.” 43 Then, though they “could have remained a considerable longer time in General Clark’s museum, listening to the interesting accounts which he was pleased to give us relative to his great journeys,” they had to leave for dinner.44 Contemporary Native peoples and older Indigenous histories were intertwined in visitors’ itineraries and imaginations. After leaving Clark’s museum, Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-­Weimar-­Eisenach, went to see Auguste Chouteau, who shared with the visitor his theories about the mound builders. “He was of opinion,” recalled the duke, “that the people

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from whom the Indian antiquities have come down to us, either by a pestilential disease, or by an all-­destroying war, must have been blotted from the earth.” When the duke described a Roman mound he had seen opened, Chouteau reportedly “expressed his astonishment at the great similarity between these mounds, and those of the Indian grave-­hills.”45 The duke went to see the local mounds for himself. “In a northern direction from the city, are seven artificial hillocks, in two rows, which form a parallelogram,” he wrote. “They belong to the much talked of Indian mounds and fortifications, of which numbers are found on the shores of the Ohio and Mississippi, and which are dispersed over these regions from Lake Erie to New Mexico.” Echoing whites’ assertions that there were neither “documents nor traditions concerning the erection of these works, or of the tribe of people who erected them,” Bernhard added that those near St. Louis had “not yet been examined.”46 The duke’s comments reveal his interest in the history of the mounds and familiarity with current theories about their creation. As did other well-­ read aristocratic travelers, he kept up on the latest scientific and natural history treatises, positioning himself as contributing to new knowledge with his writings, even as he did so from the perspective of an imperial background focused on the possession of colonized peoples and places.47 White artists fascinated by Native peoples came to St. Louis as well. Clark’s museum collection and desire to share it proved a boon to their artistic ambitions, and Clark encouraged artists, most notably George Catlin, to study it. After Catlin first encountered Native peoples in Philadelphia in 1824, where he saw a visiting tribal delegation, he became enthralled with recording all he could about them; he came to St. Louis in 1830 on his way to spending six years in the continent’s interior.48 While in St. Louis, he no doubt studied Clark’s map of the west carefully; it was the best available until the 1840s.49 He also spent “hours examining the objects in [Clark’s] museum.”50 As he studied Clark’s collection and painted portraits of Indigenous people, Catlin did so with a sense of mission: he wanted to “rescue” Native American culture. “They are ‘doomed’ and must perish,” he wrote, in terms that resonate with descriptions of “Mound Builders.”51 After arriving in St. Louis, Catlin declared that nothing would keep him from visiting the peoples of “Indian country” and “becoming their

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historian.”52 Catlin’s beliefs echoed the political rhetoric of removal and shaped the works of art and literature that he and others created. Painters portrayed Indigenous peoples as romantic figures “doomed to extinction,” while novelists presented them as “fast fading from existence.” Between 1824 and 1834 alone, forty novels featuring Indigenous characters as “Vanishing Americans” were published.53 In this era, many artists embraced the idea of the “Noble Savage.” While there were earlier versions of the concept, the modern notion of the “Noble Savage” was a product of Western travel literature from the 1600s through the 1800s. Its proponents ascribed an innate moral sense to Native peoples, casting them as wild outsiders, idealized figures free from civilization’s corrupting influences. Such a view featured notably in Catlin’s work. Other local artists did portraits of Native peoples as well, including Swiss painter Peter Rindisbacher. Immigrating at age fifteen with his family to Canada, where they suffered tremendous hardship, Rindisbacher settled in St. Louis at twenty-­three and established a studio. Soon after he arrived, the St. Louis Beacon carried a letter to the editor praising Rindisbacher’s talents and encouraging St. Louisans to seek him out: “Those who have not yet examined his fine paintings of Indian dances, will be well paid for their trouble by calling at his rooms.”54 One visitor described Rindisbacher as “a highly original artist,” who created “most spirited sketches” of Indigenous people.55 Before his death at twenty-­ eight, in 1834, Rindisbacher completed many paintings devoted to Indigenous peoples and was known for “his graphic sketches of Indian Life.”56 Two of his works were reproduced posthumously as frontispieces in the three-­volume History of the Indian Tribes of North America collection, published between 1836 and 1844.57 The writings and portraits of white artists and tourists demonstrate an interest in St. Louis fueled by the opportunities the city presented for firsthand encounters with Indigenous peoples. Many white visitors took advantage of Clark’s invitations to see members of contemporary tribes. The council chamber and streets of St. Louis were places where whites hoped to observe, meet, perhaps converse with, describe, and maybe sketch Native peoples. And while Clark could not control the words, thoughts, or actions of the Indigenous peoples in St. Louis, he put himself in the position of director, dictating both the non-­native

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audience and the set in his council chamber. Whites were the spectators for the display, and Clark showed off the room’s contents and invited white visitors to watch as he met with Indigenous delegations.58 Sitting in on Clark’s meetings with tribal delegations delighted white visitors. One Irish tourist witnessed a meeting between an Ioway delegation and Clark. Unlike some visitors, this traveler recorded in detail the speeches and gestures of the Ioway men who had gathered in the aftermath of a fatal encounter. Seven Ioway men had been accused of attacking and killing four white settlers, and their chief decided to come to St. Louis “to see [his] red-­headed father, to hold a talk with him.” The seven accused men turned themselves in, pending the investigation. More than twenty Ioways, including the accused, gathered “in the Museum, which is also the office of Indian affairs.” The principal chief, Moanahonga, also known as “Big-neck,” addressed the audience: “If I had done that of which my white brother accuses me, I would not stand here now. The words of my red-­headed father (General Clarke) have passed through both my ears, and I have remembered them. I am accused, and I am not guilty.” The Irishman noted that the interpreter was translating directly and that the pronoun “I” meant the “party” of Ioways, or “the tribe.” “Big-­neck” blamed the Sauks, two of whom were also present, for lying about the Ioways’ actions and provoking a white attack on his people. He declared that when the whites arrived, the Ioways had greeted them, coming “from our huts unarmed—­even without our blankets.” Without warning, the white men had opened fire, killing several members of the tribe: three young men, a woman, and her baby. Hearing the shots, other Ioways rushed to the scene and opened fire in defense, killing four of the whites. Another Ioway leader, an old chief referred to as “Pumpkin,” corroborated the testimony, adding that one of the young men killed was his only son. After hearing the testimony, the judges asked the Ioways “what they thought should be done in the matter.” Conferring briefly, the Ioways said “that all they required was, that their white brother should be brought down also, and confronted with them. The investigators concluded the Ioways were innocent, and the prisoners were set at liberty on their parole.”59 Like many other tourists, the Irish writer who described the meeting saw Native peoples as “noble savages” whose days were numbered. In

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his 1832 book about his travels, Simon Ansley Ferrall described their “gravity,” “solemnity,” and “unquailing spirit.” In his view, which clearly echoed contemporary expressions of the myth of the vanishing Native, “The Indians, when uncontaminated by the vices of the whites, are really a fine people; and it is melancholy to reflect that in a few centuries the red-­man will be known only by name, for his total extinction seems almost inevitable.”60 The assumption that Native peoples were destined to disappear heightened the desire of tourists to see Indigenous peoples as soon as possible. European travelers’ accounts routinely referred both to “Noble Savages” and their imminent demise.61 The age was one in which white artists, novelists, policy-­makers, tourists, officials, and many other white Americans described Indigenous peoples as disappearing. In this myth of vanishing, Indigenous peoples were described as unable either to resist the dominant society’s corrupting influences or to assimilate quickly enough to its economic and cultural demands to adapt successfully. The notion that Indigenous peoples were doomed to extinction was treated as a fact, an inevitability that made seeing them—­for those whites who wanted to do so—­a matter of some urgency, as it was for Catlin or the European aristocrats who hurried to St. Louis in the 1830s. Even the European travelers who viewed Indigenous peoples sympathetically and criticized their mistreatment usually saw the advance of modern civilization as inexorable and a sign of progress.62 Literature, art, and government policies all promulgated the myth that Indigenous peoples were vanishing. Notions of a “vanishing Indian” provided a convenient rationale for removal policies. On the federal level, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, authorized moving southern tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river, thereby opening their ancestral homelands to white settlers. Jackson’s views on removal, mounds, and the place of Indigenous peoples in the nation come through clearly in his 1830 Second Annual Message to Congress. He characterized the country as barely inhabited by “a few savage hunters” and noted that races faded away. “Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country,” he declared, “and philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it.” Nonetheless, “one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared

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from the earth,” he summarized. Referring to mounds and other historic earthworks, Jackson declared, “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes,” adding that there was nothing “to be regretted” in their passage. Just as earlier peoples had died out, Jackson argued, so too would contemporary ones, just as “the tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern states were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.”63 For decades, St. Louis represented an Indigenous frontier for American and European travelers, the first zone of contact in their journeys west. Paul Wilhelm, the duke of Württemberg, put it plainly in the 1820s: “I can advise every foreign traveler contemplating going to the upper Missouri or the western prairies to supply himself in St. Louis with all necessities for the journey.”64 There were trade goods ideal for exchanging with Native peoples available there, and a traveler could find a horse “better and cheaper” than elsewhere; one could “also easily find a guide who knows the language of several nations.”65 When Clark informed the duke that he was expecting a visit from “the first chief of the Potawatomis” and several prominent warriors, who had made camp adjacent to St. Louis, Wilhelm was thrilled. “Hastening there,” he reported, “I found them busily adorning themselves according to their manner and putting on such attire as they deemed becoming such an important occasion,” in white woolen blankets, buffalo robes, and red or blue cloth.66 Applying vermilion and green paints to their faces and bodies, the men mostly wore their hair long, though some had a tuft “decorated with deer hair dyed red or yellow, or with the tail feathers of the golden eagle.”67 Thus prepared, the Potawatomi men “marched through the streets of the town to the dwelling of the General [Clark], entirely oblivious to the many people who were attracted by their strange procession, crowding near and following them.”68 During their meeting, the Chief, Junaw-­sche-­Wome, or Stream of the Rock, and Clark sat opposite each other, as did four other prominent men; the others stood behind them. Junaw-­sche-­Wome spoke of his people’s needs, their sufferings due to the loss of hunting privileges and game. Clark replied with pledges of friendship and urged peace, before distributing presents

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of a uniform, knives, beads, paints, and blankets. The men all shook hands, including with Wilhelm, and then exited the chamber.69 Wilhelm wanted to see both Indigenous people and the mounds. He described a group of Osages arriving at the same time as the Potawatomi delegation, “In small groups they visited the different parts of the town.”70 He surmised that they were not there on official business; there were no chiefs among them and few “appeared in dress attire.”71 Local merchants treated the visiting Osages well, Wilhelm thought, because they “did not wish to offend” members of a wealthy tribe of traders in hides, furs, and horses.72 The Indigenous visitors occupied Wilhelm’s full attention until they departed. Then, he turned his “attention to the town and its surroundings.” 73 At the “first free moment,” he headed to see mounds, “those peculiar tumuli,” he remembered, a reference that indicates his participation in a nineteenth-­century discourse of archaeological writings. Although an editor of Wilhelm’s memoir suggests he visited the mounds at Cahokia, the duke himself included a footnote to the 1819 survey of the St. Louis mound group conducted by Say, Peale, and Long.74 Outsiders flocked to see these monumental earthworks. A Scottish-­ born farmer, Patrick Shirreff, visited the area for a brother who was considering emigration and spent two days in town. Both days, he “examined some mounds, or tumuli, of a former race of people, some of which are on the north skirts of St Louis, and many more on the opposite side of the river.”75 The distant traveler, “the man of literary taste and poetic fancy, or the devotee of abstruse science,” could not help but be drawn to them. Unlike most St. Louisans, many of the visitors in the 1830s had seen ancient ruins across the Atlantic in person. For such tourists, the age of the mounds imbued them with “an interest which hallows them even as the hoary piles of old Egypt are hallowed, and which feudal Europe, with all her time-­stained battlements, can never boast.”76 This continued linkage of American antiquities to those of Egypt shored up a narrative of a distinctive and impressive national past for those who saw them as compelling as those of Egypt and much more impressive than any in Europe. The mounds in St. Louis constituted a major attraction.77 Having read accounts of mounds in the area, Scotsman James Stuart included St. Louis on his itinerary for a three-­year tour of the US. At his hotel,

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Stuart was struck by his fellow guests, among them more Frenchmen than Englishmen and a group of Mexicans from Santa Fe.78 But he was most interested in the mounds, declaring that their regularity, size, and the quantities of human remains and artifacts they contained “show that the country was at one time inhabited by a far more numerous population than now.”79 Interestingly, the speculation he includes about the labor involved in constructing the mounds is not far off that estimated by modern archaeologists: “Some of the mounds are of a height that could only have been raised by many thousand labourers, employed during a great number of years.”80 In his account of his 1834 journey as far west as St. Louis, A Winter in the Far West, New Yorker Charles Fenno Hoffman celebrated the mounds. “St. Louis . . . can boast one class of objects among its sources of attraction,” he pronounced, “which are alone sufficient to render it one of the most interesting places in the Union. It is a collection of those singular ancient mounds, which, commencing in the western part of the State of New-­York,” and going all the way “to the interior of Mexico, [which] have so entirely set at naught the ingenuity of the antiquary.”81 Those at St. Louis were the largest he had seen. Located in “the north suburb” of the city, they occupied “a commanding position on the Mississippi and cover ground enough for a large body of men to encamp upon.”82 Visitors like Wilhelm and Hoffman welcomed the opportunity for Indigenous meetings at Clark’s museum and council chamber. Hoffman sat in while Clark held talks with a visiting Kickapoo delegation in 1834.83 He was dining with Clark when a clerk interrupted, summoning the general to his “‘council-­chamber.’” A group of Kickapoos sat on a bench along a wall—­their appearance, Hoffman thought, a striking contrast to the “fashionable attire of the ladies who glided into the council-­room as we moved thither from the dinner table.” An old French interpreter facilitated the meeting, the contents of which Hoffman did not bother to record. He was less interested in the Native peoples’ words and experiences than in the spectacle of their appearance and the objects on display. Tailing along, Hoffman marveled at the contents of the room: “The walls of the apartment were completely coated with Indian arms and dresses, and the mantelpiece loaded with various objects of curiosity connected with the aborigines,” among them a three-­headed vase.84 The

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ceramic pot may well have been a funerary object taken from a mound. Clark’s display of such an item underlines how white Americans at the time approached Indigenous peoples and cultures: they wanted to own, possess, and exhibit objects associated with the “vanishing race.” Seeing Native peoples was part of the process as well. Recalling his journey through the United States, German prince Maximilian of Wied-­Neuwied wrote gratefully of the access to Native peoples gained through Clark. “General Clarke, to whom I was introduced by the kindness of Duke Bernhard of Saxe Weimar,” he explained, “had very obligingly informed me of the meetings or councils which he held with the Indians, and we had the pleasure of being able thoroughly to observe and study these remarkable people.”85 To help document his scientific expedition, Maximilian enlisted Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who painted many portraits of Native peoples.86 In St. Louis, where the two spent seventeen days, Bodmer saw some portraits Catlin had painted.87 The prince also saw the artwork of Rindisbacher and purchased four watercolors from him, adding mementoes to the memories he was collecting.88 In recounting the journey, the prince explained that “All strangers who wish to visit the interior of the western territory are obliged to have a passport” from Clark. Far from objecting to the requirement, Maximilian relished the 1832 stop: “St. Louis was the more interesting to us, at this moment, because we had, here, the first opportunity of becoming acquainted with the North American Indians in all their originality.”89 The prince’s hopes were realized with the arrival of a group of Sauk and Fox men, women, and children.90 The Sauk and Fox leaders had come to St. Louis to plead for Black Hawk. Along with other Indigenous men, the Sauk leader was imprisoned in Jefferson Barracks, just to the south of St. Louis, after the Black Hawk War of 1832. The war was an outcome of the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis, uniformly viewed as a duplicitous maneuver and epic swindle. The treaty had been negotiated by William Henry Harrison, then territorial governor of Indiana, and was signed by only five Indigenous men, rather than, as was customary, full tribal leadership. It ceded fifteen million acres of Sauk and Fox land in what is today Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri to the United States for a little over $2000 in goods and an annuity of $1000 in goods in perpetuity.91 Harrison inserted language

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that suggested the tribes would maintain their right to live on the land: “As long as the lands which are now ceded to the United States remain their property, the Indians belonging to the said tribes, shall enjoy the priviledge [sic] of living and hunting on them.”92 The phrasing obscured the fact the US officials intended to sell the land to white settlers and evict the Native inhabitants. The treaty left a bitter legacy and was never considered valid by Indigenous leaders. In 1832, after a group of Sauks, Foxes, and Kickapoos crossed the Mississippi River from Ioway Territory into Illinois, planning to resettle, war erupted.93 White militiamen attacked a Native delegation, an Indigenous counterattack followed, and a series of skirmishes took place over the summer, resulting in the defeat of Native forces and imprisonment of Black Hawk in St. Louis. The delegation seeking Black Hawk’s release stayed closed to the river, where locals gathered to look at them. At their head was the Sauk leader Keokuk, who, along with thirty to forty men and an unspecified number of women and children, were assigned quarters “in a large magazine near the harbor.” Maximilian went to see their encampment and described how the Sauks and Foxes found themselves drawing a “crowd of curious spectators.”94 Some sought to buy Native peoples’ possessions, and many Sauks and Foxes in turn sold personal items. Other white onlookers wanted to ask them questions or sketch their portraits. Confronted by whites who gazed at them, treating them like objects of curiosity, the Sauks and Foxes soon grew weary of the throng. The prince wrote that “at last they were so annoyed by the importunity of the motley crowd that we could have no more intercourse with them.”95 The Sauks and Foxes turned away from the spectators who stared at and harassed them. One can imagine some of the dynamics of this scene: the Native delegation had traveled to St. Louis in hopes of achieving a delicate diplomatic goal. Once there, they found themselves surrounded by white St. Louisans gazing at them, trying to buy their possessions from them, and invading their space. Even as Maximilian did not consider himself one of the importuning crowd, he nonetheless acted as a spectator, recording the dress and appearance of the Sauks and Foxes in detail. He described them as “enveloped in red, white, or green blankets,” the men with shaved heads except for a braid and the women with hair parted in the middle. Both sexes, he wrote, had

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adorned their faces with vermilion.96 Keokuk wore a calico shirt, a large medal from the President of the United States, a “figured handkerchief round his head,” and a green blanket. Brass rings around his neck and wrists, as well as a feathered calumet he carried in one hand, completed an appearance Maximilian found striking.97 Catlin painted a full-­body portrait of “Kee-­o-­kúk, The Watchful Fox, Chief of the Tribe,” in 1835; the daguerreotype created by Thomas Easterly during the chief ’s 1847 visit to St. Louis captures a close-­up of his face.

Fig. 6.4: Keokuk, engraved: “Ke-­o-­kuk or the Watchful Fox,” by Thomas M. Easterly, daguerreotype portrait, 1847. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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Clark offered up these Native peoples to the white gaze. He invited Maximilian and others “to a small assembly, which he was to hold in his house with the Indians.”98 As Maximilian recalled, “We strangers sat at the General’s side, and near him stood the interpreter, a French Canadian,” while the members of the Native delegation sat opposite, “in rows along the walls.” Clark introduced his European guests “to the Indians, telling them that we had come far over the ocean to see them.” Before and after the meeting, the delegation’s members passed by Maximilian and the other guests, “each giving us his right hand, and looking stedfastly[sic] in our faces.” In reply to their “wish that their brethren might soon be set at liberty,” because their families at home “were suffering,” Clark said “he would intercede for the prisoners” on the condition that Keokuk and the others would “keep a watchful eye” over Black Hawk “and his associates” when they were “set at liberty.”99 After this meeting, Clark invited Maximilian to accompany him on the Warrior steamboat the following day, as he took the “Indians to the barracks, to grant them an interview with Black Hawk.” Arriving at the boat, they found the Indigenous party already on board. When they reached Jefferson Barracks, the Indigenous men “marched in procession” and then entered a hall, where officials sat “surrounded by the spectators.”100 The language Maximilian used underlines how thoroughly the event was a spectacle, a kind of entertainment which Clark helped to orchestrate. While Black Hawk was in custody, Catlin came to paint his portrait, returning from a western trek to do so, and a translator and amanuensis recorded his autobiography, the Life of Black Hawk.101 “When I painted this chief,” recalled Catlin, “he was dressed in a plain suit of buckskin, with strings of wampum in his ears and on his neck, and held in his hand, his medicine-­bag, which was the skin of a black hawk, from which he had taken his name, and the tail of which made him a fan, which he was almost constantly using.”102 The same day, Catlin worked on another portrait of Black Hawk and five other prisoners. Though not completed until the 1860s, and much less well known, the group portrait resulted from the Sauk men, particularly Neopope, urging Catlin to include their shackles to document their treatment (Figure 6.6).

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Fig. 6.5: Múk-­a-­tah-­mish-­o-­káh-­kaik, Black Hawk, Prominent Sac Chief, by George Catlin, oil on canvas, 1832. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr., 1985.66.2.

According to an observer, when the artist was about to begin Neopope’s portrait, the Indigenous man “seized the ball and chain that were fastened to his leg, and raising them on high, exclaimed with a look of scorn, ‘make me so, and show me to the great father.’” Upon the artist’s “refusing to paint him as he wished,” Neopope “kept varying his

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Fig. 6.6: Black Hawk and Five Other Saukie Prisoners, by George Catlin, oil on card mounted on paperboard, 1861/1869. National Gallery of Art, Paul Mellon Collection, 1965.16.95.

countenance with grimaces, to prevent him from catching a likeness.”103 John Hausdoerffer argues persuasively that Catlin’s initial refusal to include the chains and balls may have reflected the artist’s preference to present the men “with timeless dignity” or as “memorialized icons of nature,” rather than “as active and influential contributors to the American dialogue on how best to expand its republic.”104 In other words, documenting their status as prisoners through their chains would highlight their ongoing political struggle against the US government and its people. The Native men’s insistence that their captors and portrayers record their treatment accurately speaks volumes about their resistance.

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Indigenous people in St. Louis consistently drew public comment in this era, with whites typically describing their appearance—­again the emphasis is on the insistence of a white gaze on treating Indigenous people as a spectacle—­rather than acknowledging or discussing in detail the issues that brought them to town to negotiate or landed them in military prisons. Describing a deputation of Sauk men, Maximilian noted that they had descended the river “in long double canoes.”105 When Maximilian and his party left town, “numbers of the inhabitants assembled on the shore, among them the Saukies and some half-­civilized Kikapoo Indians. Mr. Bodmer made some interesting sketches of the former.”106

Fig. 6.7: Saukie and Fox Indians on the Beach Near St. Louis, vignette 10, hand-tinted plate, drawn by Karl Bodmer, engraved by Charles Vogel, printed by Bougeard, published by Ackerman and Co., London. From Travels in the Interior of North America, by Prince Maximillian of Wied, 1839. The State Historical Society of Missouri Art Collection.

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The image of a group of Indigenous people suggests a gathering at a relatively specific location, along the shore, where crowds watched steamboats arrive and depart, with the Indigenous men acting as spectators themselves, even as the artist gazes upon them. A lushly illustrated collection of Bodmer’s North American prints contains numerous versions of the image; one figure, the third man from the left, has been specifically identified as Massika, a member of the Sauk tribe.107 Similarly, when Henry Miller, a visitor, saw a group, he recorded the encounter carefully: “On Monday .  .  . at Noon I saw 14 Indians—­Chiefs and Braves very highly painted and ornamented, walking down the street in regular order.” Miller included no details as to the men’s tribal affiliation, declaring only that “they were stout men and very noble looking fellows.”108 In short, Indigenous peoples were characterized according to white stereotypes and myths of “Noble Savages,” rather than as members of specific tribes with unique histories and pressing concerns. During the 1820s and 1830s, government dealings with Indigenous peoples had become increasingly restrictive and exclusionary. In early 1821, a few months before Missouri was admitted into the Union as a state, the Missouri General Assembly requested that the federal government eliminate all Indian land claims, stop Indigenous immigration from east of the Mississippi, and remove eastern tribes that had earlier relocated to Missouri territory. Over the course of the next decade, the government enacted removal treaties with the Sacs, Foxes, Kansas, Delawares, Osages, and Kickapoos. The last, in 1832, eliminated all recognized Indigenous claims in Missouri.109 Removal policies and treaties meant that there were no tribes who officially called Missouri home, though Native peoples continued to reside—­and still do—­in the city and state. As the 1830s closed, St. Louis’s time as a meeting place for visiting Native delegations was fading. Though the mounds that stood along the river continued to attract tourists and attention, their days were numbered.

Chapter seven

Repurposing the Mounds for Urban Development Hoping to entice patrons, the proprietor advertised the beautiful vista from his new restaurant, located fifty feet above street level. Built of walnut on the summit of a mound, the two-­story pavilion was eighty feet long and offered “a magnificent view” of the Mississippi River and the city. It would certainly delight those who relished nature and appeal to those who found “something romantic in the idea of partaking of a feast on the top of the celebrated ‘Big Mound’ of St. Louis.” While having a meal, diners might reflect on the fate of those who built the mound and ponder their own connections to the past and the place. Americans remade St. Louis after they assumed control of the territory. The French streets that ran along the river—­Rue Royale, Rue de l’Eglise, and Rue des Granges—­became First, Second, and Third Streets, a renaming that reflects city leaders shedding “the anachronistic symbols” of former social and religious systems.1 In their place, St. Louisans embraced “limitless growth,” as real estate speculators subdivided plots of land in pursuit of personal profit and residents spread out from the center in new suburbs.2 New streets were unpaved and irregular, so much so that not long after the city was incorporated in 1822, Mayor William Carr appointed a commission to document exactly where streets lay and structures stood. In their 1823 report, the surveyors recorded many buildings encroaching on roadways, declaring it altogether “impracticable at the present time to make the city conform to the [map] made of the same.”3 Development was haphazard. As St. Louis inched northward along the river, the city gradually enveloped the mounds. The near north side 149

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where the mounds stood became part of St. Louis, with an ordinance extending the city, and Third Street, north of Biddle, became Broadway.4 With no one championing the cause of safeguarding the earthworks at the outset of white occupation and settlement, as happened elsewhere, the fate of the mounds in St. Louis lay largely in the hands of private individuals. From the 1810s through the 1840s, that fact meant that the mounds became the targets of unregulated development for private residences and commercial establishments. The early developers of the 1810s, who built on and among the mounds when they were notable landmarks to the north of St. Louis, were outnumbered over time by those who wanted the mounds gone. When city officials made decisions regarding the mounds, they prioritized urban infrastructure over historic architecture, paving the way for mounds to be razed. Such repurposing and destruction did not go without comment. St. Louisans did not follow the lead of Marietta, Ohio, where, in 1791, developers celebrated earthworks as local antiquities and incorporated them into town planning. They imagined a public square where the earthworks stood and planned to ornament it with trees, grass, and fences. In doing so, they presented a vision of Marietta that highlighted past architecture on the site as proof of civilization in the region. By building their town where the historic architecture of an older civilization stood, white settlers would use redevelopment, they believed, to restore civilization to the area. The presence of earthworks constituted a stamp of approval on the site, a promise of a future great settlement.5 Contemporary Native peoples, the proponents of such beliefs assumed and insisted, were unrelated to and less civilized than the mounds’ creators and thus less entitled to the site. White settlers saw themselves as reviving civilization in the region.6 The connection between racist ideas and practices of dispossession is clear: the title of Native peoples to the land did not matter if white occupation furthered development according to white definitions and US policy goals of expansion.7 This national story had different permutations in St. Louis, where developers in the early-­to-­mid nineteenth century did not proclaim the earthworks as part of a civilized past that heralded the city’s glorious future. Such local claims to the mound builders’ legacy lay in the future. To the extent that white St. Louisans in the mid-­1800s wanted to preserve the

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earthworks, it was for civic purposes defined in pragmatic terms: green space in a crowded city. As the city’s borders expanded—­the 1841 boundary expansion alone increased the size of the city sevenfold—­the mounds were surrounded.8 Mound Street, named for the Big Mound, first appeared in Robert M. Moore’s Addition of 1840.9 Throughout the city, the physical transformation of the urban landscape was dramatic and rapid; flat terrain facilitated urban development, with the leveling of mounds on the north side and the filling of sinkholes on the south.10 Real estate sales and street grading signaled the beginning of the end for the earthworks. The spectacular monuments of the Native past were demolished and colonial-­era buildings leveled for new streets, warehouses, hotels, and other large structures. Twin disasters of fire and cholera in 1849 reshaped the urban environment further, with a surge of new construction, rapidly-­filling cemeteries, and the draining of Chouteau’s Pond in their wake. In St. Louis’s rapid physical and economic expansion, white visitors and residents found cause for both celebration and concern. Boosters hailed the booming city’s status as an up-­and-­coming commercial hub in the center of the continent. Some even advocated for the relocation of the nation’s capital from Washington, DC to St. Louis. But not all white commentators heralded the unbridled growth. Some expressed dismay, lamenting the destruction of the monumental earthworks and the loss of open space. European and white American travel writers in particular noted the disregard for historic sites as evidence of Americans’ lack of interest in real estate as anything other than a source of profit.11 Unlike postrevolutionary France, where the national government owned historic sites, the early US government allowed them to remain in private hands. In St. Louis the lack of government protection for historic sites meant that white Americans could fence, build upon, and demolish them at will.12 Though white critics were few, they made impassioned pleas for the preservation of both the city’s distant and recent past. They invoked the importance of history, the needs of future generations, and the civic good that would come from public spaces and buildings that linked them to the past. But those in St. Louis who embraced unrestricted private interest carried the day, and the voices calling for the protection of historic architecture went unheeded. The intentional preservation of

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earthworks that distinguished Ohio cities like Marietta and Circleville for a time, before local white residents began to demand and repurpose them for urban development, did not have even a foothold in St. Louis.13 Although there were a few homes built on top of mounds in the 1810s and 1820s, the first major civic repurposing for infrastructure projects took place in the early 1830s. With St. Louis counting nearly fourteen thousand residents in 1830, city officials sought a more dependable source to replace the cisterns and springs that had primarily furnished water since 1764 and contracted, in 1829, for building waterworks to secure a supply of “clarified water.” A river intake was planned for the foot of Smith Street, now Ashley Street, where the massive Union Electric station stands. Included were provisions for a fountain to be located on the grounds of General William Ashley, whose home topped another mound; a reservoir needed to be built on a higher elevation than the surrounding city. Ashley sold 170 feet by 160 feet of land on the mound at the corner of Ashley and Collins streets to the city for the reservoir site.14 In 1831, the city’s Board of Aldermen adopted a resolution outlining the construction of waterworks and the oversight of expenditures.15 A line item listed “excavating reservoir on mound, and removing earth, 2022 cubic yards,” at a cost of $404.40.16 No one involved recorded how the mound had been constructed nor any details about its destruction. Elsewhere, 1831 witnessed the construction of another mound reservoir, this one the largest sandstone mound on record, Flint Ridge mound in Licking County, Ohio. After white settlers decided to build a reservoir, they removed stones from the huge mound cemetery, hauling fifteen thousand wagonloads full to build a dam.17 (Recently, Native peoples in Ohio have rescued some of the stones their ancestors honed to create the North American Indian Memorial Park.)18 News of St. Louis’s new water system, created through the destruction of a mound, was celebrated by white Americans as a sign of progress. In early 1832, newcomer Andrew Richey wrote that there was “rapid progress in improving the City,” including “erecting vast edifices, Splendid Churches, & Cathedrals,” as well as a basin “which is to supply the water works on a very high mound” and at its foot a road.19 In 1832, missionary and writer Timothy Flint drew attention to the reservoir,

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the St. Louis Marine Rail-­way Company, and a hospital as new projects incorporated by legislators. Among these, the “St. Louis Water Works” struck him as especially noteworthy, with the water “to be raised by steam from the Mississippi and distributed over the city.”20 Charles Fenno Hoffman, a writer from New York, was similarly impressed when he visited St. Louis in 1834: “The summit of one of these [mounds] is occupied by a public reservoir, for furnishing the town with water; the supply is forced up to the tank by a steam-­engine on the banks of the river, and subsequently distributed by pipes throughout the city.”21 Locally, in the Missouri Gazetteer for 1837, Alphonso Wetmore singled out the waterworks for effusive praise.22 Expressing a distinctly utilitarian view of the mounds, Wetmore declared, “The greatest public work, and one of which the city may be justly proud, is that by which a large volume of water is diverted from the channel of the Mississippi, and forced to the summit of one of those mounds that the red men left for the speculation of the curious.”23 Land use was an economic endeavor, its value driven by practical concerns.24 Hailing the civic improvements signaled by the water works, numerous writers also expressed explicit interest in the mounds that supported the reservoir and other nearby structures. Author Washington Irving recorded seeing the mounds during a brief stay in 1832. On his way back to St. Louis from a visit to William Clark at his farm several miles outside of town, Irving wrote that he happened to “—­pass by a circle of Indian mounds—­on one of them Gen[era]l Ashley has built his house so as to have the summit of it as a terrace in the rear.”25 A gazetteer noted that “the site of St. Louis evidently attracted the attention of a people long before white men ever saw it. The mounds that General Ashley’s residence is based on, and by which it is surrounded, were the works of defence that afforded security to a village of ancient people, who once inhabited the spot where St. Louis now stands.”26 Though his assumptions regarding the mound’s original use were entirely speculative, his comments emphasize how he understood the mound as useful to both former and contemporary inhabitants. In contrast, Hoffman saw the mounds as threatened. “This mound, with the exception of one of two enclosed within the grounds of General Ashley,” he noted, “is the only [one] fenced from the destruction that always sooner or later overtakes

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such non-­productive property, when in the suburbs of a growing city.”27 Characterizing the earthworks as “non-­productive property,” Hoffman reduced their meaning to a solely economic one. Continued population growth and increasing demands for water led to a failed attempt to develop the Big Mound as another water station. In 1837, city officials moved to acquire it “for the purpose of building a reservoir thereon.” They used a proposal from “Chas. Collins and company” and a survey that found the mound’s distance to the river to be nine hundred feet and just under two thousand feet from the current reservoir. 28 The Daily Commercial Bulletin published proceedings of the Board of Aldermen, the city’s governing body, and chronicled that group’s numerous discussions and committee reports on the feasibility of purchasing the Big Mound and transforming it into a new reservoir.29 Though the Missouri Argus carried reports of the plan going forward, with seven aldermen voting in favor of it and three opposed, the scheme never came to fruition.30 The failure likely rested on a determination that the plan was either unworkable or unpromising, rather than any sense that the Big Mound itself merited preservation. Throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s, the waterworks aside, many visitors found the modern built environment of St. Louis unimpressive. British tourist Charles Augustus Murray described the streets as “narrow, ill-­paved, and ill-­lighted.”31 He saw “but few buildings claiming the traveler’s attention, either by their magnitude or beauty.”32 After his stay, Murray declared St. Louis “the worst town of its size in the world for lodging accommodations.”33 In 1833, a Scottish visitor, Patrick Shirreff, praised the abundance of goods in the market and noted sixteen steamboats on the river but declared the city itself unimposing. “There is a row of stores fronting the river, built of stone, and the town consists chiefly of two streets of brick-­houses, running parallel to the river,” he wrote, “the outskirts being mean wooden houses.”34 If most recent building projects failed to elicit admiring commentary, that was not the case with the monumental structures that had stood for hundreds of years. White tourists’ critical views of contemporary St. Louis architecture contrasted with their positive depictions of the imperiled monumental earthworks. Journalist Edmund Flagg, who came to St. Louis in 1836, wrote about seeing “those singular ancient mounds for which St. Louis is so celebrated.”35 A lawyer-­turned-­editor for The St. Louis

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Daily Commercial Bulletin, Flagg published descriptions of places in Missouri and Illinois that if not altogether original nonetheless helped popularize information about the region.36 He called the position of the mounds “a commanding one, . . . looking proudly down upon the Mississippi.”37 The “first collection originally consisted of ten tumuli, arranged as three sides of a square area of about four acres, and the open flank to the west was guarded by five other small circular earth-­heaps, isolated, and forming the segment of a circle around the opening.”38 By the time Flagg visited the mounds, the plaza group had been largely obscured, and he identified urban development as the cause. The site was “almost completely destroyed by the grading of streets and the erection of edifices, and the eastern border may alone be traced.” To the north of that first group, he described another collection of mounds, including Falling Garden. Its destruction was imminent. Flagg noted that while the mound was large enough to accommodate a house on each of its levels, it would “never be appropriated” for that purpose, “as one of the principal streets of the city is destined to pass directly through the spot, the grading for which is already commenced.”39 A land record demonstrates how the mounds were built upon and surrounded as the city grew in the early 1800s (See Figure 7.1). The plaza arrangement is clear, as is the impressive size of some of the mounds. Biddle’s house stands atop a mound eight or ten feet high, in between two smaller mounds. A large mound stands to the east, “100 by 130 feet on its flat top and about 15 feet in height.” Surveyors noted the locations but not the sizes of several other mounds as well. Some mounds had new structures on their summits. “A classic edifice of brick” occupied the “principal” one, and another held the residence of General Ashley. According to Flagg, the excavation of the mound on which Ashley’s home stood had yielded “large quantities of human remains, pottery, half-­burned wood, . . . furnishing conclusive evidence . . . of the artificial origin of these earth heaps.”40 Admiring their visual appeal, Flagg described them as “beautiful spots, imbowered in forest-­trees.”41 The debates and theories about “Moundbuilders” filtered into the comments of white tourists who sought out St. Louis’s mounds in the 1830s and 1840s, even as they were increasingly imperiled. In 1838, visitor Henry B. Miller strolled “about one mile above the city” to climb the Big Mound, reporting a good view to the south of “the greater part of the

Fig. 7.1: Detail, “B. Accompanying the Surveyor General’s Report of the 28th February 1852 to the Commr. of the Genl. Ld. Office,” Y9903892 Indian Mounds and Grande Prairie Field of St. Louis, St. Louis Plat Map Book A, page 23b. Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geology and Land Survey, Rolla, Missouri.

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City and the smaller Mounds” from its summit.42 From his perspective, “any person visiting this city and lovers of curiosity will find themselves well repaid by visiting those mounds, where they may spend some time with a pleasant prospect and exchange some opinions . . . about their origin and design.”43 Two years later, when New York writer Eliza Steele stopped to see them while traveling for her health, the mounds were no longer “above the city” but in the suburbs. She and her companions “strolled out to the suburbs of the town to see the Indian mounds, several of which are grouped together near the river bank, in the environs of the city.” The thermometer stood at ninety-­six. In her diary of her six-­ week, four-­thousand-­mile journey, she described the mound on General Ashley’s estate as “an ornament as rare as it is beautiful.” She sat down “upon one, about twenty feet high, a truncated cone, covered with soft grass.” While she and her companions sat in silence, they “mused upon the fate and fortunes of these ancient ‘mound builders.’”44 For a time, the Big Mound still lay beyond and above the city, relatively isolated from the other mounds that were being engulfed. Not long after his 1839 arrival in St. Louis, Swiss artist John Casper Wild produced an image of the Big Mound just at the edge of the city. His 1840 lithograph, with the rays of the setting sun illuminating the growing western metropolis, showed the city nearing the Big Mound (Figures 7.2a and 7.2b). Flagg was particularly struck by the imposing height of the Big Mound and vista, “From the extensive view of the surrounding region and of the Mississippi commanded by the site of this mound, as well as its altitude,” he suggested, “it is supposed to have been intended as a vidette or watch-­tower by its builders.”45 There were “few more delightful views” in St. Louis, he declared, “than that commanded by the summit of the ‘Big Mound.’” The Mississippi’s sweeping waters flowed by below. “As the spectator, standing upon the Mound, turns his eye to the south, a green grove lies before him and the smaller earth-­heaps, over which are beheld the towers and roofs of the city rising in the distance,” wrote Flagg.46 He also repeated reports of an “Indian chief ” who died in St. Louis “not many years ago,” while visiting with a tribal delegation, far from home. Reportedly, he was buried on the summit of a mound: “his remains, agreeable to the custom of his tribe, were deposited on the most commanding spot that could be found,” a contemporary example

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Fig. 7.2a: North East View of St. Louis from the Illinois Shore, by J. C. Wild, lithograph, 16 x 22 in., 1840. New York Historical Society Library, PR.020.FF.10.

of Native peoples’ knowledge and traditions regarding mounds and their purposes.47 Flagg further noted that a cordon of mounds, which he assumed were tombs, stretched away from St. Louis to the northwest for several miles, “along the bluffs parallel with the river,” mostly ten to twelve feet in height. At the farm of Colonel John O’Fallon, two were razed, exposing “immense quantities of bones.”48 Beginning in the 1830s, there were some calls for the preservation of the mounds, both for their own sake and for the current and future benefit of St. Louisans. Claiming the mounds as white Americans’ legacy and land, advocates did not include respect for contemporary Native peoples, their cemeteries, their histories, or their cultural practices among their reasons. Rather, for example, Hoffman lamented the state of urban planning in St. Louis when he visited the city and advocated protecting the mounds as open space. Pointing to a lack of “public squares,” Hoffman thought it “a subject of surprise that . . . individual taste and public spirit do not unite to preserve these beautiful eminences in their exact forms, and connect them by an enclosure.” With the addition of shrubbery and walkways, they would form “a promenade

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Fig. 7.2b: Detail of Big Mound, from North East View of St. Louis from the Illinois Shore, by J. C. Wild. New York Historical Society Library, PR.020.FF.10

that might be the pride of St. Louis.” He hoped that the “prettily cultivated gardens in the environs, and the elegance and costliness of more than one private dwelling in the heart of the town” indicated that St. Louisans lacked “neither taste nor means . . . to suggest and carry into effect such an improvement.”49 Describing the sad state of the mounds in 1836, Flagg predicted that they would not survive for long. “As it is, they are passing rapidly away; man and beast, as well as the elements, are busy with them,” he wrote, “and in a few years they will have quite disappeared.” He believed that their “practical utility .  .  . appears the only circumstance which has attracted attention to them.”50 Proponents of preservation attributed the failure to do so to white St. Louisans’ priorities. Flagg stated, “It is a circumstance which has often

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elicited remark from those who, as tourists, have visited St. Louis, that so little interest should be manifested by its citizens for those mysterious and venerable monuments of another race.” Such inhabitants neither embraced the effort to link contemporary American civilization to that of earlier peoples nor accepted the idea that they were its cultural heirs. Rather, they saw the mounds as private property to be developed for private aims, with their value understood in terms of financial, rather than civic gain.51 Flagg criticized St. Louisans’ indifference to the earthworks, particularly given the lack of outdoor gathering places. “When we consider the complete absence of everything in the character of a public square, . . . one would suppose that individual taste and municipal authority would not have failed to avail themselves of the moral interest attached to these mounds and the beauty of their site,” he declared.52 In sum, he believed that city officials and citizens could, and should, have acted. At very little expense, the mounds could have been “enclosed and ornamented with shrubbery, and walks, and flowers, and thus preserved for coming generations.”53 Some argued that the pace of urban development necessitated safeguarding the mounds, a legacy of the past, from untrammeled economic growth. With poetic imagery, Steele extolled the earthworks as evidence of a vanished people: “Their number may give us an idea of the myriads who once roved over these plains, and we may say, while passing through the regions of the west, we are travelling over a ‘buried world.’”54 These earlier peoples are faceless and unnamed figures, their former existence reduced to “an idea,” a feeling of loss and melancholy reflection.55 Steele hoped that St. Louisans would protect the mounds for the future. “It is to be hoped the citizens of St, Louis are aware of the treasures enclosed within the city and will take measures for their preservation,” she declared, “the place would be capable of much ornament as a public garden.” Perhaps aware of the destruction of earthworks to the east or simply acknowledging local demolition, Steele predicted the effects of westward expansion. “As our country becomes settled these interesting reliques will be destroyed if care be not taken to prevent it,” she predicted. Steele rightly foresaw that the absence of systematic preservation efforts would guarantee the destruction of the monuments.

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Maps and laws testify to the rapidity of urban encroachment on the mounds. In 1836, the official decision to conclude land-­claims inquiries from the colonial era led to a rush of new real estate activity; the sale of the former Common on the south side followed.56 A comparison of two maps, from 1837 and 1842, offers a snapshot of the change. In 1837, Robert E. Lee, at that point a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was part of a team surveying the St. Louis harbor. In this portion of the map his team produced, several “Indian Mounds” are clearly visible, with Ashley’s home on one mound and the reservoir noted atop another, both beyond the plotted city streets (Figure 7.3). That situation changed in 1839, when the Missouri General Assembly passed a law for roadwork directly in the vicinity of the Big Mound. “An act to provide for laying and opening certain State roads” described “A road commencing near the big mound, on the western edge of Broadway, near the big mound at the dividing line” of properties belonging to several citizens.57 A map from a few years later, the 1842 Hutawa city map, shows Ashley’s house on Church street, with the reservoir mound a block north, on Broadway, both surrounded by streets rather than open ground (Figure 7.4). Farther north, Big Mound fills a city block, streets now bordering it. Four years later, the Hutawas prepared another map, this one showing streets and landmarks but not topography.58 New streets necessitated grading. In some cases, that could mean lowering the ground level below the surrounding landscape, as happened initially with the Big Mound. These records reveal how within a very short period—­the decade of the 1840s—­the signs of an older Native past began to disappear from cartographic depictions of the city. Increasingly, it seemed that neither the recent nor the distant past merited preservation. The sense of history disappearing threaded through discussions of imperiled colonial-­ era landmarks. Pointedly, gazetteer Wetmore noted that while the “antique works” of the city’s mounds still stood in 1837, its eighteenth-­century fortifications had “all been removed to make room for the extension of the city.”59 Wetmore asserted that “the antiquities of St. Louis, on which the past and present generations have looked with interest, are the two mansions of the

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Fig. 7.3: Detail from “Map of the Harbor of St. Louis, Mississippi River, Oct. 1837,” by Robert E. Lee, Montgomery C. Meigs, H. Kayser, J. S. Morehead, Maskell C. Ewing, William James Stone, US Army Corps of Engineers. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

elder Chouteaus,” erected at an earlier period. Despite their age—­at that point only several decades—­“these venerable mansions are, however, still permitted to stand, the monuments alike of ancient and modern

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Fig. 7.4: Detail from Plan of the City of St. Louis, Mo. As Incorporated under the Amending Act of the General Assembly of Missouri, by Edward and Julius Hutawa, 1842. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

grandeur.”60 Flagg’s comments about St. Louis were similarly tinged with palpable nostalgia. He portrayed the city as possessed of “a mellowing touch of time, which few American cities can boast,” attributing the patina of age not to the mounds but to the French and Spanish structures of the colonial period. “There is an antiquated, venerable air about its narrow streets and the ungainly edifices of one portion of it; the steep-­ roofed stone cottage of the Frenchman, and the tall stuccoed-­dwelling of the Don, not often beheld,” he wrote. In his view, these survivors of the past made St. Louis “a spot of peculiar interest to one with the slightest spirit of the antiquary, in a country where all else is new.”61 The contrast between an American present and the relatively recent colonial and European past drew attention. Charles Dickens, who spent

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several months traveling in the US in 1842, mentioned St. Louis for the jarring juxtaposition of the old French part of town and new construction. The “quaint and picturesque houses,” some “lop-­sided with age” appeared to be “grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvements.” In listing the “improvements,” Dickens thought it “hardly necessary to say, that these consist of wharfs and warehouses, and new buildings in all directions; and of a great many vast plans which are still ‘progressing.’”62 While Dickens saw something appealing in the old French buildings, another British author, James Buckingham, criticized them roundly after his 1840 visit. “What is still called the French quarter, which forms the southern portion of the town, was badly built, with narrow streets, and small and mean houses; though these are all fast disappearing, to make way for better edifices,” he wrote. “But the American portion of the city is as regularly laid out, and as well executed, as any town of similar size in the Union.”63 He was a clear proponent of “out with the old, in with the new,” which in this case meant “better edifices” built by Americans. The rapid disappearance of colonial-­era structures inspired efforts to quell the tide of destruction, particularly after the sale of the original trading post. With a foundation dug by the Missourias in 1764, the structure had been built for Laclède. Later, his stepson Auguste Chouteau bought and enlarged the property to make it a grand residence. Some considered it St. Louis’s “best known landmark” at Chouteau’s death in 1829.64 In 1841, his widow Thérèse Cerré Chouteau, who had moved to another part of town in 1836, decided to raze the family home to make room for thirty-­two new brick structures, three-­story buildings designed to accommodate businesses.65 In a failed appeal to save the mansion, contemporary actor and writer Matthew C. Field wrote a call to action; artist John Casper Wild printed the poem alongside an engraving of the Chouteau mansion. In “The Chouteau House,” Field urged readers to “Touch not a stone! An early pioneer/ Of Christian sway founded his dwelling here,/Almost alone./ Touch not a stone! Let the Great West command/ A hoary relic of the early land;/ That after generations may not say,/ ‘All went for gold in our forefathers’ day,/ And of our infancy we nothing own.’/ Touch not a stone!” In an apt and pithy summation of the crisis, Field urged, “Yield not your heritage for ‘building lots.’”66 His plea neatly conveys Whitney Martinko’s analysis of a central conflict

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white Americans created: “As urban improvers guided environmental transformations to facilitate the growth of commerce, advocates of preservation argued that city dwellers should not shape all elements of the built environment according to the market value of the land that they occupied.”67 Despite the efforts of Field and Wild, the historic building was razed in October 1841 to make way for new construction. For a moment, the event simultaneously drew attention to the colonial past and the modern present, though not many St. Louisans were deeply upset. Most agreed with the assessment of Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, a visiting French mathematician and astronomer; writing in 1843, Nicollet thought that while the loss of the “splendid mansion lately admired by strangers as well as inhabitants of the city . . . might be regretted,” it was clear that its removal “made room for more modern buildings better suited to the commercial extension of the place.”68 One wonders whether the hubbub over the Chouteau mansion inspired some of the looking backward that took place in the 1840s, such as the founding anniversary celebration. In February 1847, the eighty-­third anniversary of the founding, St. Louisans marked the city’s beginnings with a dinner and parade, the latter featuring a group of Indigenous men. The elaborate procession made its way through streets bedecked with flags and flowers, their sourcing a bit of a wintry puzzle. The impressive parade included a brass band, a military contingent, a group of young men, the members of the arrangements committee, and then “the invited guests.”69 At their head, in an open carriage, was “Mr. PIERRE CHOUTEAU, the President of the day.” Behind two other carriages with dignitaries, four Indigenous men processed, “dressed in full costume, and mounted on horses, after the manner of the aboriginal tribes of this country.” Wilson Primm, a St. Louis lawyer and devoted chronicler of the city’s early history, pronounced them a very appropriate “guard of honor, for the venerable President had witnessed the day when the presence of friendly Indians had been, in fact, a guard and protection to him.”70 The Indigenous men’s presence was symbolic. Primm did not list the men’s names, tribal affiliations, or places of residence. They were for him generic emblems of a distant past—­both Indigenous and colonial—­not

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individuals with their own complex history and relationship to St. Louis or the Chouteau family. In his address to the crowd, Primm described the tribes inhabiting the region in the 1760s, at the time of the city’s founding, as “untutored and savage bands of Indians.”71 Aside from eighty-­nine-­year-­old Pierre Chouteau’s comments mentioning the Osage and trade with them, few of the white guests mentioned Indigenous peoples in their toasts.72 The point of the celebration was the European founding of the village and its successful growth during its American period, not the Indigenous world in which it had emerged nor the built environment created by earlier Native peoples on which it stood. The celebrations of 1847 aside, white St. Louisans in the 1840s were more inclined to look to the future rather than reflect upon the past. Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for a specific time and place, was not widespread enough to mobilize effective preservation efforts of colonial-­ era buildings. Some white St. Louisans may have talked about the changing urban landscape and the eradication of the city’s early buildings, but they did not halt the process. Nor did they focus on the earthworks. In The Great Heart of the Republic, historian Adam Arenson suggests that “while changing the French face of the city was an active topic of conversation, the destruction of American Indian ruins went on without debate, a constant facet of life in the first century of St. Louis history.”73 Arenson rightly suggests there was little debate, but he may downplay how impassioned were those who bemoaned the mounds’ disappearance and called for their preservation. No matter how sincere, their voices did not carry the day. As James Buckingham wrote despairingly in 1842, “The indifference manifested by almost all classes of Americans toward these antiquities of their own country, renders it almost certain that in a few years the greater number of them will disappear.”74 The search for antiquities to clothe the United States with inherited grandeur, so powerful in the first few decades after the nation’s founding, could not compete against local economic interests and civic leaders’ ambitions. Enthusiasm for antiquities persisted as a useful strategy for dispossession of Indigenous peoples, enabling white settlers to claim lands and the earlier built environment as their own. Urban development proved at odds with the preservation of mounds in communities across the eastern half of the continent, with striking cases throughout

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the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. In Columbus, Ohio, home to many Native earthworks, mound removal was well underway by 1820. There, a chronicler noted that the several mounds that once stood in the main street of Columbus “had been entirely removed, and converted into brick” and possibly used for construction of the state house.75 In Cincinnati, Ohio, a disappointed European aristocrat went in search of the city’s mounds in the mid-­1820s, having seen them on a map, and “was unsuccessful, for the very good reason that the hills had been demolished and in their place houses built.”76 In perhaps the most irony-­laden example, discussed in the introduction, the white residents of Circleville, Ohio, who named their community after the mounds around which they constructed their town, leveled the mounds within decades. They eradicated the historic, circular earthworks, replacing them with a flattened landscape of a grid street plan.77 So, too, did mounds fall in St. Louis. When the mounds’ continued existence was weighed against modern “progress,” defined as economic development by private individuals and expanding urban infrastructure, St. Louis’s Native monuments lost. “Whenever they stand in the way of any ‘improvement,’ as it is called, of either tillage or building,” Buckingham concluded, “they are demolished without scruple, and without regret.” So uninterested were people in safeguarding them that “the very expression of a wish that they might be preserved from destruction, is regarded by most persons with a smile at its folly.”78 Individualism and private interest played a crucial role, with St. Louisans increasingly favoring the idea of “turning over as much property as possible to individuals who might then seek to make it productive.”79 The government controlled the sale of land to individuals, who then developed it individually.80 The pace of the mounds’ destruction shocked more than one observer. In 1843, after some time away, a St. Louisan was stunned and scarcely recognized the place. In a letter to the Daily Evening Gazette, he wrote, “A person absent from the city only a few years might easily lose himself in this section, for of the old landmarks he would find but few remaining.” Especially vivid were the changes to the north. “Even the ancient mounds, for which St. Louis has long been noted and which lie in this quarter, seem to have hidden their diminished heads before

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the advancing wave of civilization,” he stated. The author condemned his fellow St. Louisans for their lack of foresight: “Unprotected by any law and with no thought on the part of the citizens to preserve them from destruction, these natural or artificial wonders soon fell a prey to the encroachments of civilization.”81 What struck this observer was the toll of urban development, how the mounds had been repurposed or destroyed to make way for buildings and streets. “Dwelling places have been reared upon some of them,” he noted, “and others have been worn and shorn of their proportions by the tread of men and animals.” Added to the ruinous effect of the elements, the overall scene was “now sadly disfigured by a street which had been graded through the whole of the principal collection. Even the Falling Garden, once so famed for its beauty, can be deemed beautiful no longer. It is now, all that remains of it, the site of a dwelling.”82 What seems at first glance a paradox is the practice of white St. Louisans increasingly naming things after the mounds at the same time they were razing them. As the city expanded to the north and enveloped the mounds, white residents named structures and businesses after the earthworks in the neighborhood and continued to refer to them as landmarks, perhaps, in part, because the Big Mound still dominated the landscape as new streets surrounded it. In 1840, for example, a new Methodist church opened “near the Big Mound.”83 A few months later, a newspaper reported that a “St. Louis home near the Big Mound was entered by burglars and robbed of valuable movable property.”84 The name of Jackson and Toneray’s “Mound City coffee-­house,” located on Broadway in 1845, celebrated the nearby landmark.85 Mound Fire Company number 9, founded in 1844 and disbanded in 1858, also stood on Broadway.86 And when Mound Methodist Episcopal Church Sabbath school hosted a summer festival in 1845, organizers directed attendees to “the Grove, west of Major Dobyns’ near the Big Mound.”87 By their naming practices, they were claiming the Big Mound as their own. New businesses and buildings proliferated around, and eventually on top of, the Big Mound. In 1844, construction of a large structure began on the Big Mound. The process drew public attention to Indigenous peoples and their burial practices when workers uncovered

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human remains. The St. Louis Weekly Reveille published the news under the headline “Skeleton from the Big Mound.” Asserting their relatively recent interment, the reporter suggested they could “hardly date farther back than the city itself.” A largely intact skeleton “was found four feet from the top surface, about equally dividing the mound—­lengthways. The head was to the north . . ..” With the human remains were “a small fragment of an Indian belt or sash, worked with beads, and the larger portion of a black silk handkerchief .  .  . and a wooden pipe, not fashioned after the usual barbarous devices of savage art, but apparently modelled from the common clay pipe—­a simple bowl and stem.” The reporter thought the belt material, silk handkerchief, and pipe shape all “spoke . . . clearly of civilized manufacture.”88 The burial was likely that of the Indigenous leader Flagg and others noted as having been interred there in the colonial era. On the summit of the Big Mound, lumber merchants Vandeventer and Field built a two-­storied wooden pavilion, eighty feet long, “for a pleasure resort.” The city directory described the mound and its location as “situated on Broadway, near the river, about one mile and a quarter from the Court-­house.” At that point, in November 1844, the mound stood “about fifty feet higher than the street which runs along its base; and about eighty or ninety feet above the river.” Grading had lowered the street level well below the built portion of the mound, a fact that was raised in later debates over its earlier construction. From the pavilion’s top, patrons would enjoy “a magnificent view up and down the river, and over a portion of the city.”89 Artist Henry Lewis captured the commanding position of the mound and the pavilion atop it, just to the right of the tallest smokestack (Figure 7.5b). William Green leased the pavilion and hired a popular caterer, Milton Hopkins. The St. Louis American proclaimed Hopkins’s appointment “sufficient to insure .  .  . a profitable patronage.”90 In advertising his business, Green invited guests to enjoy the “extensive and beautiful” view, offering “at all times, to accommodate parties at the shortest notice,” who might find “something romantic in the idea of partaking of a feast on the top of the celebrated ‘Big Mound’ of St. Louis.”91 As important as the restaurant’s construction was in the history of the destruction of the Big Mound, so too is the advertisement striking for

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Fig. 7.5a: Saint Louis in 1846; by Henry Lewis, oil on canvas, 1846. Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust, 170:1955.

what it reveals about white attitudes at the time. In harkening to the view, the mound itself, and romantic sensibilities, Green’s announcement reveals his familiarity with the language and ideas of romanticism and its appeal to many, regardless of whether he shared them. While Green might have had a good sales pitch, he was not a sound businessman. He and Hopkins showed up as defendants in litigation initiated by Charles R. Anderson in the summer of 1845, after Anderson swore that the two men had failed to pay him $60.19 for hundreds of

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Fig. 7.5b: Detail of Big Mound, from St. Louis in 1846, by Henry Lewis. Saint Louis Art Museum.

feet of walnut and other materials for the Mound Pavilion and ten pin alley “situated on and adjoining the Big Mound in North St. Louis.”92 Green was also named in another case, prompted by Louis Labaume and Archibald Carr, who claimed Green owed them $48.12 for lumber and other expenses involved in the construction of the ten-­pin alley “immediately east” of the Big Mound.93 Within a few years, the Mound Pavilion had burned to the ground, destroyed by a disastrous fire in 1848 (Figure 7.6). The painting depicting the event, created in the late 1800s, suggests how the mounds were used, seen, and remembered by white St. Louisans. Firefighters from the Mound Engine Company fight the flames. Across the street to the south, a man stands in the doorway of a house constructed on top of another mound, and beyond, between two streets, stands Mound Market, built in 1843. The built environment layered a modern city upon older Native historic architecture.

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Fig. 7.6: Mound Fire Co. No. 9 Responds to the Burning of the Pavilion at Big Mound, by Matthew Hastings, watercolor, c. 1890s, reprinted in Edward Edwards, History of the Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis, Illustrated (St. Louis: Veteran Volunteer Firemen’s Historical Society, 1906), 197. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Disastrous though the 1848 fire on the Big Mound was, it was minor in comparison to the conflagration that devastated St. Louis the following year. On May 17, 1849, a fire started aboard a steamboat, the White Cloud, when a spark from a passing vessel landed on its wet paint.94 Firefighters were unable to quell the blaze, and a drifting, burning boat ignited other vessels. Flames leapt to the docks and then to the buildings

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of the riverside commercial district. Before the fire was extinguished, three people, including a firefighter, had died, and 430 buildings and 310 businesses, concentrated in fifteen square blocks close to where the Arch now stands, lay in ruins. Twenty-­three steamboats and tons of freight were reduced to ashes.95 A devastating cholera plague coincided with the fire and prompted further change to the built environment. The Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, who spent the night of the fire moving cholera patients out of harm’s way, remembered the streets being “like the ruins of Pompeii.”96 The cholera epidemic fueled the rapid development of the new Bellefontaine Cemetery and the clearing of Chouteau’s Pond, another famed colonial-­era site, which was labeled as a potential source of the outbreak. A British visitor, Emmeline Stuart-­Wortley, who came to St. Louis not long after the dual disasters of cholera and fire hit, found St. Louisans surprisingly cheerful about the state of the population. Though the epidemic, Stuart-­Wortley heard, had carried off a third of the population, she was told “that though it is only a short time since this appalling affliction had befallen the city, yet so great had been the influx of emigrants, that the gap which had been made by cholera was quite filled up. ‘So,’ added my informant, with not uncharacteristic indifference, ‘the dead are not at all missed; not in the least, you see.’”97 Thus, as the 1840s drew to a close, competing forces, contrasting civic visions, and major disasters all played a role in altering the mounds and paving the way for their ultimate destruction. Social, physical, and economic change—­fueled by massive white immigration, epidemic disease, fire, unrestricted real estate development, and huge construction projects—­transformed the city rapidly and dramatically. As the city grew, its commercial present and future prospects crowded out echoes of both the colonial and older Indigenous past. As Otis Adams, a visitor to St. Louis, wrote in 1849, “Its commercial prosperity makes it perhaps the most important and interesting point of the great West.” With its “admirable” location and “commercial advantages, it is now universally acknowledged that the ‘mount City,’ as it is called, must eventually become the New York of the West.”98 He accounted for the nickname: “St. Louis is called the ‘Mound City’ from the fact of there being a large mound on the bank of the river on the north side of the city.”99 His

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explanation suggests Adams was unaware that many mounds once stood in the area. Though full of praise for the local economy, he, like earlier visitors, criticized the lack of civic mindedness and aesthetic sensibilities of St. Louisans. “In their haste to be rich,” he wrote, “the people of St. Louis have overlooked one very important point necessary to make a handsome city. They have made no reservation of land in the city for public ground—­for walks. It is now too late to remedy the evil.” 100

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The mayor delivered a message devoted to Public Squares and the role open spaces could play in a crowded city, where they might serve as “lungs of the community.” Addressing his fellow politicians, he urged immediate action. If ground within the city limits could not be secured, they should try to buy land in the suburbs. The following week, an alderman suggested that perhaps the Big Mound might be preserved for that purpose. The massive earthwork might “be held by the city of St. Louis as a Public Square forever.” In 1850 alone, 246 steamboats made 2599 stops in St. Louis, laden with over one million pounds of bacon, coffee, sugar, lead, salt, wheat, and other goods.1 Almost 105,000 people called St. Louis home, up from roughly one thousand inhabitants in 1810; ten thousand in 1820; fourteen thousand in 1830; and thirty-­six thousand only ten years earlier; by 1860, the population reached 160,000. As the population boomed, the city spread rapidly north and south along the Mississippi River and westward into the hinterland. In the 1850s, rail track webbed across the state. Heralded by their champions as a harbinger of progress, rail lines tied distant communities together while cutting swaths of destruction through Indigenous territories across the country.2 It was an age of both dramatic social change and radical physical alterations to St. Louis’s built environment. For the mounds, the 1850s brought the failure of St. Louisans’ one civic effort to preserve them. In the mid-­1800s, St. Louis was a city of newcomers and a site of conflict. From the eastern part of the United States and Europe, white Americans and immigrants poured into the mid-­continent metropolis. 175

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As one Scottish observer noted in February 1840, the streets were so crowded with emigrants as to be nearly “impassable.”3 Well under half of those residing in St. Louis in 1850 were born there.4 Most adults hailed from Germany or Ireland, the former fleeing revolution, the latter famine and poverty. While the building and manufacturing trades offered employment opportunities, reaching St. Louis did not solve immigrants’ problems. Inadequate housing and sanitation fueled the spread of tuberculosis and cholera. Nativists despised the newcomers, and anti-­immigrant violence and riots erupted. Meanwhile, deepening sectional conflict brought ever greater attention to the plight of enslaved Black Americans, with the fates of Dred and Harriet Scott working their way through the court system of Missouri, a slave state, and the US Supreme Court between 1846 and 1857. In the midst of these dramatic changes, Indigenous peoples, their concerns, and their histories continued to have a place in local civic culture. Reporters covered the lecturers of noted Indigenous speaker and minister George Copway, a vocal critic of US land grabs, as well as the establishment of the first local branch of a national fraternal organization, the Improved Order of Red Men. As in earlier decades, tribal delegations frequented the city. In 1854, for example, The St. Louis Globe-­Democrat reported “a large delegation of Indians from Nebraska territory,” traveling by wagon, stopping in St. Louis on their way to Washington for treaty negotiations “with the government for some eight millions, more or less, of acres of their lands.” The fourteen Omaha, Otoe, and Missouria chiefs stayed for two weeks, meeting with the Superintendent of Indian Affairs and conducting business elsewhere. Highlighting how the Native men were treated as spectacles, the reporter noted that throughout their stay, they were “followed by large crowds of idlers” and attracted “considerable attention wherever they passed.”5 The press was full of news about Indigenous peoples, often in the context of wars in the west, but also, as in this case, regarding diplomacy. St. Louis newspaper accounts often demonized contemporary tribes as preying on white settlers on the frontier or interfering with the orderly process of white American settlement. In 1855, in a piece entitled “Indian v. Surveyor,” the St. Louis Dispatch recounted how Pawnee chiefs in Nebraska responded to white engineers in their territory. When the

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surveyors started to work, “they were ordered to stop by the chiefs who told them . . . they had no right to that land.” Treating the Indigenous leaders’ comments “as a joke,” the engineers proceeded, and the Pawnee men in turn tore down the stakes the surveyors placed “as fast as they were set up.”6 Though Indigenous peoples proclaimed in no uncertain terms that white Americans “had no right” to their land, such declarations were dismissed. With the flood of new European arrivals turning the city into one of the biggest in the country, St. Louis became a major urban center with an increasingly complex infrastructure and administration. New gas lines, streetlamps, and grand public buildings, such as a new Federal Customs House and Court House, transformed its physical appearance. The governing Board of Aldermen created new committees on streets and alleys, public buildings, and public squares, and special sub-­committees handled land acquisition and development matters.7 Physical growth propelled government expansion, with new departments supervising the levee, sewers, and water works. In the face of the extraordinary pace of urban development, the relentless demolition of mounds, seen in Cincinnati and elsewhere, ensued. At the heart of the destruction lay acts of remembering and forgetting central to white Americans’ mental gymnastics regarding Indigenous peoples and their pasts. The story was not unique to St. Louis. As they moved westward, white Americans encountered Indigenous people, their communities, and their monuments, but their occupation and settlement of Indigenous lands necessitated that they see Indigenous peoples as not tied to or entitled to them. Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 account of his journey on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers captures this process of dispossession and erasure, though he suggests legal purchase rather forced removal was the means. “The white man comes. . . ,” he wrote. “He buys the Indian’s moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-­grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried and ploughs up his bones.” Thoreau was also struck by how white settlers renamed places: he “comes with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman, and Celtic names, and strews them up and down this river.” The imposition of European names was a kind of overwriting, a reestablishment of Native lands as white.8 In short, purchasing Native peoples’ goods, acquiring

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their land, digging up their dead, and renaming were all part of the practices through which white Americans appropriated Indigenous land and tried to erase Native peoples’ connections, past and present, to it. Indigenous peoples rejected such conduct, criticizing white Americans’ aggression and demanding justice, and noted leaders appeared in St. Louis. In the 1850s, Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh, also known as the Reverend George Copway, was perhaps the most famous Indigenous leader to bring Native peoples’ concerns to St. Louis audiences. His presence in St. Louis reflected in part the growing importance of the city to the US. Born in Canada in 1813 and a member of the Mississauga band of Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Copway attended a mission school after his parents had converted, became a Methodist minister, and later moved to the United States, where he made lecture tours, officiated at religious services, advocated for Native peoples, and briefly published Copway’s American Indian, a newspaper devoted to Indigenous peoples’ concerns. In his attire, he signaled his place in both white and Indigenous societies.9 Although he spoke favorably of the religion and institutions of the United States, Copway was also a blunt critic. In the second edition of his best-­selling 1847 autobiography, Copway declared “The white men have been like the greedy lion, pouncing upon and devouring its prey. They have driven us from our nation, our homes, and possessions; compelled us to seek a refuge in Missouri, among strangers, and wild beasts; and will, perhaps, soon compel us to scale the Rocky Mountains; and, for aught I can tell, we may yet to driven to the Pacific Ocean, there to find our graves.”10 Copway proposed that “Indians north of the southern boundary of the State of Missouri,” along with tribes along the Great Lakes, Upper Missouri, as well as “the Shawnees, Soukees, Foxes, Chippeways, Ottowas, Delawares, Minominees, Winebagoes, and Sioux” would gather in “one general settlement” on designated lands along the upper Missouri River. “This country would become the great nucleus of the Indian nations,” he hoped.11 Alluding to contemporary political debates over voting rights, Copway scathingly observed: “Fanatics have talked of extending universal suffrage, even to the colored man, but their being silent in reference to that which would elevate the North American Indian, proves that they assent to his downfall. He must receive something in return for giving up his whole country.”12

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Fig. 8.1: Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh – G. Copway, photographic print, c. 1860. Marian S. Carson Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/item/98519233/.

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In St. Louis, Copway appeared as both Christian minister and Indigenous advocate. In December 1854, he helped officiate at the dedication services of the First Methodist Church at the corner of Eighth Street and Washington Avenue, a church with over three hundred communicants.13 Two weeks later, Copway delivered “another sermon” on the “history and destiny of the Indians.” A newspaper notice informed readers that a collection would be taken; Copway regularly appealed to white audiences for funds to finance individual young people’s schooling and to support his efforts to establish a Native state in the Northwest.14 The phrasing of an advertisement suggests Copway delivered multiple lectures: “This gentleman will deliver another of his very interesting disclosures, in the Mercantile Library Hall, to-­morrow (Sunday) afternoon at 3 o’clock.”15 A few days after leaving St. Louis, Copway traveled to Alton, Illinois, to lecture on “The Character of the Indian Race and the Means of Perpetuating it.” The Alton Weekly Telegraph described Copway as “the talented Indian lecturer who has recently attracted crowds, both in Chicago and St. Louis.”16 After his appearance at a Fourth of July celebration in Cincinnati, a newspaper reporter wrote that “the Indian preacher, was among the speakers, and claimed to be a real ‘native American.’”17 Copway also spoke before a Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM), after receiving an invitation to deliver an address before members of the white fraternal organization.18 White St. Louisans formed the first local branches of the Improved Order of Red Men in 1856. As Philip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) writes in Playing Indian, the members of this national organization appropriated and modified aspects of Native cultures to express their own identity. A middle-­class revival of an earlier organization, the Red Men, the IORM embraced temperance, patriotism, and American history, incorporating Indigenous attire, names, and images into their celebration of the past. With such practices, they contributed to the ideology of the vanishing Indian; they created their own “fraternal Indian history without having to account for the actions of real Indian people.”19 They made Native peoples into part of a commemorative past—­one that hearkened back to the revolutionary moment when colonists played Indian in the Boston Tea Party—­not a complex, challenging present.

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The St. Louis IORM branch members likely named early chapters after the central figures in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, rather than the sixteenth-­century Native leader. In the poem, Longfellow incorporated material from Copway, a friend and visitor, to recount the tragic story of lovers Hiawatha (Ojibwe) and Minnehaha (Dakota). The wildly popular poem likely inspired the founders of St. Louis’s Hiawatha Tribe, number one, as well as those who established Minnehaha Tribe, number 2, the same year. The national organization’s records include no information about “Tribe No. 3,” but did record Cherokee Tribe, number 4, as founded in 1858, with a “Great Council” of Missouri instituted that year. The Daily Missouri Republican carried an announcement from the Hiawatha tribe, notifying the “members of this tribe” that they were to “assemble at the Wigwam of Minne-­ha-­ha tribe, No. 2, corner of Third and Locust streets, over St. Louis Engine House,” the following evening, at 7:30 p.m., “by order of the sachem John A. Alter.”20 With borrowed and fabricated names, costumes, and rituals, the members of the IORM characterized themselves as “a gathering of historians, the worthy keepers of the nation’s aboriginal roots.”21 Such assertions depended on their seeing Indigenous peoples as vanishing and thus as unable to preserve their own histories. White Americans’ curiosity about Native peoples, cultures, and historic architecture extended into artistic productions. As mounds and earthworks were being leveled throughout the Mississippi River Valley and the eastern part of the country, a handful of artists painted them in the 1840s and 1850s, using enormous rolls of canvas to create moving panoramas. These artworks drew attention to the ways some white Americans viewed these structures as antiquities, curiosities, and wonders and offer some of the most striking visual records of historic Native architecture since destroyed. Hundreds of feet long, panoramas presented the vastness and awe-­inspiring features of the West, including Indigenous earthworks. One survives in the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum: John J. Egan’s The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley. Over seven feet high and 348 feet long, the painting features glorious sunsets, beautiful landscapes, numerous mounds, and, often on the margins, Native peoples. Egan based his paintings on detailed drawings made by Professor M. W. Dickeson,

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a medical doctor, “Who spent TWELVE YEARS of his Life in opening Indian Mounds.”22 In Section III of the presentation he delivered as viewers watched the panoramas scenes roll by, Dickeson discussed a “Huge Mound and the manner of opening them.”23 The scene shows eight Black men at work doing the digging, while two white men in the center stand and observe, and a third white man, to the left, sketches the mound; a party of white sight-­seers stands nearby. The image shows ceremonial burials, carefully laid out human remains and funerary objects, a sacred site rendered as a scientific curiosity for the tourists’ gaze.

Fig. 8.2: Detail, A Huge Mound and the Manner of Opening Them, from The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, by John J. Egan, distemper on cotton muslin, c. 1850. Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust, 34:1953.

The painting shows how white Americans used mounds. At the center of the scene, the dig reveals a hidden, earlier civilization, or so the artist and excavator present it. In his mind, Dickeson’s digs were noble, a pursuit of knowledge. Part of what may shock the modern reader

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about Dickeson’s comments is their celebratory, boastful tone. He was a graverobber and vandal of epic proportions. Considering himself an authority on “the antiquities & customs” of those whom he described as “the unhistoried Indian tribes,” Dickeson proudly declared that he had opened “over 1,000 Indian Monuments or Mounds,” and amassed “a collection of 40,000 relics of those interesting, but unhistoried Native Americans.”24 The scale of both his actions and his collection suggest how, by the middle of the 1800s, white Americans like Dickeson may have felt even more entitled to claim and possess Indigenous artifacts and sites than did someone like William Clark, before removal had forced Native peoples farther west. Moreover, Dickeson’s characterization of Indigenous peoples as “unhistoried” reflects nineteenth-­ century white settlers’ investment in assessments of Native peoples as peoples without a past. Mapping, surveying, excavating, and painting such sites spread whites’ views of Indigenous peoples and interpretations of Native peoples’ histories, even as they ignored or discounted Indigenous knowledge sources.25 Notes for another artwork, Leon D. Pomarede’s Original Panorama of the Mississippi River, mentioned St. Louis’s mounds among the historic architecture of the city. Along the river’s bank, military works built in 1780 once stood, and beyond those, “in the northern suburbs of the city,” one could still see “those ancient mounds, (relic’s of a by-­gone race,) which St. Louis is so celebrated for, hence the name of ‘The Mound City.’”26 This 1850 commentary declares mound builders a vanished race distinct from contemporary tribes, and asserts white Americans’ claims to their legacy by invoking the “mound city” nickname. The world the panoramas presented was disappearing fast, with St. Louis’s expansion to the north in the 1850s enveloping the mound precinct. A lithograph from 1852 and an engraving of it published in 1855 suggest how the Big Mound, at the far right, loomed large, both in the landscape and in artists’ renditions of the scene (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Over the course of a few decades, centuries-­old monuments were unceremoniously destroyed. Colonial-­era structures were replaced by newer construction, and the topography itself was altered for street grading. Photographs and maps from the period demonstrate how the mounds were repurposed, altered, surrounded, and leveled. The earliest

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Fig. 8.3: St. Louis, J. W. Hill and F. Michelin, lithograph, 1852. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Fig. 8.4: St. Louis, lithograph by J. W. Hill, engraved by Wellstood and Peters, published by permission of Smith Bros. & Co. in The Ladies Repository (January 1855). Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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Fig. 8.5: Big Mound, Fifth and Mound Streets, Thomas M. Easterly, half plate daguerreotype, 1852. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

surviving camera-­produced image of the Big Mound was created in the early 1850s by noted local artist Thomas Easterly, a native of Vermont who relocated to St. Louis permanently in the late 1840s. Easterly took over the gallery of daguerreotypist John Ostrander, who had a studio at Fourth and Olive.27 Walking the streets of St. Louis, Easterly used his camera to make permanent images on sheets of silver-­ plated copper, unique works of art that constitute an important record of the early history of St. Louis.28 At the point he made the daguerreotype of the Big Mound’s western façade, in an image dated to 1852, the monumental earthwork had already undergone alterations. In the 1840s, it had suffered from excavations and leveling at the summit for the construction of the Mound Pavilion, when some superficially buried remains were unearthed.29 By the early 1850s, grading at its base along

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Fig. 8.6: Detail from Plan of the City of St. Louis, MO, by Julius Hutawa (St. Louis: Julius Hutawa and Leopold Gast & Brother, 1850, c. 1842). St. Louis Public Library.

the streets that bordered it, including Broadway, lowered the ground level well below the mound’s original height, exposing more clearly the constructed portion of the mound, built on top of surface clay. With grading, the summit was approximately fifty-­three feet above street level, nineteen feet higher than when measured in 1819.30 Newspaper accounts and maps provide evidence of the Big Mound’s endangered status in the face of urban expansion. The seventh edition of Julius Hutawa’s Plan of the City of St. Louis, Mo., first published in 1842, details the state of the mounds in 1850. Among the 104 numbered buildings and sites are several mound references: 94, the Old Reservoir; 97, Mound Engine house; and 100, Big Mound.31 The brief historical notes on the map refer to the city’s early borders as reaching “southward and east to the Sugar loaf.” Mound Market appears in the middle

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of Broadway. On the map itself, only the Big Mound, bounded by E. Mound and E. Brooklin streets and occupying half of city block number 249, appears as a mound, its sides hatch marks, its summit topped by the number 100. A few years later, in 1853, a map produced by J. H. Fisher showed a city on the move, an urban core spilling out into the surrounding lands, most developed near the river but radiating out far beyond it. Fisher acknowledges the mounds with an “m” at the site of the “Old Reservoir,” a notation to Mound Market, in the middle of Broadway, and inked in, the words “BIG MOUND,” just to the north of Mound Market, and a hatch marked shape occupying the full block.32 While these maps show the clear footprint of the Big Mound in the early 1850s, they also document the continued expansion of the city around it, clear proof of the unfettered growth that sealed its fate. In 1853, the status and condition of two mounds came up for discussion among city council members. The fates of the so-­called Little Mound, on which the first reservoir was constructed in the early 1830s, and the Big Mound briefly drew official attention. One discussion involved a plan to destroy the remains of the reservoir mound, and the other centered on legislation proposed to preserve the largest mound. Though exactly who or what prompted the preservation initiative is not certain, at least two factors were likely in play. Firstly, there were ongoing, regular discussions among city officials regarding establishing public spaces, such as parks and public squares, including a space to be acquired for a new city hall. Urban parks were seen as necessary places for recreation as well as for promoting public health. In January 1853, the Board of Aldermen discussed legislation authorizing the mayor “to purchase grounds for public Parks and Squares,” making the ordinance “the special order of the day” for January 18.33 Council members were considering three “distinct and separate pieces or parcels of ground: one of said pieces or parcels shall be situated north of Cass avenue and west of Broadway,” putting it west of the Big Mound which fronted the east side of Broadway, as well as “one piece at the western end, and one at the southern end of the city.”34 During the debate, various amendments were introduced, including a plan for any purchase of lands designated for parks to happen “within eight months from the passage of this ordinance, if practicable.”35 By a vote of eight to four, the aldermen approved the bill.

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In early October, John How, who served as mayor from 1853 to 1855 and again from 1856 to 1857, delivered a message on “Public Squares,” in which he declared “the vast importance of this subject to the health and enjoyment of the community.” He urged city officials to act on “the present opportunity of procuring suitable places, (lungs of the community they have been aptly called), for our crowded population.”36 How had been in conversation “with some of our largest landowners, with reference to the purchase of grounds in the suburbs.”37 He thought that “if grounds within the city limits cannot be obtained, would it not be well to secure some in the immediate vicinity before it becomes too late?”38 The following week, How sent word to the city council that James Lucas, Esq., had offered to sell block number 514 to the city “for a public square, and if this offer is accepted, will donate block No. 825 for the same purpose.” How had “no hesitation in recommending” Lucas’s proposition “as the best opportunity we may have of acquiring a central locality for a Municipal Hall.”39 The same day as Lucas’s offer came before the Board of Aldermen, so, too, did the status of the Big Mound. A brief entry in the Board of Aldermen’s minutes for October 13, 1853, noted the mound’s status as the subject. Alfred Hencock, an alderman, introduced legislation to preserve the earthwork: “An ordinance authorizing the Mayor to purchase of the owners a certain lot of ground, known as the ‘Big Mound,’ to be held by the city of St. Louis as a Public Square forever.” The ordinance “was read twice, the rules having been suspended for that purpose.” A motion led to the creation of a committee to investigate and gather information on the feasibility and desirability of such an act, and “a Special Committee of Three. Messrs. Hencock, McFaul and Papin were appointed said special Committee.”40 News of the deliberations over the fate of the Big Mound reached beyond St. Louis. On November 1, 1853, the Louisville Daily Courier reported: “It is proposed to sell the ‘Big Mound’ at St. Louis to the corporation for a public square. The price, as paid, is $50,000.”41 In their roles as committee members assigned to study the Big Mound matter, St. Louis aldermen met with the owners of the land on which the mound stood and gathered information about current activities at the site. After conferring “with the owners of said property” about selling it, the aldermen thought “they ask[ed] too high a price for the same.”42 They

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were also deterred by its current state, after finding “workmen engaged in digging down the Northern portion of said Mound, the destruction of which, in the opinion of your committee, destroys the importance of preserving said square for the benefit of the city.” 43 The mound was no longer intact. In November 1853, the opening of Brooklyn Street, “so as to complete its connection west of Broadway with the streets near the river,” damaged the north end of the monument, which stood in the path of Brooklyn Street.44 “The improvement requires the cutting away of full one tenth of the Big Mound,” reported a newspaper.45 It also led to loss of life, when rain rendered the soil unstable, and laborers, using hand tools to chip away at the structure, triggered a landslide. “The caving in of a bank of earth at the Big Mound” ensued, and in “the premature detaching of a large piece of earth,” two workmen were hurt.46 The first, though “badly bruised . . . recovered soon from the first shock and got up again.”47 The second, twenty-­five-­year-­old Irish immigrant Thomas Mahoney, sustained severe internal injuries and died shortly thereafter.48 (Other deaths at the site occurred in the 1850s, with a little boy dying in May 1856, from injuries sustained when he fell from it, and two workers being injured, one fatally, when a section of the Big Mound collapsed, burying one, in September 1856.49) It is clear that the removal of the northern edge of the Big Mound harmed the prospects for its preservation. The same week as the street opening project led to the landslide and fatal accident, the city’s Board of Aldermen met and heard the special committee’s report. After reviewing their findings, Chairman Hencock, who had introduced the initial legislation, announced the determination that he and his colleagues had come to: “that the Bill be indefinitely postponed.”50 Why Hencock had decided to introduce the legislation in the first place and how exactly he personally felt about the final recommendation to table it are unknown. But the report was adopted, with the ordinance for preserving the Big Mound “to be held by the city of St. Louis as a public square forever” indefinitely postponed, as advised.51 The opposition of the Board of Aldermen to the plan was the focus of an article published days later in one of St. Louis’s German-­language newspapers, Anzeiger des Westens. Reporting on failed efforts to create parks and public squares, the paper noted that two thirds of the alderman

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voted against the Lucas proposal. “In the same way,” the newspaper noted, “the Board of Aldermen declared against the purchase of the ‘Big Mound’ for a similar purpose since the price demanded was too huge and since a tenth of the mound” was in the process of being razed.52 The paradox is inescapable: a preservation effort necessitated by development was derailed by development. Notably, in an article otherwise in German, the name “Big Mound” was not translated, highlighting its status as a widely known landmark. Ownership of the Big Mound reached the courts in November as well. A suit was filed: “The case of the Perpetual Insurance Company against L. A. Benoist and others, involving title to the big mound in St. Louis and ground adjoining worth $250,000 is now before the Circuit Court of that city.”53 The fate of another earthwork, already dramatically altered, was discussed by the aldermen that autumn as well. On October 31, 1853, Henry Kayser, the city engineer, submitted a report following up on ordinance 3055, approved that summer, which had authorized and directed the opening of certain new streets.54 Peter Lindell, a landowner whose property was affected, offered voluntarily also to open “so much of Bates streets as lies within his said land between Broadway and First street, provided the city removes the old wooden reservoir situated immediately south of his land between Broadway and Collins street.” He wanted the city to “open that portion of Bates street now occupied by the embankment around said reservoir.”55 The embankment was most certainly what remained of Little Mound. Reviewing the history of the facility, Kayser mentioned that “the tract of land on which said reservoir stands was sold to the city, in the year 1830 and 1831 by the late Wm. H. Ashley, for $800.” The initial agreement included the proviso that if the city ceased using the land to supply residents with water, then Ashley or his heirs “‘shall pay to the city of St. Louis the purchase money, [and] then the conveyal shall be void.’”56 The engineer recommended accepting Lindell’s offer, as “the progress of the public improvements in that neighborhood requires the opening of the streets through Mr. Lindell’s land on account of drainage.”57 He submitted several documents in support: the deeds with Ashley, “a plate of the premises,” and Lindell’s offer.58 Kayser characterized the reservoir as “dilapidated too far, to make it fit for further use,” offering the opinion that “in its present condition

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[it] may well be considered a nuisance to the neighborhood.”59 Though the legal case resolving the property’s ownership went on for years, no one recorded concern for the mound as historic architecture of cultural significance. In the case of both mounds, the alterations undertaken as part of infrastructure work—­the creation of a water supply in one and street work in the other—­opened the way to their levelling. Neither was immune to the developer’s ax and shovel. Though the fate of the Little Mound did not appear to generate any discussion, the failure of the civic effort to preserve the Big Mound did not go unremarked. A few months later, in early 1854, ongoing threats to the monumental earthwork provoked pointed, searing criticism from A. B. Chambers, the influential editor of the Daily Missouri Republican. On February 13, Chambers printed a “Local Matters” column devoted to the “Destruction of the Big Mound.”60 “It is with pain,” he opened, “we learn that one of the oldest monuments of the city—­that, indeed, from which it derives its name of ‘Mound City,’ is about to be levelled with ordinary earth.”61 Noting that workman were “already engaged in the work of destruction,” he lamented the imminent loss: “in a short time this mysterious and magnificent work of other times and of an unknown people, will have faded from sight.”62 The reason was clear, in his view, and he denounced it roundly. The mound would fall, “a victim to the giant arms of the god Utility—­affording another evidence that we are a practical people, and when we have a mind to go ahead, there is nothing, however sacred or venerable it may be, that can stop our career.”63 Chambers’s view of the mound as hallowed or as something to be honored may suggest the impetus behind the legislation proposed the previous fall. If not anti-­modern, Chambers certainly shared elements of the Romantic ideals of literary figures like Thoreau: finding sources of inspiration, awe, and wonder in one’s environment, whether in ancient structures like the mounds or in natural beauties. With a sensibility that resonates strongly today, Chambers reproached contemporaries for their disregard of the past, recent or ancient: “We dig up grave yards, uncoffin the bones of the dead, and build beer cellars upon spots consecrated by Piety to the holiest emotions of the heart.”64 Even the newly founded Bellefontaine Cemetery, he suspected, might “pass into the hands of the bone-­grinders to promote the growth of

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turnips.”65 The dead had few defenders. Mayor How likely agreed with Chambers, noting that twice, during his residence in St. Louis, it had “become necessary to remove the city cemetery,” due to expansion of the city.66 In an impassioned indictment of contemporary attitudes, Chambers declared, “We leave nothing, and seem intent upon leaving nothing to connect the past with the future, though monuments of this kind often stand out in bold relief and challenge our admiration and forbearance.”67 Chambers imagined for readers what the mound might have witnessed in the past or could in the future, invoking racially framed fantastical scenes: prophets preaching from its summit, battles fought at its base, glorious victories won by “some copper-­colored Caesar or Napoleon,” or “frightful struggles between man and man . . . all about religion and politics.”68 Chambers urged preserving the Big Mound as a historic monument, “a work of art” and a local treasure. He boldly stated, “As things now stand we would not exchange it for Bunker Hill with the monument thrown in.” 69 The history of Bunker Hill, like that of countless other sites, was part of an American identity. Whatever the reasons for its removal—­ about which he claimed to have “known nothing”—­ Chambers acknowledged the owners had the right to determine the mound’s fate. Yet he thought its impending destruction a great shame. If he had had childhood memories of gazing from the summit, “before bricks and mortar had half robbed the view of its sublimity,” he would feel even more strongly. His suggestion, of course, was that other long-­ term residents of St. Louis might have such fond recollections. In their position, Chambers thought he would feel an “emotion that no plea of necessity can suppress,” on seeing it “dedicated to the mercenary god.”70 The earthwork connected people to their city’s history. But more than nostalgia dictated the significance of the Big Mound, Chambers believed, and St. Louisans should devote themselves to defending it from destruction. Chambers insisted, “The Mound is an object that ought not only to be ‘spared,’ but ought to be preserved.”71 The reasons were clear: “It is in itself a great curiosity, and to this day is as great a mystery as the Pyramids of Egypt.” 72 Positioning the Big Mound as a wonder comparable to those around the world, Chambers declared its loss would be an irreparable one for the city and its people;

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yet he made no reference to its importance for Indigenous peoples. “To dig down the Mound—­to kill off the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ in order to make room for apple-­stands and groceries,” would be an act with “no parallel in the sacrilegious.” 73 Chambers called on St. Louisans to rally to the cause of preservation for the sake of the city’s past, present, and future. If the mound were “the abode of the Genius of the city,” its destruction might cause that beneficent being to leave and instead shower its “blessings on Cairo, Alton, or Chicago.” Citizens had better “beware how they offend their guardian spirit.”74 Chambers lamented St. Louisans’ “modern” priorities: “The ancients, unlike the moderns, gave dignity to every thing they touched; and whatever they had once invested with a sacred character, it was ever afterwards held to be impious to profane.” If the mound had been in Greece or Rome, he believed, “it would have been the subject of a thousand beautiful legends, any one of which would have saved it from the shovel and spade.”75 With a clear tone of disapproval and concern, he wrote, “We think the old Mound should be allowed to stand unless they want the dirt badly . . . .since the city has not thought proper to purchase it as a lung for the good citizens to breath[e] through, there seems but little hope of its standing fast under the great temptation to convert the ground it occupies into convenient building lots, or for horse auction stands and the huckstering trade.”76 The Big Mound site was unique in St. Louis. “If there is any one spot in the city that deserved the protection of its inhabitants more than all others,” Chambers argued, “it appears to us that the Big Mound is that spot.”77 Safeguarding it would also provide an appropriate space for local history markers. Perhaps trying to rally the support of those more interested in themselves than a historic earthwork, he suggested that “a tablet upon the old Mound,” would be “a glorious site for a monument to commemorate the names of those who have contributed to the prosperity of the city, or who in any way deserve to be remembered as public benefactors.”78 Chambers died three months later and so did not live to see the mound fully razed. When the final leveling of the Big Mound began fifteen years later, a reporter recalled Chambers’ failed efforts to preserve it. “Col. Chambers,” the article noted, “once was a member of the committee that waited on

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old Mr. Benoist, recently deceased, in reference to the Mound.”79 The committee members wanted Louis Benoist, a wealthy banker, “to donate his part in the Mound to the city; the other proprietors, it was expected,” would follow his example. 80 It is unknown whether Chambers headed a separate committee of citizens or accompanied the special committee of aldermen who visited Benoist and others in the fall of 1853; there’s no corroborating evidence of a Chambers-­led committee. What is revealing, nonetheless, is how the newspaper reporter recalled the effort: “The plan was to change the whole Mound and its surroundings, which at the time occupied about three or four blocks, into a public garden, with a kind of a pavilion on the elevated ground in the centre with other localities for public entertainment; to plant it with trees and shrubbery, and surround it by an iron rail fence.”81 When Benoist, “though a generous gentleman in many other ways,” refused the request, “the whole plan fell to the ground on account of his opposition.”82 A few months after Chambers publicly championed preservation, a local Methodist clergyman echoed his sentiments. In The Western Casket, a journal “devoted to religion and literature,” Rev. David Rice R. McAnally bemoaned the ongoing destruction of “The Mound.” He began, “Most persons in this city well understand what is meant by the ‘Big Mound,’ which a few years since stood on the west bank of the Mississippi river, a short distance north of St. Louis.”83 McAnally himself had settled in St. Louis only in 1851. In three years, development had taken a rapid toll: “Now the city has extended far beyond it, consequently it has been surrounded by buildings, and is now fast giving way before the ‘march of improvement,’(?) and from present appearances will soon be ‘dug away,’ ‘hauled away,’ and ‘numbered with the things that were.’”84 The writer’s parenthetical question mark spoke volumes. What constituted “improvement” was, in his mind, clearly debatable. Happening to pass by the Big Mound, “and seeing the work of demolition that was carried on, [he] involuntarily exclaimed ‘What Vandalism!’”85 McAnally compared Big Mound to another important public site that recently had been destroyed, Chouteau’s Pond. With palpable sorrow, the minister insisted that “this one spot, at least, ought to have been preserved as a memorial of the past” and was worth saving as an enclosed and pleasant retreat.86 There were too few such places after the draining

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of Chouteau’s Pond. Once a “handsome body of water,” with a picturesque small waterfall and a bridge, the pond had been a beautiful site for recreation.87 But with people dumping trash, as well as fishing, strolling, and picnicking, and industries depositing waste, the pond became a hazard to public health.88 McAnally saw the fate of Chouteau’s Pond and that of the Big Mound as linked: they were city landmarks that people did not value. Labeling the pond a health menace, city officials approved an amendment to the city charter in 1851 that empowered them to order the draining of the pond.89 “The policy seems to have been to despoil what was really beautiful, and then turn round, at the public expense, with a few thousand or million cart loads of earth fill up some sinks and hollows, quagmires and stinking ponds, in order to ‘lay off a park’ for the recreation and health” of citizens, such as one proposed near Market and Twelfth Streets.90 With a park proposed for part of the former pond site, the minister questioned officials’ decisions about city planning. “What a beautiful park might have been ‘laid off,’ including the ‘Big mound’ as it was!” he declared. “But regrets are vain now—­it is too late.”91 McAnally went on to assert his understanding of the mounds’ origins as created by peoples about whom contemporary tribes knew. “It has been said that since the discovery of America by the whites, no Indians could be found who could give any information in reference to those mounds,” he wrote. “That none were found who would give the information, we admit, but it does not follow that they could not have had they been disposed.”92 The distinction McAnally drew here was an important one, rarely made by white Americans. Further evidence of the besieged state of the Big Mound in 1854 came from Thomas Easterly. In this image of its eastern side (Figure 8.7), Easterly’s composition makes clear that the mound has been dug into with tools, carved away in sections, part of the removal and grading process that was diminishing its size and integrity. A wooden fence separates the mound from the street. In the background, several buildings abut the great monument. As he chronicled the city’s past, Easterly created a rich, indeed unparalleled visual record of the rapid and irreversible changes altering the urban landscape of St. Louis.93 The views he created of the Big Mound, including this one, remain eloquent as evidence of the past and indictment of an era.

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Fig. 8.7: Big Mound, Fifth and Mound Streets, Thomas M. Easterly, half plate daguerreotype, c. 1854. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Real estate development in Big Mound’s vicinity was inexorable. In 1856, the Big Mound itself was announced as for sale. The Neuer Anzeiger des Westens listed “the undivided half of a lot, containing four arpens, including in part the big Mound, extending east from the two by forty arpens lot sold” recently.94 In early June 1857, “S.V. Papin & Bro” placed six notices in the Missouri Republican announcing a sale of twenty-­six land parcels nearby, proclaiming the “Splendid Business Property!!! Broadway Lots!!!” to be auctioned.95 “These lots are centrally situated, in great traveled thoroughfares, in a densely built district, near

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the river and the city terminus of the North Missouri Railroad,” with the Broadway lots “in the vicinity of the Big Mound, and the others on the streets adjoining.” 96 “Carts-­Carts-­Carts” for sale: “they can be seen at the Big Mound” in “North St. Louis.”97 An advertisement in 1859 for a two-­story brick building identified the “nearly new” building as located “on Brooklyn street, near and immediately west of the Big Mound—­ excellent neighborhood.”98 Big Mound and Sugarloaf Mound remained significant local landmarks and boundary points in property disputes in the 1850s. In one case, the City of Carondelet vs. the City of St. Louis, the plaintiffs argued that in 1794, during the Spanish era, the government ordered inhabitants of both communities to meet at Sugarloaf mound, “a noted monument.” There, the official surveyor, “Don Antonio Soulard,” ran a line from “the said Mound,” to define Carondelet’s common fields, which St. Louisans encroached upon.99 Big Mound functioned as an important legal and physical construct through the 1850s, when long-­term land disputes led to a case that came before the Missouri Supreme Court in 1857. According to the filing, in 1822 Pierre Chouteau had agreed to sell land that began at the river and extended back so far “as to embrace the big mound.” An 1818 deed from Pierre Chouteau to A. P. Chouteau conveyed “a piece of land lying and situated at the place called la grange de terre” and further that Pierre Chouteau had acquired lands belonging to Joseph Brazeau which “comprised all the mound called the ‘grange de terre,’” the northernmost part of land granted to him by Charles DeHault Delassus in 1799 and surveyed by Antoine Soulard in 1803.100 In May 1859, a large sale of land around the Big Mound took place, signaling the opening of further development to its immediate north. Its “eligibility . . . for business, residence or manufacturing purposes,” proximity to the wharf, the North Missouri Railroad depot, and “the many permanent and substantial improvements in the various localities around which the property to be sold” made the sale unmissable. The land embraced all of what was described as the “Chambers, Christy and Wright’s Addition,” with boundaries of the Mississippi to the east, “the vicinity of the Big Mound” to the south, “on the west by the Reservoir, and on the north by the Rock Branch, within which limit not less than twenty thousand persons now reside.”101 Many other lot sales in the

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vicinity of the Big Mound took place in the 1850s and 1860s, with real estate auctions advertised repeatedly in the press.102 As the city engulfed the mounds, St. Louisans invoked the mounds as symbols for their enterprises and as part of civic identity. In 1853, Balmer and Weber offered “Mound City Waltzes” as new music for the Christmas holidays.103 An advertisement for a panorama in 1853 suggested that it would “rather astonish the good people of the Mound City.”104 Mound and Mound City became more common as part of business names as the mound precinct was developed. The Mound Flouring Mills, for example, was located “nearly opposite the Big Mound”; it made headlines in September 1851, when an apparent act of arson destroyed it.105 In 1854, the city directory included Mound Brewery, Mound City Exchange, Mound Engine House, Mound Market, and Mound School.106 Mound Methodist Church and Mound Hotel also stood nearby.107 Several of these were concentrated along Broadway, which ran through the mound district and along the northern side of the Big Mound. In 1857, Mound City brand cured hams evoked the mounds with dozens of advertisements in the pages of the Daily Missouri Republican.108 Given the proliferation of businesses in the neighborhood, it is not surprising that in 1858, one author declared that the time had arrived when the Big Mound would be “destroyed by the influence of industry.”109 Some who used the “Mound City” nickname heralded the leveling of the mounds as a sign of progress. St. Louis mayor John How, for example, celebrated the change. In 1854, delivering remarks during the visit of former President Millard Fillmore, How declared, “We are proud, sir, of that city whose guest you now are. Our pride is not local, but national . . . You will find few traces of its aboriginal type. The mounds have crumbled beneath the touches of civilization. In place of those tumuli we hope to erect the monuments of art and science and freedom. The city of the Mounds gives place (like those who reared them) to the Pioneer City of an advancing civilization.”110 In this statement, How simultaneously invoked the builders of mounds as the first civilized residents, claimed the mounds as part of local history, and cast himself and fellow St. Louisans as the last and rightful heirs to that past. Far from unique to St. Louis, these ideas of “firsting and lasting,” that Jean O’Brien has described so eloquently,

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were widespread in the United States. In his response, Fillmore praised St. Louis and its progress as “the great central city of this Union,” noting that only the completion of the “iron hands” of the railroad, linking the Atlantic and Pacific was needed.111 Unsurprisingly, rail lines and new rail companies were financially supported and sought after in St. Louis and in the state. Indeed, key to the growth and reputation of the city after the Great Fire of 1849 were rail lines, which rapidly transformed the city and state. In 1849, not long after the devastating fire, St. Louis hosted a railroad convention, where Thomas Hart Benton championed a transcontinental railroad linking New York and San Francisco, with St. Louis in the middle, all part of a western transportation empire that would unite Europe and Asia.112 In 1850, the Pacific Railroad was incorporated, with the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad and the North Missouri Railroad incorporated the following year. In 1851, the legislature passed a special act of incorporation and support for the North Missouri Railroad Company “to build, equip and operate a railroad from St. Louis to the State line of Iowa,” as part of the effort to achieve “a perfect scheme of internal improvements.”113 In 1851, construction began on the Pacific Railroad line, starting in St. Louis. The first locomotive of the Pacific Railroad arrived by steamboat in 1852, hauling the first train west of the Mississippi in December, a five-­mile trek from St. Louis to Cheltenham, a village roughly at the intersection of Manchester and Hampton Avenues today.114 In 1855, when the line had reached Jefferson City, an inaugural excursion turned into a disaster when a hastily constructed temporary bridge collapsed and forty-­three people died in the Gasconade River.115 Despite the accident, major rail construction proceeded dramatically during the decade, and Missouri spent more funds on new railroad construction project in the 1850s than any other state, accruing the fourth-­ largest state debt burden as well as nine hundred miles of railroad track by the Civil War.116 Over one hundred railroads had been incorporated by 1861, with the seven receiving state aid laying significant amounts of trackage.117 Enthusiasm for railroads was devastating for the Big Mound and ultimately for public use of space along the riverfront. Rail construction, touted as a means to reach the iron deposits and lead mines south

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of the city, underpin future economic growth, and connect the city to other markets, led to the creation of an industrial corridor along the river, both to the north and south of the central downtown wharf area. During the 1850s, the Pacific, North Missouri, and St. Louis and Iron Mountain railroads laid tracks along routes that ultimately monopolized the riverfront for industry, contributing to manufacturers establishing new businesses, from foundries and chemical works to machine and woodworking shops.118 The exact routes through the city, debated and controversial at the time, served to enrich private individuals, when railroad directors opted for riverfront space that generated huge land-­ damage payments, with compensation of fine hundred to five thousand percent more than the value of properties.119 In the case of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, pressure from stockholders who owned riverfront land led the board of directors to reject routes recommended by engineers; in addition, all but one of the board of directors held substantial riverfront landholdings.120 In short, personal profit dependent on land speculation clearly outweighed common sense and the long-­ term public good in the location of rail track. As Andrew Hurley has argued, civic and business leaders in St. Louis welcomed the railroad as contributing to public growth, even as individuals put personal profit ahead of public interest, with the result that railroads consumed land along the Mississippi, removing the property from the public domain, leaving “later generations to mourn the loss of the St. Louis riverfront.”121 The future captured the imagination of city leaders who embarked on a headlong race to lay tracks and embrace economic development. Notwithstanding the campaign to preserve the Big Mound, the past seemed of little import. At the same time, grave dangers and terrible losses approached on the horizon. In Missouri, a pivotal slave state in the antebellum era, the Dred Scott case work its way through the legal system in the 1850s, eventually moving from the state supreme court to federal court, and finally to the highest court in the land. After the US Supreme Court heard the case in 1857, the majority decision to invalidate the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and declare African Americans ineligible for citizenship throughout the country pushed the nation closer to open conflict. In the months leading up to outbreak of the Civil War, St.

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Louis was deeply divided, with paramilitary units of both proslavery Democrats and antislavery groups, armed to the teeth, patrolling the city.122 In May 1861, several days of riots left St. Louisans dead in the streets and factions of pro-­unionists and southern sympathizers at odds. The presence of loyal German immigrants who volunteered helped keep Missouri in Union ranks as well as secure the federal arsenal, the second largest in the US. Though Missouri remained under Union control throughout the conflict, the war years were contentious and unstable. Over eighteen thousand soldiers were treated in Jefferson Barracks medical facilities. By 1865, the Civil War had ended, leaving lasting legacies of bloodshed, loss, and bitterness. Expanses of the South lay in ruins, and more than six hundred thousand Americans lay dead, among them forty thousand Black soldiers who served in the US Army. In St. Louis, the war’s end brought large numbers of Black refugees to the city. And though the war was over, there was no end to the political contests or institutionalized racism that fueled it. For Indigenous Americans, the war had other terrible consequences. After 1862, once they were no longer needed to battle the Confederate threat in the West, volunteer reserve Union forces were deployed against Indigenous peoples in coordinated efforts to conquer them and decrease their territories.123 Military enforcement of government policies led to some of the bloodiest US wars against Indigenous people. And beginning in 1868, after the US Army Medical Museum urged medical officers to collect the skulls of Indigenous peoples for craniometric studies, graves of recently deceased Native peoples were desecrated by government order.124 Against this local and national context of war, death, destruction, and desecration in the 1860s, the fate of the Big Mound was decided.

Chapter Nine

The Destruction of the Big Mound As the spring wore on, the schoolboys watched the Big Mound shrink. One day, they saw a large crowd and ran to see what was going on. Workmen had uncovered a large, long-­hidden burial site within the mound. Their pickaxes and shovels exposed skeletons, shells, tools, and ornaments. The scene was mayhem. A reporter described the mound as in the possession of “body snatchers.” Joining the throng, the boys scrambled to grab whatever they could reach. Some kept what they found as “curiosities” to show off. Others gathered “long strings of beads and baskets full of Indian shinbones and broken skulls.” Then, with “the innate sense of American boys for business and speculation,” they stood along Broadway, hoping that passersby would pay a dime or two for a basketful. Many people did stop to buy, and the children pocketed the change. In short order, “parts of Indian skeletons” were scattered across the city. Though the Big Mound had suffered from urban development in the 1840s and 1850s, it still towered, recognizable, above its surroundings. Over several months in late 1868 and early 1869, however, it was leveled, falling to the railroad. Among the witnesses was Thomas Easterly, who photographed the mound as workers carved it up and carted it away.1 Also on hand were reporters, who vividly described the Indigenous remains and funerary goods that lay within. Curiosity seekers and amateur archaeologists seized the moment to test their theories about the mound’s origins and publish their findings. Together, St. Louisans

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created a record that documents how they treated the Indigenous dead as objects and their sacred site as disposable. Among white scientists and writers interested in Native earthworks, both in St. Louis and elsewhere, the mid-­1800s was a period of intense excitement and publication. At an April 1860 gathering of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, lawyer Nathaniel Holmes presented a pottery fragment he found imbedded in the Big Mound, in the “artificial portion” about two feet above the natural surface line. At that point, “the streets in the vicinity of the mound had been cut down to a depth or eight or ten feet below the natural surface,” with “the northern and western portions of the mound” removed to street level. A clear demarcation was visible on the exposed side, with stratified deposits below and soil of an “almost homogenous structure” above indicating the constructed mound. He concluded that the pottery “must have been carried thither by the Indians” and mixed with their building materials.2 In making this statement, Holmes entered into a debate over whether the mound was a built or a natural formation. He noted that ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft and local entrepreneur and museum owner Dr. Albert Koch had “supposed this mound to be a natural formation,” while Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, whose 1848 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley was a landmark study, “had entertained no doubt of its artificial character.” It was clear, Holmes asserted, “that the views of Messrs. Squier and Davis were correct, there could be no reasonable doubt.”3 Squier and Davis’s richly illustrated volume was the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution and its first volume in its Contributions to Knowledge series. The two visited, sketched, and dug into hundreds of Native earthworks in the eastern part of the US, reporting their findings in detail, speculating about the purposes of different kinds of mounds, and asserting that their creators were not the ancestors of contemporary Native peoples but had been members of a distinct, superior race. Within a few years, the mound had been significantly altered. In 1865, the Saint Louis Dispatch declared that the Big Mound was “gradually melting away,” cut in two by the excavation of Bogy Street and the mining of raw materials. On the north side of Bogy, the mound was destabilized by “a series of tunnels, for the purpose of obtaining the sand” beneath a layer of clay. The sand, “an excellent material” for use in

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various industries, was available at “$5 per load,” and the clay made “an excellent brick for building purposes.” The contractor, a Mr. Kimball, had “leased the Mound for ten years, for the clay and sand, which can be got in almost inexhaustible quantities.” In his third year of “undermining the mound,” Kimball complained of the current high cost of labor, as well as a “decreased demand for building material,” which led to the suspension of brick making. In more “prosperous times,” it was estimated, Kimball could manufacture three million bricks annually.4 With commercial enterprises seeming likely to seal the mound’s fate, critics lamented while champions of economic development celebrated. One decried the “grasping, money making spirit of the age” that meant that earthworks were “fast disappearing” and would “in a few years . . . be entirely destroyed.” The reporter noted that the mounds were once “so numerous on the present site of St. Louis as to obtain for the city the designation of the ‘Mound City.’” Already, the nickname had begun to harken to an earlier period, “within the memory of the oldest inhabitants.”5 Labeling the Big Mound an eyesore, the editors of the Daily Missouri Republican called it a “huge lump of yellow dirt,” as “dirt, and nothing but dirt.” Occupying the block between Broadway and Second and Mound and Brooklyn streets, the mound was no longer intact, the mound’s Broadway side being washed away by “the rain alone,” and the side fronting Second Street diminished by a brickmaker. Given the mound’s mass, the writer speculated that changing “the whole Mound of clay into brick,” might take “nearly a century before the whole elevation could be worked down to the present grade of Broadway.”6 Urging private development, he wrote, “The more the whole block is parceled out among various owners, the better the chances are becoming to have the ugly thing removed.” Among the four current owners—­Wm. B. Duncan of New York, the estate of Louis Benoist, Joseph Gartside, and Caspar Gestring, the last had only recently purchased 117 feet of frontage on Broadway for $11,500 and had permitted a “Mr. Wm. Wattingham to dispose of the dirt during the two years and a half to come.” Dirt was worth something, with the “whole Mound . . . worth nearly eighty thousand dollars in its present condition.”7 In the fall of 1868, the pace of soil removal escalated dramatically when employees of the North Missouri Railroad began to excavate the Big Mound in earnest. Announcing that “the ancient land marks are fast

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disappearing and even the Old or Big Mound, from which St. Louis derived its cognomen as the ‘Mound City,’ is being obliterated,” a reporter lay the blame squarely on the railroad. The earth was being “carted away to fill up the holes and gullies over which the iron horse will soon pass on its way to and from the very heart of the city.”8 The magnitude of the effort involved impressed observers, who noted 150 men and sixty teams at work “demolishing that well-­known tumulus of yellow earth known as ‘the Mound.’” The earth was hauled to the spot where the track of the North Missouri Railroad was being extended. Landfill needs would likely “not only consume all the dirt of the Mound, but a large portion of the high ground between Florida street and Cass avenue and Collins and Second streets.” With the rapid progress of the destruction, those “who want to bid good bye” to the earthwork had better “do it during the next two or three weeks.”9 The leveling took five and a half months more. The mound’s removal led to injuries among laborers and onlookers. In early November, Michael Kennedy, a railroad worker, was hurt while digging, thrown fifteen to twenty feet when “a quantity of earth gave way.”10 A few weeks later, a young man standing on top of the mound suffered a severely broken leg when a section collapsed on him; the unnamed man had gone to the mound “with the intention of getting employment.”11 A few days later, laborer Patrick Reardon suffered a broken leg when another part of the mound collapsed.12 Easterly documented the tools of destruction: men, wagons, buckets, and, in the hands of some of the men atop the mound, shovels. One of the Big Mound series shows pickaxes stuck into the sides of the diminished monument.13 During the mound’s removal, the “discovery of interesting remains” deep within it altered the views of those who had persisted in calling it a natural feature. In the early days of the mound’s removal when “large quantities of earth were removed without any discovery being made, people began to regard it as a settled fact that the Mound had nothing human about it.” The situation at the “ugly protuberance” changed dramatically overnight. “Some discoveries have been made which are quite interesting,” a reporter noted. Workers “dug up some human remains—­ part of a thigh bone, a jaw bone, some teeth and a large quantity of beads, also some small bones.” Some beads ended up at the Gen. Lyon engine house, while the human remains “came into the possession” of

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Fig. 9.1: Big Mound, Looking East from Fifth and Mound Streets, Thomas M. Easterly, half plate daguerreotype, 1869. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Fig. 9.2: Big Mound during Destruction, Thomas M. Easterly, half plate daguerreotype, 1869. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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Dr. Scott and Dr. Briggs of the Academy of Science. The location of the remains, “about thirty feet from the top of the mound,” opened “a wide field for conjecture.”14 This discovery prefigured a larger one the following spring. As the removal process went on, more and more people paid attention, including amateur scientists, archaeologists, and historians. In January 1869, the Missouri Historical Society had a meeting focused on the Big Mound and “Some Facts Respecting it.”15 On the agenda was a presentation by former mayor “The Hon. John F. Darby.” Reminiscing about St. Louis history, he recalled a “foot print in limestone rock,” which was taken out and moved to New Harmony, Indiana, and Christmas day 1822, when he first climbed the Big Mound. Then a boy, he “ran up it,” remembering “an undergrowth of vegetation.” Though his timing may have been off—­he was nineteen in 1822—­it is clear that Darby had strong memories of and associations with the mound and local history. Darby shared the story of a fatal duel between Joshua Barton and Tom Rector, which took place “on the second bank or ledge of the Big Mound.”16 After listening to his presentation, members of the society debated the artificial versus natural origin of the mound, and three men were appointed to a committee “to get information about the Mound and obtain some of the relics which had been found for the society.”17 They felt the opportunity to seek artifacts and information could not be missed. During the months of demolition, public commentary included discussion of the presence—­or absence—­of Indigenous peoples, past and present, in the city. Robert D. Sutton, described as an “old citizen,” who “arrived in St. Louis in 1817,” published his memories of the mound.18 He described standing upon its summit “for the last time,” well aware that climbing it would not be possible for much longer.19 Over the previous decades, the place had been transformed. Sutton explained, “The position I now occupy is the top of the ‘Big Mound,’ which is fast being demolished to make a highway for the ‘iron horse’ of the N.M.R.R.,” the Northern Missouri Railroad. As he gazed toward the east and the Mississippi River “rolling on in majestic grandeur to the ocean,” he noticed that its banks had “no curling smoke from the ‘council fires’” nor “whoop from the Indian warrior.” There were “no canoes

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moored at the shore.” In coupling the absence of Native peoples with observations about the changed physical environment, Sutton seemed to imply that Indigenous peoples belonged more to nature than to civilization. “Wherever I turn my gaze,” he wrote, “my eye discovers naught but destruction of the works of nature—­by the too willing votaries of civilization.” Where trees once stood in the thousands, “scarce a spear of grass [was] allowed to grow upon the bosom of mother earth.” In their place was ground stacked with “with huge piles of brick and mortar,” or “packed with wood, stone and cinder, so that it is impossible for vegetable life to exist.”20 An imagined Indigenous past and a belief in an inevitable white demographic takeover shaped Sutton’s tale. Remembering the “old tribes,” Sutton offered a story of “a tradition” that had “existed in those times (fifty years ago).” He claimed that at midnight, frequently, “a tall majestic human form might have been seen walking to and fro on the summit of the Mound.” With folded arms, the “Giant Chief of the Big Mound,” more than six feet tall, slowly paced, “as if in deep thought.” After a time, the lonely figure would stop, gaze toward the river, and then, “in the Indian tongue,” loudly exclaim, “‘They have come! They have come! They have passed the great waters! My people are driven from their homes and the graves of their fathers, and are gone far towards the setting sun.’” Sutton asserted his account was true: “Thus speaks tradition.”21 The story echoes the ghost stories Coll Thrush has explored in Seattle, where Indigenous histories have often been represented as mystical hauntings, in which a Native past gives way to a white urban present; such narratives are a product of colonial imaginations and a phenomenon, Thrush notes, which could not be further from the truth.22 What Sutton did get right was the fact that US expansion had led to forced removals of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and the desecration of their cemeteries. The elegiac tone of Sutton’s nostalgic lament about Native peoples could not have differed more from the letter to the editor printed immediately below it, a call to destroy them. Complaining about obstacles to the expansion of the United States, A.H.K., writing from El Paso, Texas, put white supremacist and genocidal views front and center in “Fight Indians with Railroads.” The author argued that the government needed

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to pursue a new strategy. “It is estimated that the Indian wars of the United States,” A.H.K. wrote, “have cost the general Government five hundred and fifty millions of dollars.” That sum, he believed, could have funded “five transcontinental lines of railroads.” Railroads could “cut off” the possibility of retreats and compel “the Indians to go upon reservations.” In the writer’s view, the benefits of railroads were more than economic: they were weapons for supporting white settlement. “When you penetrate a country by railroad,” he declared, “it immediately settles up with adventurous white men, who band themselves together, strike the Indians a few direct blows, and then the depredations stop; the Indians decamp for other parts.”23 In short, white violence could compel Indigenous peoples to flee their territories. Such jarring juxtapositions of racist, expansionist proposals with laments for a mythic, Native, vanishing past were not unusual or actually at odds. Rather, they were linked by their function, intentional or not, of dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their histories and their lands. These attitudes were not solely vestiges of previous white perspectives on Indigenous peoples. Rather, in an era of aggressive white settlement and seizure of Indigenous lands, they were responses to contemporary events. By the late 1840s, with white Americans crossing the continent, it was clear that Indian removal policies requiring relocation west of the Mississippi, did not offer a permanent solution.24 By the 1850s, the creation of reservations was the preferred federal policy, and coerced government acquisitions of Native territories proceeded apace, prompting Indigenous peoples to defend their lands. Increasingly, they did so against the US Army, which, other than during the Civil War, was primarily involved in fighting Indigenous peoples in the second half of the nineteenth century.25 The US Supreme Court acknowledged that Native peoples held their lands “by right of occupancy,” a “perpetual right of possession . . . from generation to generation”; calling that right “sacred,” the Court called it a “gross breach of the public faith” owed to the Osages when Congress granted Kansas land, including Osage land, for railroad purposes in the 1860s.26 But the problem was that white settlers flat out rejected or ignored the Court’s rulings, moving into Native territories and enlisting military aid when their intrusions met with resistance. Repeated conflicts ensued and escalated into horrific acts of violence

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against Native peoples, as in the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, when Colonel John Chivington led hundreds of US soldiers in an attack on a peaceful encampment, killing and mutilating at least 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, overwhelmingly women and children.27 Reading about the subsequent Congressional investigation, St. Louisans would have learned that the “Cheyenne Indian Massacre” was a “most brutal and unprovoked slaughter of men, women, and children” living “in a state of entire peace with whites.”28 Possession of Native peoples’ lands and their deaths at the hand of white settlers and soldiers proceeded apace as the destruction of their historic architecture in St. Louis progressed. As the demolition of the Big Mound proceeded, Easterly returned to the site repeatedly, photographing the mound’s ever-­shrinking dimensions. Unlike some of the celebratory newspaper coverage, Easterly’s daguerreotypes of the Big Mound convey a somber, even funereal mood, even when there is something triumphalist about those posing in them. Though there is no record to suggest that Easterly saw them as memento mori (a Latin phrase often translated as “remember death” or “remember all must die”), the images call to mind, at least for this author, Victorian-­era photographs of the dead. Popular in the 1800s, memento mori were unsettling works that simultaneously memorialized the deceased and emphasized the inescapability of death. They could be funeral artwork, gravestones, and even works of architecture, in which the symbols served to remind viewers of the universality of mortality. Thus, even as the people in these Easterly daguerreotypes stand upon a historic monument they have destroyed or witnessed being destroyed, so too, one thinks, their lives have ended. Like those Indigenous people whose remains had lain buried within the mound, the individuals pictured are now all long dead, their names lost. For modern viewers, Easterly’s images may prompt surprise at the cavalier attitudes, regret at the destruction, or revulsion at the macabre spectacle of crowds gathered atop a burial site. Another image, too poorly preserved to reprint, shows dozens of people lined up on top of the mound.29 During the final phases of removal in April 1869, news of human remains being uncovered in mounds in both Missouri and Illinois generated both scientific and popular interest. On April 1, the Missouri Republican carried a report of skeletons being exhumed by railroad

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Fig. 9.3: Big Mound Shown Partially Graded, Thomas M. Easterly, half plate daguerreotype, 1869. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

workers in a location that “abounds with Indian mounds” in Illinois. In East St. Louis, employees of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad Company uncovered “a large number of bones.” A professor from the Chicago Academy of Sciences, who happened to be in town, hurried to collect “a complete set of these bones for the benefit of the museum at Chicago.”30 His timing was presented as fortuitous, as if otherwise nothing of scientific value would have been saved. On both sides of the river, the railroad simultaneously led to the desecration of Indigenous cemetery mounds.31 Such mounds mostly met similar fates elsewhere in urban America. In St. Paul, Minnesota, some were destroyed for a rail yard. But other mounds there survived, intentionally preserved, making St. Paul an exception to the rule of destruction.32 Although mounds there were levelled to open a river view when a park was created in the 1880s, six were preserved in the city’s Indian Mounds Regional Park. As the demolition of the Big Mound neared completion in mid-­April, the “work of cutting” garnered “fresh interest” because of discoveries of

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“Graves, Skeletons, and Relics.” At this point, the mound was disappearing rapidly, with “the highest point . . . only about fifteen feet above the street, leaving only a small portion of the eastern slope, adjoining the brick yard, to be removed.” Pronouncing the “The Big Mound Nearly Disappeared” on April 12, the Missouri Republican provided a timeline: “The ‘Big Mound,’ so long known as a land-­mark, in the upper part of the city, is expected to be leveled to the grade of Broadway in about ten days.” Crowds gathered not only to witness the mound’s destruction but to collect what was found within it. One Sunday, “a large crowd of men and children were busy with sticks, hands, shovels and crow bars in exploring for relics.” They found “a skull and various fragments of bones” and “a large quantity of small shells which were gathered up and carried away.” Firemen at the Lyon Engine House took possession of “a very perfect arrow head of white flint.”33 That week, a large burial was uncovered. The Missouri Democrat of April 14 announced that the day before, “workmen unearthed an Indian grave containing human bones, beads, arrow-­heads, &c. A large crowd collected around the relics, and they were all carried away.”34 Most striking was one exhumed skeleton, “which, from the ornaments, found in connection, must have been that of a former chief of considerable distinction.”35 The Neuer Anzeiger des Westens carried the news as well, reporting “an interesting find” at the site, describing “a great chief.”36 In “Discoveries at the Big Mound,” the reporter wondered to whom the “graves, skeletons and relics,” belonged. Expressing the scientific racism of the age, the author “regretted that the skulls have not been taken out more perfect,” citing the wish to compare them to those studied by Dr. Samuel Morton, the noted craniologist, who had come up with the “mean internal capacity of the skulls of the Mound Builders” as 85 cubic inches “while that of the American Indian is 82.” If a comparison had been possible, the author believed, it would have clarified who had constructed the earthwork.37 Echoing Morton, he assumed that modern Indigenous people were inferior to both those who built the mounds and to white Americans. Pseudoscientific theories based on flawed assumptions and suspect data underpinned arguments about Indigenous peoples’ purported inability to assimilate: their presumed inferiority made their disappearance, their “vanishing,” inevitable. Such racist notions served to rationalize US expansionism.38

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At some point during the Big Mound’s leveling, St. Louis physician George Engelmann took possession of the skulls of seven of the people interred there. He subsequently gave them to another physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, of Philadelphia, who in 1892 donated them to the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. They were subjected to the same kind of cranial volume measurements that Morton practiced and are housed to this day at the Mütter, an institution with a vast collection of human remains.39 In the race-­based science of the day, the US government was complicit, with the US Army officials assisting in the process of collecting skulls. An Army Medical Museum established in 1862 was founded to support the study of crania of all races, but soldiers and officers almost exclusively collected the remains of Indigenous peoples between 1865 and 1880.40 After 1868, when the Assistant US Surgeon General directed officers to obtain a series of adult crania representing all major Native nations, military men dug up the skulls of the Indigenous dead, many of them recently killed in encounters with the US Army or the victims of massacres.41 White Americans were obsessed with skulls, and other bones, obtaining them, measuring them, and categorizing them. As Ann Fabian argues in The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead, Morton, like other collectors, sought to increase the store of knowledge of human diversity.42 The dead were specimens, with skeletal remains of both the ancient dead and the recently interred equally prized. Among the most avid graverobbers in the mid-­1800s were medical men, who dug up fresh cadavers for anatomical study. Andrew T. Still, who founded the first osteopathy school in Kirksville, Missouri, admitted, “I became a robber in the name of science. Indian graves were desecrated and the bodies of the sleeping dead exhumed in the name of science.”43 He was tireless in his quest: “Indian after Indian was exhumed and dissected, and still I was not satisfied.”44 Trying to quell “the qualms of conscience,” he noted that “the dead Indians never objected to being object-­lessons for the development of science” and that “their relatives knew nothing about it.”45 The latter statement was patently false, then and now, with relatives of the Indigenous dead complaining of the mistreatment and thefts, as did Black Hawk’s family after his remains were stolen in 1839.46 Before

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his death, the Sauk leader had underlined the importance of Indigenous burial sites, declaring that there was “no place like that where the bones of our forefathers lie.”47 Yet contemporary white scientists, archaeologists, curiosity seekers, and others, like Still and Morton, sought the bones of Indigenous peoples, with the result that huge numbers of their remains ended up in museums and private collections. Skulls were used as the basis for broad generalizations about different groups of people, informed by theories that rested upon racist assumptions.48 Just as contemporaries debated the identity of the mound builders, so, too, did they continue to question the origin of the mound itself. A lengthy newspaper analysis of the burial chamber and the mound’s construction appeared on April 18. Its gripping lead: “The crisis in the demolition of this ancient and mysterious landmark was reached on Tuesday evening [April 13] by the discovery of a large quantity of human remains far below the surface of the earth.” Author James M. Loring, a lawyer, noted that observers had mixed reactions to the news: “the zealous advocates of the natural formation theory were somewhat stunned by this, to them, unexpected denouement.” Among such artificial construction deniers, “their confusion has only increased as the excavations were continued, in proportion as the relics found augmented in number, variety and extent, until the final developments showed a tier of remains 18 feet in breadth and 70 feet in length, situated 25 feet below the former surface of the mound.” There, each skeletal remain was “placed in a reclining position, east and west, with the head toward the east.”49 Loring pointed out, with no little irony, recent scholarly pronouncements declaring the mound a natural formation. Several weeks earlier, Professor Spencer Smith had delivered a presentation to the members of the St. Louis Academy of Science, “afterwards published with their approval,” in which he claimed that the Big Mound was the work of nature and that no human hands had played a role in its creation. In arguing for the mound’s creation through “natural causes,” Smith expressed doubt that there was any design behind it. “It would puzzle the most imaginative antiquarian to find a motive powerful enough to induce a nation to expend so much labor as must have been required to heap up this vast mound of earth,” he claimed. Moreover, the ornaments

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found were not at all “remarkable specimens.”50 After rehearsing Smith’s arguments, Loring noted that the professor’s natural formation theory prevailed among the science academy’s members. Drawing on records of property disputes and land surveys, Loring presented his alternative view. He explained that the Big Mound had possessed “a regularly defined outline and base” and had stood thirty-­five feet “from the grade of the adjacent street.” At the time of the levelling, “four different homogenous strata,” were visible from the street “but hardly distinguishable on a closer examination”; the top three were “dark in color,” the “earth easily separated and thrown down by the heavy pointed iron bars which were thrust into them.” All of the human remains, except one from a burial within living memory, were found “25 feet below a horizontal line drawn from the top, in a long trench or grave dug 4 feet deep in the original clay, by 18 feet wide and about 70 feet long.” The western side of the grave was “distinctly defined” and showed “the marks of the instruments used in its construction.”51 At the scene, Loring grabbed some bones and artifacts and later described the notable finds. He took hold of and measured a femur, the longest bone in the human body, and also carried home a piece of blanket which he thought appeared scorched. What he considered to be “some of the most interesting relics”—­soon in the possession of firemen at the Mound engine house across from the mound site—­ were two identical copper objects that lay on either side of the skull of one set of human remains.52 St. Louisan Thomas Tillot Richards, treasurer of the Missouri Zinc Company, wrote about the masks to the American Naturalist, which published his note in 1870. Richards enclosed with his letter “a perforated shell disk and an oblong bead.” Back in St. Louis, he retained “a lock of long hair which was on one of the skulls; I also obtained from the same head two copper ornaments, shaped alike, which were behind the ears and beneath which were the oblong beads, one of which is enclosed.” He added that he also had in his possession “two large conch shells” which were “also found.”53 Richards’s description of these human remains and funerary goods as “found” or “obtained” serves as yet another illustration of the extent to which such acts were framed as scientific rather than destructive.

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A photograph of these long-­nosed god maskettes eventually made its way to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, but what happened to the masks themselves is unknown; Richards committed suicide in 1881.54 The long-­nosed god maskettes he took were the first of eleven known long-­nosed god maskettes removed from Indigenous burial sites from Wisconsin to Florida.55 Copper beads around the neck of the same individual were found as well, in addition to perforated shell beads from the Atlantic or Gulf, at one point clearly strung together. The funerary items around the remains of the elite figure, as well as the depth of the burial all constituted “a fatal objection to the sandbar theory” proposed by artificial construction deniers. In closing, Loring added his view that “the history of the human race is yet to be written, and the men of antiquity are yet [t]o have justice done them.”56 The unearthing of the human remains and funerary objects that so enthralled Loring prompted an effort to preserve the artifacts. Several men approached the new mayor, Nathan Cole, in office only a few days, to urge him to take action. At their suggestion, Cole “addressed a note” to the president of the Historical Society, James H. Lucas, suggesting “that as numerous relics, important to science, were being unearthed at the Big Mound, and would be irrevocably lost unless some arrangement were made for their preservation, he would second any efforts tending to secure that result.” In reply, Lucas “said that he would consult with the owners in relation to the matter.” The report indicated that it was “probable that a police officer [would] be detailed to protect such remains that may be exhumed.” For the past week, a “crowd of body snatchers and relic gatherers” had “held possession of the Mound.”57 Among the crowd that April was artist and enthusiastic amateur archaeologist Alban Jasper Conant. Best known for an 1860 portrait of Lincoln, Conant opened the Western Academy of Art, a gallery in St. Louis, after settling there in 1857.58 He also avidly excavated Indigenous earthworks in the region, including the Big Mound, publishing his findings, and joining the Academy of Science. It was an age in which the methods of archaeology differed dramatically from those of even a few decades later, and a lack of professional training did not bar amateurs from its pursuit or prevent them from speculating wildly about what

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they found; at the first meeting of the Academy of Science, in 1856, the fifteen members in attendance included seven physicians, three lawyers, and three professors.59 Conant presented himself as an expert on mounds and burials and as an eyewitness to the final stages of the destruction of the Big Mound. In his 1879 book, Foot-­prints of Vanished Races in the Mississippi Valley, and his section on archaeology in Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, from 1541 to 1877, also published in 1879, he provided a purportedly firsthand account of the discoveries.60 He contrasted the discovery of a relatively superficial burial site of two skeletal remains on the Big Mound, three feet deep, with that of the April grave find. The former, he noted, were recent burials, and though not present when they were uncovered, he had been given—­and kept—­the skulls, leg bones, other artifacts, and a lock of hair.61 More important were the remains uncovered that April. As its leveling neared, Conant made a “final visit to the mound,” which he considered the “most interesting of all.” On the night before his visit, “the workmen had made a vertical cut directly across the northern end of the small portion of the work which yet remained.”62 According to Conant, who claimed to have examined the site, the cut revealed a cross-­section of the mound, exposing the northern end of a sepulchral chamber. Conant wrote that the chamber had vertical walls, overlaid with a roof of “heavy timbers” and dirt above. In Paradigms of the Past: A History of Missouri Archaeology, Michael O’Brien challenges Conant’s account, noting that there were no timbers recovered and that Conant’s description of the long-­nosed god maskettes was less detailed than a newspaper account published at the time of their recovery.63 Whether Conant’s account is altogether accurate or not, it does evoke the drama of the discoveries and local, public reaction to them. The process of dismantling the mound and uncovering the burial site was a violent, tool-­driven one. According to Conant, the human remains were “disclosed, several at a time, as the laborers detached long, vertical sections of earth by the simultaneous use of crowbars inserted at the top.” Around the bones “were beads and shells in prodigious numbers.”64 Most of the skeletal remains had such quantities of shell beads that Conant

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speculated “that the bod[ies] from the thighs to the head must have been covered with them.” Conant began to dig into the Big Mound himself, “being very desirous of securing, if possible, a perfect skull, or at least the fragments from which one might be reconstructed.” He “began a careful excavation with a common kitchen knife near the feet of a skeleton, following the spinal column to the head.”65 With some dismay, Conant reported that his work was interrupted by a “crowd of eager boys from the neighboring schools, who scrambled for the beads which were thrown out with every handful of earth, with such energy” that he was lifted off his feet “and borne away.” Undeterred by this mêlée from pursuing his prize, Conant sought out “the aid of a burly policeman.” With the officer’s intervention, he was able to finish his excavation, “but without being able to secure what was so much desired.” To Conant’s disappointment, “The bones were so much decayed, when the roof fell in, that all the larger bones were crushed, and only small fragments of the skull could be obtained.”66 Conant’s somewhat breathlessly reported this incident, casting himself as the heroic figure who persevered in the pursuit of science. He was supported in his endeavor by the police officer, the embodiment of the state and its power. In his view, the two fought side by side against the disorder caused by thoughtless young boys. For today’s readers, Conant’s report of his activities at the mound in April 1869 may be shocking in its ignorance and arrogance. “If any other deposit had been made with the dead, save the before-­mentioned beads and shells,” he declared, “the tomb must have been desecrated by some savage who had no regard for its sacred character.” That rather remarkable statement shows that he did not view himself as a vandal desecrating a tomb. Rather, Conant’s remarks reveal his sense that he had the right to engage in such actions. In this regard, he had much in common with the countless numbers of white Americans who excavated Indigenous cemeteries, took human remains and sacred funerary objects, and displayed them. Profound racism informed Conant’s imaginings of a “savage” desecrating the burial site of the Big Mound as an explanation why “not a vestige of anything else was disclosed at the time of its demolition.”67

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Fig. 9.4: Big Mound during Destruction. The Last of the Big Mound, Thomas M. Easterly, half plate daguerreotype, 1869. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Before the month had ended, the mound was no more. Easterly captured some of the last moments. On April 27, 1869, the “last shovelful of earth which composed the Big Mound was taken away.”68 The German-­language Neuer Anzeiger des Westens printed an article on “Der Mound,” which summed up the news bluntly: “The Mound is now gone.”69 Newspapers in other cities, including the Chicago Tribune, carried the news as well, with articles reprinted from St. Louis papers.70 The Missouri Republican declared “The Mound Gone,” and the reporter informed the public that “the place where the huge Indian sepulchral hill stood is now on a level with Broadway and the adjacent streets.” Describing the last moments of the demolition, the newspaper writer minimized the art, engineering, and skill of the mound’s builders. He compared the mounds unfavorably to the pyramids of Egypt, saying, “These mounds, at best, were only an imitation of nature,” in contrast to the monuments of the Nile, which he declared required “a very advanced state of mechanical perfection.” The lack of an organized archaeological

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dig was, he thought, revealing. He claimed that a lack of scientific interest in the mound’s contents demonstrated its unimportance: “The spade and shovel of the diggers were neither guided nor controlled by any scientific hand, and a few private individuals alone showed an interest in collecting a few human bones and the innumerable shell-­beads dug out of the immense mausoleum, whilst the general superintendence of the whole antiquarian interest was left entirely to schoolboys.” 71 “Schoolboys” collecting and selling the artifacts of the Big Mound did not trouble the writer as much as the lack of organized scientific inquiry did. Motivated by “childish curiosity” and “the innate sense of American boys for business and speculation,” schoolboys of the neighborhood had crowded the site. “The diggers were constantly surrounded and often hindered in their labor by hundreds of urchins,” a reporter wrote. They collected “beads and bones, to either keep them or sell them as curiosities,” and then stood along Broadway “with long strings of beds and baskets full of Indian shinbones and broken skulls, offering them, according to the quantity they had collected, at from ten to twenty cents a lot.” As a result, “parts of Indian skeletons are now scattered over the whole city.” The author claimed he was not criticizing “anybody whose duty it may have been to look into the matter.” Rather, he thought it important to “record the astonishing antiquarian interest shown by the school children of this city during the removal of the Mound, in comparison to which the activity of our scientific men was less than significant.” When he had witnessed a construction project for a European railroad, “a legion of geologists” were always on hand. His remarks dripping with sarcasm, the author suggested that if, without organized scientific exploration, archeological knowledge had been gained during “the digging down of such an ancient monument as the Mound,” he would “willingly retract whatever, in this obituary of the ‘Big Mound,’ may be construed into reproach of our savants.”72 The final days of the Big Mound also witnessed the countdown toward completion of the first transcontinental railroad, a coincidence that serves as a reminder that the birth of the railroad signaled the death of the mounds. As Spencer Smith wrote for the Academy of Science, “This remarkable feature in the topography of the city has disappeared; it succumbed to the irresistible spirit of the railroad.”73 On April 26, the Missouri Republican printed railroad news from the west.

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A special correspondent reported that “the hands of San Francisco and St. Louis and the Eastern cities are almost joined!” Jubilantly, the writer continued, “I write this letter in the expectation that it will appear in the REPUBLICAN within nine or ten days from date. We are looking towards you earnestly and eagerly, and some of us are thinking about taking a little run over to the Mound City in a few weeks to see for ourselves what is going on.” The “approaching completion of the Pacific Railroad” was celebrated as both a national and a local triumph, heralding an age of transcontinental trade and communication.74 The final spike was ceremoniously driven into place in Utah Territory on May 10, not quite two weeks after the Big Mound was razed. In the aftermath of the mound’s loss, opening graves to make way for the progress of railroads continued. In May 1869, the city permitted ground above streel level near Grace Church “to be used to build the continuation of the North Missouri Railroad to the Elevator, an enterprise which, together with the Big Mound, levelled some of the highest ground in the city.” Digging the street around the abandoned graveyard unearthed human remains: “A great many graves also were laid open, so that old coffins and bones of the dead are everywhere sticking out.” The rector collected the bones and ordered them “to be decently buried in a common grave.”75 In response to this development, “the ladies of the parish, fully appreciating this sad condition of things,” organized a fund for “terracing the ground and providing for the contents of the graves which are now laid open and which, by subsequent digging, may be disturbed,” including the construction of a vault for “the bones of the dead.”76 No similar effort was directed toward reinterring those disturbed in the destruction of the Big Mound. After the Big Mound was razed, some visitors sought out the site, and newspapers reported its state. “Where once stood” the Big Mound, “now stands a big wood-­pile, surrounded by a tall fence.”77 In May 1869, a professor, Albert B. Hager, the State Geologist of Vermont, passed through St. Louis. In town for a day, “He visited, with Prof. Spencer Smith, the damaged library of the Academy of Science, the site of the Big Mound, the Mercantile Library, and left last evening for Carthage, Mo., to examine the lands of that section.”78 The list of sites suggests that locations noted for their scientific merit or potential to contribute to the

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state of knowledge had some stature among academics. The library had been damaged by fire, and among the losses were artifacts from the Big Mound. Criticism of the local scientific community continued in the aftermath of the mound’s destruction and was highlighted in August 1869, when the Missouri Republican published a brief piece, entitled, “Quasi-­ Scientific.” On this occasion, the author sarcastically characterized the schoolboys as “scholastic philosophers” who were “occupied in collecting the Indian bones and other antiquities buried under that hill. What they could carry away in their breeches pockets was taken home and put in the cabinets of these juvenile naturalists.” Critically, the author noted, “Under the superintendence of a scientific society not a single skeleton was saved, nor anything done in a scientific manner to ascertain either the age or the race of those whose bones were found beneath the top of the hill in a long and regularly shaped trench.” At least, that is what the writer believed. “At any rate, if any of our scientific societies did anything of the kind, it has been carefully hidden from the public, and up to this date no report of it has appeared in the public prints.”79 The reason for this piece is not clear; why would the author bring it up again? Clearly, in the author’s view, scientists were not living up to their responsibilities. Either the author did not know of scientists’ presence as the Big Mound was leveled or did not consider their actions adequate. Beyond the human remains and funerary goods destroyed and taken by members of the public, their final locations unknown, there were others that ended up in scientific institutions and museums, where some remain to this day. Some became part of the Academy of Science’s collections at the time. In November 1868, Dr. C. E. Briggs presented a “small collection of human bones and Indian beads, made of bone, taken by himself from the Big Mound.”80 In late April 1869, Dr. Friedrich Adolph Wislizenus, vice-­president of the society, “presented for the Museum a string of shell discs (Indian beads), found in the excavation of the Big Mound.”81 Less than three weeks later, when fire broke out, the library was damaged but not entirely ruined, while the collection, including, presumably, human remains and beads from the Big Mound, as well as a pottery fragment removed from the Big Mound and donated to the society in 1860, were destroyed.82 At the Saint Louis Science

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Center, a human bone and perforated shell disk beads taken from the Big Mound became part of the museum’s collections in 1943, when donated as part the Whelpley Collection of Indian Artifacts; these human remains and funerary goods were scheduled for repatriation to the Osages in July 2023.83 Other materials from the Big Mound, primarily shell beads, remain at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Regret over the destruction of the Big Mound and the loss of its contents lingered among scientists and historians. A decade later, members of the Missouri Historical Society described “the disjointed efforts made to collect relics.”84 That a small number, in possession of the society, lay in a “cigar box,” suggests their handling of artifacts was disorganized at best according to their own standards.85 They clearly considered that failure a lasting source of embarrassment, even mortification. The shame came not from guilt or regret over the desecration of Indigenous graves but from a sense of injured civic pride. The society’s Committee of Archaeology thought it humiliating that relics and remains from the Big Mound were no longer in St. Louis. Those interested in their study had to visit the Smithsonian or the Peabody, or go even further afield to the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury, England, “to find proper collections of our prehistoric remains.”86 Their sense of ownership in “our prehistoric remains” is clear. The Big Mound, the human remains interred within its huge burial chamber, and the sacred funerary objects were all part of an identity and a history claimed by the inhabitants of the self-­styled “Mound City,” part of their modern history and culture. They saw the history of the city as distinct and separate from what it truly was: an intertwined tale of early and recent Indigenous histories, US urban development, and Indigenous dispossession and removal.87

Chapter ten

Writing the Afterlife of the Mounds In his 1870 book, the professor described the summer of 1824, when prominent men from many tribes came to St. Louis by canoe to see William Clark and camped “on the river bank between Green street and Bremen, then occupied by but five houses.” Recalling “these friendly visits” as continuing throughout Clark’s life, the local historian declared that they had “entirely ceased” after the official’s death in 1838. The St. Louis where “the Indians” could be seen was no more. If today’s residents spotted “a similar group walking through the streets of St. Louis,” he thought, the visitors would “attract as much attention as a herd of camels, so rapidly have the Indians since that period retired and given place to civilization and improvement.” Throughout the late 1800s, articles on the “Indian problem” and violent clashes between whites and Indigenous peoples appeared regularly in the St. Louis press. While the US-­Indian Wars took place far from St. Louis, the ongoing conflicts provided the backdrop for white St. Louisans’ understandings of the present moment. In the immediate aftermath of the leveling of the Big Mound, local writers ruminated on the city’s past and future. Some local boosters began to recall the Big Mound nostalgically, while others discounted both the place of the mound and that of Native peoples in the city’s history. Overwhelmingly, white artists, writers, politicians, military leaders, and many others in St. Louis and across the nation continued to insist that Indigenous peoples were dying out, even when vital statistics gathered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs beginning in 1874 revealed a trend of births exceeding 225

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deaths.1 While the fiction of the Vanishing Indian flew in the face of the evidence, the theory persisted, shaping public opinion among white Americans, and playing a vital role in debates over government policies directed at Indigenous peoples.2 This chapter explores how these varied strands informed writings about Indigenous peoples, mounds, and St. Louis history in the late 1800s. Crucially, the central myth of the Vanishing Indian flourished into the closing years of the century, despite—­or perhaps in part because of—­the post-­Civil War militarization of government dealings with Indigenous peoples. As Walter Johnson damningly suggests, “Emancipation in the East was shadowed at every step by imperialism in the West, as if the laws of the settler republic, or at least the racial prerogatives of the ‘white man’s country,’ required that every step toward Black freedom be compensated with a step toward Indian annihilation.”3 In 1871, US legislators passed a law prohibiting further treaties between the US government and Indigenous nations. In 1874, US Army headquarters were moved to St. Louis, a move designed to facilitate wars against Native peoples.4 With efforts to confine Indigenous peoples to reservations falling under the authority of the US Army’s Department of the Missouri, armed encounters happened regularly and with disastrous results for tribes. Many Army officers believed that “Indians were doomed to vanish, and the mission of the military was to manage this inevitable disappearance and stamp out any remaining resistance.” Labeling Indigenous peoples as criminals or insurgents rather than sovereign peoples opened the door to horrific violence, including that directed toward non-­combatant women and children.5 According to the prize-­winning essays on the “Indian question” in the 1881 Journal of the Military Service Institution, there was no autonomous Indigenous future, Native peoples were doomed, and it was up to the military to oversee their demise, whether through warfare or “civilizing” measures directed at captured Native warriors.6 These views seemed to predominate over the optimism that briefly marked postwar government reforms in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, during a moment when an Indigenous man headed the government agency. Ely S. Parker, a Seneca leader, friend of Ulysses S. Grant, and Civil War general, was named the first Native commissioner by Grant in 1869.

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Fig. 10.1: Col. Ely S. Parker, photograph by Mathew Brady, c. 1860–1865. National Archives and Records Administration.

Parker hoped to establish permanent peace between the government and various tribes through reforming the agency, tackling corruption, and protecting land rights. His two-­year tenure did not bring the changes he hoped to see, and it also found him the target of baseless charges of corruption. Unable to secure membership or a voice for Native men on a new Board of Indian Commissioners or pursue his reform agenda in the face of efforts by white policymakers intent on promoting confinement and assimilation, Parker resigned in 1871.7 The era of formal treaty making between the United States government and Indigenous nations ended that year as well. White Americans’ drive to take over the land, championed by officials and enacted by settlers, lay the basis for assaults on Indigenous lands, communities, and cultures. In the late 1860s, efforts to control Native peoples through removal and reservation policies shifted to a greater emphasis on assimilation programs.8 Boarding schools, begun in the 1870s, were a key vehicle. At the same time, containment and confinement remained policy goals. Reports that the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered increasing pressure on Native peoples to “confine themselves wholly within the limits of their respective reservations” made front page news

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in St. Louis in 1874.9 This decision to place “the Untamed Sons of the Forest” under stringent surveillance constituted a threat. Any Native peoples who moved without explicit permission from the local agent or superintendent, as well as the nearest military commander, who would also provide a military escort, would be “looked upon and treated as hostile.”10 Staying still offered no safety, however. White settlers invaded Native reservations, as was the case with the Osages in Kansas, robbing and pillaging. A government agent recounted white settlers stealing their horses, turning the Osages out of their homes under threat of death, seizing their stores of grain, and pillaging their graves.11 Continued trespasses on Native lands resulted from previous government failures to enforce the laws, according to federal agents, who argued that “squatters still believe that there is no real intention to interfere, and nothing but forcible ejection will undeceive them.”12 Native peoples repeatedly and vocally declared their attachment to their lands and their commitment to stay near and watch over the graves of their ancestors.13 Wars and massacres stained the record of US-­Indian relations. The 1860s witnessed not only the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, but Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer leading soldiers in a deadly attack against a Cheyenne encampment of men, women, and children in 1868.14 War broke out repeatedly, with the Sioux Wars spanning the years from 1854 to 1890. The Great Sioux War began in 1876, when a gold rush in the Black Hills led government officials to seize Sioux lands when the tribe refused to sell their territory. In the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass (also known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand), Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho men resoundingly defeated the US Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment. Soon mythologized, the battle and Custer became part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows.15 Custer’s defeat, commemorated in an Anheuser-­Busch advertisement and painting familiar to many St. Louisans, marked a turning point in the US-­Indian Wars. Afterward, the US government demanded land cessions and threatened to cut off supplies to reservations. In the face of overwhelming governmental and economic pressures, the Sioux ceded territory, unwillingly, and afterward lobbied for the return of their lands for decades; the US Supreme Court eventually heard the case and found that the US government had taken the Black Hills without just

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compensation. After the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 assigned reservation lands to Native heads of households in 160-­acres allotments, all lands not so apportioned—­possibly three-­fourths of all Indigenous territories—­ were labeled “surplus” and designated for whites, who moved westward from St. Louis in the tens of thousands to claim new homesteads.16 In 1890, after the US violated a treaty with them, members of the Lakota tribe joined the Ghost Dance movement, a spiritual revival that began in 1889 and focused on reuniting the living with the spirits of the dead, ending westward expansion, and bringing peace and prosperity to Native peoples. In the midst of escalating tensions in December 1890, five hundred troops of the 7th Cavalry seized weapons from a group of Miniconjou Lakotas that numbered 230 men and 120 women and children. Gunshots broke out, and soldiers turned rapid-­ fire weapons on the Lakotas; as officers lost control of their troops, the slaughter continued, as soldiers chased and killed fleeing women and children. Within an hour, somewhere between 150 and 300 Lakotas lay dead or wounded. General Nelson Appleton Miles, who conducted a subsequent Army Court of Inquiry, deemed Wounded Knee a deliberate massacre. Initial reports in St. Louis characterized the Lakotas as precipitating a fight and resisting disarmament.17 One reporter said it “was almost another Little Big Horn massacre, with the difference that the Indians in the former played the part of the whites in the latter.”18 Two days after the massacre, the Globe-­Democrat called for a probe: “The resolution in the Senate to investigate the killing of Sitting Bull should be amended as to include the butchery of the soldiers on Wounded Knee Creek.”19 Ongoing coverage in St. Louis papers suggested how fraught and contentious discussions of Wounded Knee and the status of Indigenous people were. In “The Indian Problem,” published a week after the event, the Globe-­Democrat assessed the policies involved in the “Management of the Nation’s Wards.” The author noted how General Miles had stirred up a row with his criticisms. By removing the commanding officer, Colonel Forsythe, Miles was acting in a way that would discourage officers from taking “part in negative campaigns.” The article suggested that it was “Eastern philanthropists” who believed that “somebody ought to be rebuked for the wholesale and apparently indiscriminate slaughter of

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Indian men, women and children at Wounded Knee.” Calling Miles’s decision into question, the reporter quoted other officials who claimed that Indigenous women and children were fierce fighters and highly skilled marksmen and that it was impossible for US Army soldiers to distinguish Native women from men by their dress. Blaming Indigenous people for their suffering and discounting their statements that they were starving, the writer argued that only “industrial and other education, in the cultivation of the soil and the raising of stock” would solve “the Indian problem.”20 Such intertwined assumptions about Indigenous peoples’ characters and cultures, coupled with expectations of their inevitable disappearance in the face of equally predestined US expansion, informed how white St. Louisans wrote about their city’s past and future, an arc that consigned Native peoples to the past. In the Fall of 1869, a lengthy, pre-­publication excerpt from Elihu H. Shepard’s History of St. Louis and Missouri appeared on the Missouri Republican’s front page. Shepard, a language professor at St. Louis College (now University), described a time when tribal delegations regularly visited William Clark, camping along the riverfront and performing exhibitions of music and dance in public. Harkening back to the 1820s, Shepard pronounced such days long past, suggesting that seeing Native peoples in the streets of St. Louis would be as surprising as seeing camels. Likening Indigenous peoples to exotic animals, Shepard declared them “primitive” peoples, capable of only “rude” music and dependent on donations from strangers. Shepard treated Native peoples as vanished and construed their absence as positive, giving way to “civilization and improvement.”21 When Shepard touched on the mounds, he minimized their significance, siding with those who denied their human origin. Writing about an Osage chief who was killed and buried on top of the Big Mound in the colonial period, Shepard suggested that the chief ’s remains, “as well as other remains,” were scattered in the recent removal of the mound.22 Shepard’s emphasis on the relatively recent interment, as opposed to older burials, seems intentional. Summing up the Missouri Historical Society’s views on the creation of the Big Mound, Shepard noted that members had “observed its removal, to ascertain” whether it was “the

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work of nature or art,” concluding that “beyond a doubt, that it was the work of nature only.”23 He promoted the falsity of natural construction despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He discounted the artifacts uncovered in the mound as “small, rude and trifling ornaments, made of sea and other shells, bone, clay, and two of copper, .  .  . but nothing that would enrich a cabinet or add anything to science.”24 For him, the Big Mound had been notable primarily as a place with a view, recalling memorable evenings in 1824, when crowds gathered there to watch prairie fires. Describing blazes presumably set by Native peoples, he noted that “the plowman had not controlled and prevented their annual burnings as at this day.”25 The dramatic scenes he evoked, like the Indigenous peoples whose actions he acknowledged, belong to what he presents as a distant, lost past. Where Shepard’s 1870 book surveyed the city’s history and development with marginal acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples, another important 1870 publication, heralding what lay ahead for the dynamic city, had even less coverage. According to the federal census, St. Louis was then the fourth-­largest city in the United States, behind only New York, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.26 Though the numbers were inflated to suit local boosters—­St. Louis census takers reported 310,000 residents only after Chicago’s announced 298,000—­the fraudulent figures stood, and local promoters celebrated.27 Journalist Logan U. Reavis enthused about the nation’s population and economy in Saint Louis: The Future Great City of the World, a popular volume repeatedly reprinted in the 1870s and 1880s and issued in both English and German.28 So enthralled was he with the city’s potential that Reavis urged relocating the nation’s capital to St. Louis. He did not lack supporters. When they gathered at the Mercantile Library in St. Louis in October 1869 to discuss the prospect, twenty-­nine of thirty-­seven state governors backed the proposal.29 In Reavis’s future great city, Indigenous people and their monuments were unimportant. The only reference to the mounds was an inaccurate one, stating that the city’s first reservoir had stood atop the Big Mound.30 The one reference to the “Mound City” did not emphasize its Indigenous significance. In the introduction to the third edition, there was a note from former state geologist G. C. Swallow, who hoped to congratulate

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Reavis on the book in person someday “in the Mound City, when it shall have become the Business Metropolis and the Political Capital of the Nation.”31 Mentions of the “Mound City” moniker became a regular refrain in publications, and the Big Mound’s existence and demolition became touchstones in local interest stories. One such example appeared in a May 1871 letter to the editor. “An Inside View of St. Louis Thirty-­Five Years Ago,” was submitted by “F. W. Southack,” who thought readers might find an account “of the early times in the city” to be “both interesting and profitable.”32 He arrived in the spring of 1837, when the city was “quite picturesque, and somewhat rural.”33 At the time, “beautiful forest trees were on every street, and it was several years that they were permitted to remain, but the encroachments of business finally caused them to disappear.” Southack said he chose to settle in St. Louis after touring other northern states, concluding that “this must inevitably be the great manufacturing and distributing” city of the Mississippi valley.34 Thinking back, Southack remembered the northern reaches of the city as relatively undeveloped in the vicinity of the mounds. Of the earthworks, he singled out the Big Mound as having been “a great place of resort in fine weather for the citizens and strangers; for, at that period, the city could not boast of any parks or squares, and this mound and Chouteau pond were the only public places which could be pointed out to strangers as any worthy of their notice.” Like many others, Southack highlighted the roots of the city’s nickname: “The Big Mound, from whence this city derived its name as the Mound city, was of ancient date and an object of great curiosity.”35 He could have easily been quoting from a January 1871 article on the historical origins of nicknames for cities “more or less celebrated” around the world, such as the Holy City of Jerusalem and the Eternal City of Rome. The author of that piece summed up St. Louis’s claim to fame: “Mound City.—­A name popularly given to St. Louis, Mo., on account of the numerous artificial mounds that occupied the site on which the city is built.”36 In the aftermath of the Big Mound’s destruction, new buildings soon went up. Richard J. Compton and Camille N. Dry’s remarkable visual record of the city as it looked in 1875, Pictorial St. Louis, the great metropolis of the Mississippi valley, shows a birds-­eye view of the metropolis,

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Fig. 10.2: Detail from Plate 45, image 49, showing Mound Market (11), Mound Fire Company No. 9 (13), and a Carriage Factory on the site of the Big Mound (12). From Richard J. Compton and Camille N. Dry, Pictorial St. Louis, the Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley; A Topographical Survey Drawn in Perspective A.D. 1875 (St. Louis: Compton & Co., 1876). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www. loc.gov/item/rc01001392/.

showing buildings, streets, vehicles, and pedestrians. The celebratory tone and rich detail of Pictorial St. Louis captured the forward-­thinking approach of the day, and the images reveal the structures built on top of—­or in the place of—­mounds. The site of the Big Mound held a new, large factory belonging to Caspar Gestring, who had owned property there since 1868.37 Gestring, a German immigrant and one-­time blacksmith, had opened a wagon shop with partner Henry Becker in 1866 at the northeast corner of Broadway and Brooklyn. In 1875, on the southwest corner of the block, they constructed a four-­story building, where the company manufactured hand-­made wagons until 1935.38 In 2009, when the site was excavated, no “intact prehistoric deposits were found, although a handful of prehistoric artifacts were recovered from one of the cisterns.”39 As Pictorial St. Louis suggests, urban development allowed for few concessions to the past. When the Missouri Historical Society mounted the “Saint Louis in the Gilded Age” exhibit at the History Museum in Forest Park in the 1990s, curators Katharine Corbett and Howard Miller selected this 1876 book and Eads Bridge, constructed between 1867 and 1874, as the two “defining relics of Gilded-­Age St. Louis.”40 As Corbett and Miller note, the close timing of the projects was

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more than coincidental; they were both part of an effort to make civic dreams for the future come true, with the bridge the city’s “economic lifeline and civic icon, the book its portrait album and showy ad.”41 An engraving of the city from the early 1870s proclaims the “Mound City” nickname, a few years after the Big Mound was razed, while foregrounding the newly constructed Eads Bridge and the bustling waterfront. To a great extent, St. Louisans celebrated and promoted their city’s economic potential, not their past.

Fig. 10.3: “Mound City” (View of St. Louis from the east), lithograph, c. 1873. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

The future was the focus of the day in 1870s St. Louis, and famed landmarks disappeared, falling victim to new priorities. In April 1870, Chouteau’s Pond, once celebrated for its beauty, partly filled in during the 1850s, was fully filled in. Lamenting its loss, a writer likened it to the Big Mound. “In early time,” he wrote, “it and the ‘Big Mound,’ between Broadway and the river, near Mound street, were the distinguishing features of St. Louis, the pond being the more important and dignified of the two.”42 Given that the article appeared only one year to the week after

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the leveling of the Big Mound was completed, it seems slightly surprising that the author provides the location of the mound, as though readers might not know about it. He also mentioned the pond’s location and lamented how its beauty had long-­since been obscured by its becoming a dumping ground for clay, ash, manure, “garbage, old boots, worn out kitchen utensils, and other nondescript rubbish of a great city.” The fates of these landmarks were seemingly intertwined: “The Big Mound is gone, and the pond has followed it—­the one hacked to pieces and cut down: the other filled up.” In the blink of an eye, the city’s growth had led to the destruction of the traces of its birth and recent past. A consciousness of how the destruction of Indigenous mounds constituted losses to white communities threaded through some contemporary commentary. In June 1871, after the completion of the Springfield and Illinois Southeastern Railroad, which connected Beardstown, Illinois, with St. Louis, a reporter noted that among the points of interest nearby were ten or twelve mounds, “full of bones and relics of the ancient occupants.” But in Beardstown itself, an “old mound erected by the mound builders, which occupied a block, has, like the big mound of St. Louis, nearly disappeared in this money making age.”43 It is no coincidence that in the 1870s, members of the Missouri Historical Society, reportedly troubled by the loss of the Big Mound, responded by establishing a museum and allocating funds for archaeological work.44 Founded in 1866, the organization had been created “for the purpose of saving from oblivion the early history of the city and state but more particularly the city.”45 In 1878, a newspaper article entitled “Re-­Organized” announced an “important meeting of the Missouri Historical Society”: an effort to revitalize an institution that suffered from a lack of public interest, patronage, and activity. Reprinting the initial 1866 call to form a historical society worthy of the age, the reporter listed some of the collections, including 2006 books, three hundred pamphlets, fifty manuscripts, and a number of “curiosities.” Among this list of maps, portraits, and old currency were funerary objects and human remains: “Relics of ‘Big Mound,’ bones, arrowheads, etc., in cigar box” and “Relics of the Big Mound (small bones).”46 The lack of detail in the description, combined with the cavalier handling—­stored in a cigar box—­testifies to their treatment by non-­native scientists and history enthusiasts as possessions and objects of scientific curiosity; the fate of the human remains is unknown.

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In the 1870s, the destruction of the region’s Indigenous past generated regular newspaper copy with an emphasis on scientific knowledge. In “The Relics of a Lost Race,” J.F.S., of Virginia, Illinois, surveyed the range of published opinions about the mounds’ origins for readers whom he assumed were “by this time familiar with the locations and general appearance” of the mounds, as well as the artifacts that could “be seen in all our public museums and private collections.”47 The author was likely noted physician and archaeologist Dr. John Francis Snyder. Reputedly born in a house atop a mound—­Square Mound in St. Clair County, Illinois—­in 1830, Snyder grew up in Belleville, Illinois, eleven miles southeast of the Cahokia mound site.48 Recently, he wrote, the destruction of mounds in and around St. Louis had exposed bones and artifacts that were inspiring “new inquiries in the field of our country’s ethnology and archaeology.” Snyder’s phrasing underlines how students of archaeology viewed the Indigenous past: it was part of “our country.”49 Snyder and others were deeply concerned with scientific reputations, believing they could bolster the city’s fame. Clearly riffing on Reavis’s book, Snyder praised developments indicating that “St. Louis must be the ‘future great city’ of the Mississippi Valley.” But there was a limit to his admiration. St. Louis was falling behind Chicago despite having been “the emporium of western commerce, the headquarters of all military operations in the Indian territories; the out-­fitting point and rendezvous of mountaineers, trappers and fur-­ traders.” Given such significance, the city’s location and importance should have resulted in different outcomes. “For half a century St. Louis could have enjoyed an exclusive monopoly in collecting from the western half of our continent facts and specimens in every department of natural history,” he insisted. Mastodon bones and other fossils “should have remained forever in St. Louis,” but they were sold to outsiders. Other valuable collections had ended up in Chicago. “Thus St. Louis has, with shameless indifference,” he concluded, “let pass unnoticed the golden opportunities of making herself what she should be, the centre of learning and chief patron of science in the Mississippi valley.”50 But it was not only natural history that had been neglected; the region’s human history had been overlooked as well.

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Snyder called out the connections between St. Louis and the histories of Indigenous peoples pointedly, condemning the dismissive attitudes of contemporaries. “St. Louis is in the centre of the ancient Indian empires of this valley,” though contemporary tribes, he wrote, had moved hundreds of miles away “and are in rapid process of extinction.” Despite an evident Native past and what he characterized as an endangered Indigenous present, St. Louisans had done little. Snyder declared, “Your city contains no respectable repository to preserve the traditions, manners, customs, arts or crania of the vanishing race.” He claimed that “no authorized commission” from the city had produced “any reliable” written description or pictorial depiction of them “or even collected the curious relics their destruction discloses.” The losses were irreversible: “The ‘Big Mound’ in St. Louis, and others in East St. Louis, have been shoveled down and carted away, and the many strange implements and osseous remains they contained have been carried off and scattered over half a dozen states.” As a result, “the history of these mounds, as revealed by their structure, ingredients and contents, has been lost to science, at least so far as your city is concerned.”51 Snyder’s concerns had nothing to do with the priorities, beliefs, or concerns of Indigenous peoples, for whom the practices he extolled were acts of sacrilege, grave-­robbing, and theft. Roundly criticizing scientific endeavors in the city as inadequate, Snyder acknowledged some recent efforts. He noted the founding of the Academy of Science in 1857, and how, with “few workers, this institution has bravely struggled with the ravages of civil war and a destructive conflagration” to sustain “a feeble and unpromising organization.” Snyder added that the state’s best natural history collection had been destroyed in 1863 “by the accursed vandalism of an Iowa regiment of volunteer patriots.”52 The conflagration he referred to was the devastating fire in May 1869, which destroyed the entire collection, including objects from the Big Mound. Snyder called upon St. Louisans to step up to support a science institution. He closed with a plea: “Cannot some man of wealth be found in your midst who will follow the magnificent example of Mr. Henry Shaw, and donate to the city for the use of the Academy of Science a commodious fire-­proof building for the safe-­keeping of the museum,

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library and archives of that institution?”53 Interestingly, Snyder assembled his own museum, the contents of which were sold in 1911 “for a fair price to parties in St. Louis”; he also helped establish the Illinois State Historical Society, founded in 1899.54 At the society’s first meeting in 1900, he urged the preservation of Illinois’s “antiquities” and state aid to support their investigation.55 Repeatedly, he and others hearkened to the theme of preservation for the sake of academic science; they claimed the Indigenous past as their own. Other mound enthusiasts and archaeologists added to the chorus of those extolling the mounds when destruction of monumental earthworks took place across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis. In 1870 and 1871, the large Cemetery Mound in East St. Louis, comparable in size to the Big Mound, was removed, its fate similarly tied to railways. The East St. Louis mound group, numbering possibly as many as forty-­five, had been reduced to fifteen by 1870.56 In December 1870, a reporter recorded “the finding of large quantities of human bones, ancient vessels, ornaments, and implements in the mound. . .now being leveled, and the earth used in filling the trestle-­work of one of the new railroad tracks across the old slough east of Bloody Island.”57 Workmen “dug up the bones of three races buried in the mound,” the coffins of whites recently interred in the cemetery on the summit; “the bones of Indians, with skulls entire,” from roughly a hundred years ago the author guessed; and “the remains of the ancient race of mound-­builders, much decayed.” What happened next reflected the ingrained scientific racism of the day: the remains of whites received dignified reinterment while those of Indigenous peoples were abused “in a manner characteristic of the intercourse between the whites and the red men of the forest—­they were rudely shoved aside, and any one desirous of adding to his anatomical cabinet was free to help himself to what remained of ‘the poor Indian.’” A Professor Marsh, of Yale, “secured a perfect skull” to add to his collection of “thirty skulls of ancient mound-­builders.” The deeper remains, found in burial chambers far below the surface, also held “entire jug-­shaped vessels,” hammers, hatchets, chisels, beads, arrow heads, and vases, many “carried off by the workmen and by visitors” before arrangements were made to secure “to science all interesting relics.” After summarizing the finds, the reporter suggested that “Indian mounds are so common in the West that many people pay no attention

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to them. .  .  .The Big Mound, recently dug down in this city, told its story, and gave rise to disputes among scientific men.”58 A few months later, in March 1871, the mound destruction in East St. Louis was the subject of an impassioned plea. Wills de Haas, a physician by training and mound enthusiast and historian by choice, announced his “earnest protest” against “the vandal spirit which is rapidly consigning to destruction” antiquities, including a “large elliptical mound at East St. Louis.”59 Sounding hopeless, he asked, “Cannot something be done to stay this wanton destruction? In the name of science, in the name of the past, and in behalf of the future, we invoke those who can stay this spirit of vandalism, to do so.” If that proved impossible, he hoped someone would conduct an examination “by the light of science; photograph, distinter, and carefully collect the minor remains of art, revealed by the destruction of the monuments,” a practice he called “disgraceful to the age.”60 Here, as elsewhere, white critics’ comments about the destruction of mounds reveal their proprietary sense of the Indigenous past, including human remains, funerary objects, cemeteries, and monuments. Mound explorations farther east also attracted local attention in St. Louis. An 1872 column was a reprint of an article from the New York Evening Post on theories regarding the mound builders, and classifying those of Mississippi River valley, the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and Peru. A front page column, “Literary Notices,” featured John D. Baldwin’s new book, Ancient America: In Notes on American Archaeology, and described it as “a book of absorbing interest to those interested in the antiquities of this country.”61 An illustrated collection in compact form, Ancient America presented “all that is known” about the architecture of Mexico, Central America, “and the mounds and other relics of the North.”62 Baldwin’s book was cited in a reprinted essay, from the New York World, the next year, published after the excavation of a “skull and body-­bones” from a mound near Columbus, Ohio.63 That piece referenced Baldwin’s discussion of the fragile condition of human remains typically uncovered in mounds. The regularity with which reports on scientific endeavors related to mounds in other cities appeared in St. Louis newspapers suggests that publishers thought there was significant reader interest in the subject. It was “the Golden Age of Scientific Societies,” when many enjoyed science as a hobby or avocation.64 Amateur archaeologists pursued

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their enthusiasms by joining scientific associations, opening mounds, and removing their contents.65 Destroying mounds and stealing human remains appeared routine, as in a case reported from Athens, Ohio, where a man who brought in “a large basket filled with human bones—­seemingly the different limbs of several bodies—­which he had just exhumed from a mound on the farm of Mr. William Henry.” The reporter declared them “unquestionably the remains of the aborigines who once inhabited this country.”66 Later that year, a Cincinnati newspaper, the Gazette, summed up the widespread fascination in “Relics of a Lost Race.” It opened, “Such is the title of several articles which have recently appeared in the newspapers, especially in regard to the opening of a great mound near St. Louis.” In a bit of circular reprinting, the reprinted Cincinnati article included a passage reprinted from a St. Louis newspaper regarding the opening of the burial chamber in the Big Mound.67 Nowhere in these articles did reporters characterize those who opened mounds as graverobbers. Whether motivated by fame or fortune, excavators saw themselves as entitled to remove remains and destroy mounds. Profit-­driven vandalism took place as well. For some, the financial lure of excavating mounds proved more compelling than science. In his massive report on mounds, published in 1894, Cyrus Thomas recalled how in 1879 and 1880, the people of Charleston, Missouri, “discovered that the pottery, in which the mounds of this region seem to have been unusually rich, had a considerable commercial value.” The discovery ignited “a regular mining fever” that “spread so rapidly that in some instances as many as twenty-­five or thirty men, women, and children could be seen digging for pottery in one field at the same time.” The excavated ceramics were sold to Charleston merchants “who in turn sold them to various museums, scientific institutions, and relic hunters,” bringing several thousand dollars to the town.68 Mounds were everywhere, it seemed, and farmers regularly encountered them in their fields. Part of what seems surprising about this flurry of newspaper coverage is the extent to which it continued to rehash debates over the mounds’ construction and the identity of the mound builders. Prior to 1890, many white commentators continued to assert that contemporary tribes were not related to the mound builders and were indeed responsible for

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the demise of their civilization.69 And despite evidence of the mounds as constructed, debates over whether they were natural or artificial formations persisted.70 A typical article, “The Fabled Mound Builders,” printed in January 1873, opened with a question in large typeface: “Were the Mounds Built by Men?” The author suggested that for a long period, speculation around the mounds’ origins had hardened into an appearance of fact, so much so “that it really seems irreverent to call in question the validity of their reasoning.” A personal examination of more than one hundred mounds convinced the writer “that the labor of man had no more to do with the building of these mounds than it had in creating the peaks of the Alleghany mountains.”71 Paradoxically, some of those white Americans who destroyed the mounds saw themselves as saving their history. A few weeks after the dismissive piece discussed above, a St. Louis newspaper reported at length on A. J. Conant’s “Archaeology” lecture, delivered at “the University club at its hall.” Conant was a painter, writer, and archaeology devotee. In his talk, Conant surveyed ancient European history and then discussed the mounds in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Michigan, before speaking “of the big mound recently demolished in St. Louis.” He considered this mound a work of peculiar interest as being one of the largest sepulchral mounds whose contents had been explored.” After describing the burial chamber in detail, Conant suggested there was a connection between the builders of the Big Mound and Monks Mound and the ancient peoples of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. Though the author of the article said he had “not space to give a lengthier synopsis” of the lecture, he nonetheless gave a long one, and ended with Conant’s concluding statement that “the work of the scientist of to-­day” was to examine wrecks and fragments, “and as he touches them with the magic wand of scientific induction, then ancient men stand up on their feet revivified, and proclaim the story of their nameless tribe or race.” At the end, the reporter noted, “the lecturer was loudly applauded.”72 Conant’s archaeological work reached a broader audience in 1879, when his contributions appeared in a new work of local history. Ten years after the Big Mound was leveled, W. F. Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri opened with a frontispiece engraving of the monumental earthwork. It is striking that for a history of the whole state, Switzler chose a mound image. In “The Big Mound at St. Louis, 1869,” based

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Fig. 10.4: “The Big Mound at St. Louis, 1869,” frontispiece to W. F. Switzler, Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, from 1541 to 1877 (Saint Louis: C. R. Barns, 1879).

on an Easterly daguerreotype, rays of sun stream down on the mound, where two men drag a very long pole, perhaps a flagpole, and a third sits contemplating the view. Two structures are partly visible on the margins, a bit of roof and chimney on the far left, and a two-­story building to the right. The street below cuts across the bottom of the mound.73 In the preface, editor and publisher Chancy R. Barns declared that Col. Switzler had written a remarkable history, adding: “The numerous mounds and other pre-­historic relics found within our borders indicate that Missouri was once the seat of a mighty empire, of which these relics are now the only traces. It has been thought proper, therefore, to precede the History by an account of these ancient remains. Prof. CONANT’s admirable written chapters, which giving such an account, present also a complete epitome of the science of Archaeology.”74 Archaeology occupies

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twelve chapters and 126 pages. Conant’s contribution to Switzler’s book was also published separately in 1879, as Foot-­prints of vanished races in the Mississippi Valley. The title at once claims a presence—­foot-­prints—­ and an absence—­“vanished races,” in the vicinity.75 Notably, Conant chronicled the destruction of the mounds even while celebrating them: “The waves of an advancing civilization and the hand of agriculture have passed over them and utterly destroyed vast numbers, including many of the most remarkable ones, which arrested the attention of every beholder.”76 The irony and paradoxes are palpable. “The name of the city of St. Louis was once Mound City, called so on account of the number and size of those ancient works which once stood upon her present site,” wrote Conant. “The larger of them are all demolished, while the few which yet remain are so small that they would hardly be noticed.” Despite widespread demolition and obliteration, Conant doubted that there was any richer field for archaeological research in the Mississippi River valley than Missouri.77 Even as Conant argued for the careful study of the mounds, he cast doubt on the identity of their creators and criticized popular understandings of them, noting that “until quite recently the prevailing opinion . . . was that they were the work of the red men, and to this day they are known among the masses as Indian mounds.”78 Summarizing descriptions of mounds that had been destroyed in St. Louis and its environs, Conant shared the good news that some local earthworks had been earmarked for preservation. A small group of mounds stood in Forest Park, then a few miles west of the city, and the park commissioner, Conant happily reported, had resolved to preserve them. He considered it “a pity that none of the larger ones” had been spared to stand as memorials of their creators. “But let them remain,” he urged, “such as they are, and when future generations shall throng the green groves and shady walks of that beautiful garden of their great city, these shall recall the fainting echoes of another race, whose homes once clustered, in days long gone, upon the banks of that great river where a statelier—­can we say happier —­city stands to-­day.”79 Conant’s optimism about the Forest Park mounds was misplaced. The “Mound City” nickname continued to be celebrated. In his 1883 History of Saint Louis City and Saint Louis County, J. Thomas Scharf

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stated that “the city had hardly outgrown the proportions of a village, however, before it began to receive the distinctive title of ‘Mound City,’ from the remarkable artificial structures which, crowned the terraces of the bluff.”80 He acknowledged the Big Mound as “one of the most striking and remarkable features of its landscape.”81 In recalling the many conjectures regarding the Big Mound’s construction, Scharf summarized a paper read before the St. Louis Academy of Science by Professor Spencer Smith, which argued that the Big Mound “was a natural formation,” discussed the fate of artifacts from the Big Mound, and repeated the story of Chambers’ effort to preserve it.82 Scharf also included the discovery of large quantities of remains and artifacts outside of St. Louis in his discussion of mounds. Col. John O’Fallon’s mansion, on the Bellefontaine road, stood on a burial mound. When the foundation was dug, “human bones by the cart-­load, with stone axes and arrowheads in great numbers, were taken out,” and the woods to the west “were full of small mounds, thrown up apparently by the Mound-­builders as sites for their houses, all having hearth-­places, whereon were vestiges of charcoal and ashes.”83 Indigenous peoples’ history and present, as well as the place of mounds, became the focus of preservation efforts, scientific endeavors, and celebrated exhibitions. Those who built the mounds continued to be cited as exemplars of an ancient civilization, whose creations imbued American history with antiquities and antecedents comparable to Europe’s.84 Excavations at Fort Ancient in Ohio led to the creation of a state park, one of the first of its kind, in 1889.85 Many artifacts from the site were displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where they attracted thousands of visitors.86 That same year, the St. Louis Post-­Dispatch carried a lengthy Sunday feature on “The Big Mound” and “Chief Pontiac’s Legend of the Mound which Gave St. Louis its Nickname.”87 Author Henry Inman, who served as an officer in the US-­Indian Wars, wrote about his adventures and the western frontier, and counted among his friends William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, famed for his Wild West shows. In his Big Mound column, Inman opened with the assertion that there were “few, if any, of the people of St. Louis now living who remember the immense mound that once existed on the north side of the beautiful city.”88

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Overstated though his claim may have been—­with the mound’s destruction only twenty-­three years before—­Inman was no doubt right to assume that many readers lacked firsthand knowledge of it. “It towered high above the city and many of its spiral steeples,” he wrote, “its lofty summit commanded a view far in the distance of the surrounding country.” Indeed, he declared, “It was a thing of wonder in the early days—­a mighty landmark in the years of the primitive civilization.” Far from a natural formation, “it was the work of man,” but not, he believed, that of contemporary tribes, but “a relic of ages long past and long lost.” Though the mound “had resisted the elements and Time himself,” it did not survive the development of St. Louis, for “man is more destructive than either.” Simply put, people dug into it, “for it yielded good clay with which to make bricks.” Thus far, Inman’s account was not far from wrong. Then he shifted to legends, particularly a fanciful story that the Ottawa chief Pontiac, who, visiting St. Louis for a wedding, on the eve of his 1769 murder in Illinois, had declared a desire to be buried there. “When I die,” he purportedly told French officer and commandant Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, “bury me on the Big Mound, that looks far above the tallest trees. The Manito loves the place, and Pontiac would like his grave there.” In Inman’s tale, St. Ange inquired why the Great Spirit loved the mound and why Native peoples looked upon it “with so much reverence.” Pontiac then shared a tale of an industrious early people created by the Great Spirit, who lived in peace and built mounds to try to reach the Great Spirit, but whose numbers became too great to sustain. After Pontiac was assassinated near Cahokia and news reached St. Louis, St. Ange supposedly “sent for his body, where he had it interred with all the honors of war. . ..No mark, no mausoleum, that I am aware of,” wrote Inman, “points out the spot where his bones lie, but his grave was on the Big Mound.”89 With this fabrication, Inman highlights the city’s Indigenous past, claiming it as part of St. Louis’s own, treats the builders of the mounds as members of a civilized lost race, and casts Pontiac as a modern Indigenous leader who recognized the Big Mound as sacred. It is a fascinating riff on the location’s distant and recent Indigenous past. In the aftermath of the mound’s razing, the notion of the Mound City persisted as a theme of civic identity and commerce. Between the

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1870s and 1890s, Mound City businesses proliferated in St. Louis, with no connection between the nickname and the business focus, as with Mound City Chemical Works, Mound City Automatic Phonograph Company, Mound City Cab Company, Mound City Building and Loan Association, and Mound City Distilling Company. Nor is there

Fig. 10.5: Mound City Shoe Store advertising card, 1880–1883. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

anything calling a mound to mind in this 1881 advertisement for the Mound City Shoe Store or the 1890s business stationery of the Mound City Paint and Color Company. The ironies suggested by the names of Mound City Railroad Company and Mound City Wrecking Company likely eluded their owners. History’s shadow hovered over St. Louis, with Indigenous peoples figuring in the historical consciousness of contemporaries, sometimes peripherally, at other times centrally.90 At the same time the mounds were being commercially invoked in the late 1800s, St. Louis and the United States passed the centennials of their founding, and writers of local and national histories continued to think about how and where Indigenous peoples fit into narratives of the past and present. Their histories tell us more about white Americans and their attitudes, of course, than they do about Indigenous peoples themselves.91 In the early 1900s, St. Louisans

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Fig. 10.6: Business letterhead of Mound City Paint and Color Co., St. Louis, Mo., December 4, 1890. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

continued to engage with the memory of mounds and mound builders, as the distant and contemporary Indigenous past and present shaped popular and high culture and commemorative initiatives. Nostalgia for a distant Indigenous past percolated. Though the Big Mound was leveled in 1869 and the site soon built upon, the memory of it survived. In the months, years, and decades following its destruction, the Big Mound lived on in the discussions of locals who recalled it, described its demolition, or debated its origins. No longer standing on the near north side, the Big Mound became tied to the civic identity of St. Louis, the self-­ proclaimed “Mound City.” Consumed for bricks, industry, and railbeds, it was transformed into a chapter of local history to be commemorated.

Chapter eleven

The Indigenous Past and Present as Local History Two weeks before the 1904 World’s Fair opened, a full-­page newspaper article, illustrated with numerous photographs, featured a branch of a founding family of the city, the Chouteaus. The focus was on “the story of the Chouteau who married an Indian maiden” and the pair’s Osage-­French descendants in Indian Territory. Wooster Mound resident Sophia Chouteau Littlebear, interviewed for the piece, acknowledged her Chouteau relations in St. Louis, noting that she had not seen them in many years. Describing her appearance and Indigenous attire and that of the other “Indian kin of the Chouteau family,” the reporter declared that “historical fiction fails to parallel the contrast offered by the St. Louis Chouteaus and the Osage Chouteaus, the one standing for the civilization of the white race, the other for the primitive existence of the aboriginal redskins.” He reminded readers of a fact they might not have considered on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition centennial celebration: the histories of Indigenous peoples and European settlers in St. Louis remained deeply intertwined. In the 1890s and early 1900s, St. Louisans encountered local events and exhibitions that presented Indigenous peoples’ recent and distant past, as well as their present, in striking and varied ways, some persisting from previous decades and others new. Through Anheuser-­Busch western-­themed advertisements to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis residents were exposed to carefully 249

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constructed representations of Indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their place in US society. Against the backdrop of the US government’s policy goal of assimilation, St. Louisans encountered Indigenous peoples presented in works of art, science, theater, and spectacle that conveyed a view of them as savage or primitive and destined to disappear as discrete social groups, even as Indigenous participants in such avenues contradicted such interpretations.1 These representations reflected the views that both Native peoples and the “Wild West” they had inhabited has vanished. Meanwhile, scientific assessments of historic earthworks conclusively stated what Native peoples had always known: that the earthworks across the continent were created by their ancestors. By the early 1890s, much had changed for the continent’s Native peoples. After the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, large-­scale military attacks by US forces on Indigenous peoples mostly came to an end, though outbreaks of war against Native peoples continued into the 1920s. Land hemorrhaging continued, and by the 1880s, 441 reservations existed in twenty-­one states.2 With tribal landholdings labeled a barrier to the goal of assimilation, reservations were targeted for dismantling by the 1887 Dawes Act. Known as the General Allotment Act, it led to the alienation of ninety million acres of Indigenous lands. During this period and beyond, as attacks on their lands and livelihoods continued, Indigenous communities were plagued by a host of problems both on and off reservations, among them grinding poverty and the forced Americanization—­ and often illness and death—­ of Indigenous children removed from their families and taken to boarding schools far from their homes. The territorial losses suffered by Indigenous peoples in the 1800s translated into land gains for white Americans, who continued their westward expansion. With the federal population count of 1890, officials from the US Census Bureau recorded continuous white settlement across the continent. This purported milestone, “the closing of the frontier,” inspired historian Frederick Jackson Turner to write his influential 1893 essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner presented his paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association at the Chicago World’s Fair, the World’s

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Columbia Exposition, so named in celebration of Columbus and his 1492 voyage. Turner argued that a distinctively American character and polity, distinguished by rugged individualism, self-­reliance, and democratic institutions, was forged as successive waves of white Americans explored, hunted, mined, and farmed the West. Although his thesis has remained influential, it has been roundly criticized, not least for his treatments of Indigenous peoples and his characterizations of their territories as free lands where white farmers engaged in “the essentially peaceful occupation of a largely empty continent.”3 The extent to which the continent was not empty was abundantly demonstrated by another landmark piece of scholarship from the early 1890s, this one focused on the monumental earthworks constructed by Indigenous peoples. Cyrus Thomas’s “Report on the mound explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology,” published in 1894, definitively resolved lingering debates among white Americans over the artificial versus natural formation of the mounds as well as arguments among white archaeologists and mound enthusiasts over the identity of the peoples who built them. Based on the analysis of a decade’s worth of mound explorations, the ground-­breaking report, more than seven hundred pages long, reflected rigorous methodology that distinguished it from earlier efforts and made it a milestone in the history of American archaeology.4 As the second director of the Mound Exploration Division of the Bureau of Ethnology, Thomas was committed to compiling and analyzing vast amounts of information about mounds in order to settle many debates. In the 1880s, he authored works such as “Who were the mound builders?” and “Burial mounds of the northern sections of the United States.” What comes across today from Thomas’s report is the powerful visual statement made by the map of the distribution of mounds in the Eastern United States. The red dots demonstrate how numerous and widespread were Indigenous earthworks (See Figure 11.1). In their locations and range, they illustrate long-­term occupation, engineering activities, and public works projects undertaken by large numbers of Indigenous peoples across time. They follow waterways, mirror the sites of contemporary cities and towns, and appear in many different localities across a huge swath of the country.

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Fig. 11.1: Distribution of Mounds in the Eastern United States Compiled under the Direction of Cyrus Thomas, from “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology,” Bureau of Ethnology, Annual Report 12 (1894).

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Most importantly, Thomas’s work demolished the “lost race” theory. From his research, Thomas was convinced early on “that the mound builders and the American Indians were one and the same.”5 There was no lost race; Indigenous peoples built the mounds. Moreover, he acknowledged the mound-­knowledge of contemporary tribes. Thomas believed in cultural continuity across millennia, with those who built mounds spanning the prehistoric past, the distant past, and the recent, that is, post-­ European contact, past.6 In making these statements, Thomas “denounced the level of racist cant that had impaired scholarly vision for so long.”7 So conclusive was the evidence that the Mound Builders did not exist as a separate race that the report may have marked the last scientific reference to them as a people, despite some clinging to the idea of their existence.8 In St. Louis, detailed news about mound research appeared in St. Louis’s German-­language press that spring.9 While Barbara Alice Mann argues that popular interest in the mounds faded once Thomas’s report definitively debunked the “lost race” theory, interest in the mounds as a highly mythologized part of St. Louis’s local history continued into the 1920s. While Turner’s and Thomas’s landmark writings presented a sea change on a national level in white scholars’ treatments and theories about the recent and distant Indigenous past and the ties of contemporary tribes to the continent’s mounds, other aspects of Indigenous peoples’ experiences received more publicity in St. Louis. These images arose within the context of the economic growth of St. Louis and the ambitions of its boosters. The most famous and widespread presentation of Indigenous people emerged in the context of beer. By 1890, though hard times lay ahead, St. Louis had grown enough to become the country’s second-­largest beer producer.10 Interestingly, its most famous brewery (and by 1910 the world’s largest), the Anheuser-­Busch Brewing Association, was responsible for disseminating an influential interpretation of Indigenous history. In 1892, the company acquired a twelve-­foot by thirty-­two-­foot painting, Custer’s Last Fight, painted in St. Louis by Cassily Adams around 1885.11 Taken in bankruptcy proceedings against the owners of the local saloon where it was on display, the painting was eventually donated to the 7th Cavalry, but not before the company had another artist, F. Otto Becker, make a copy suitable for

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reproduction. Becker’s 1896 lithograph took liberties with the original, and Becker created a dizzying scene of carnage, with a heroic Custer surrounded by Native forces depicted as ferocious and savage. For decades, the image played a significant role in shaping white Americans’ views of the West and its Native peoples.

Fig. 11.2: Custer’s Last Fight (Anheuser-­Busch advertisement), by Otto F. Becker, chromolithograph, 1896. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Custer’s Last Fight was a standard image on saloon walls, making it a typical part of the visual environment for St. Louisans who frequented bars. And many did, with much of the city’s beer production consumed

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locally. Anheuser-­Busch distributed huge quantities of the Becker print, including during the second World War, when two thousand copies a month were mailed to members of the armed forces.12 (As a child, I spent hours looking at one such copy, a two-­foot by three-­and-­a-­half foot print that hung on the wall of my godparents’ finished basement in Ferguson; it was likely a gift from a family friend who owned a local bar.13 I remember staring at the image, counting the figures depicted, and examining their expressions.) Eighteen subsequent editions of the print have produced over one million copies.14 One scholar ventured that in the fifty years after its production, more people saw that image than any other work of American art.15 In turn, the image shaped subsequent historical and popular treatments of the battle, with books and Hollywood films perpetuating the myths. The mythologizing of Indigenous peoples, battles, and the West, present in Custer’s Last Fight, spread in Wild West shows. These wildly popular entertainments, featuring both Indigenous and white performers, were staged across the US, including St. Louis, from the 1880s through early 1900s.16 The shows dramatized the conquest of the West and its Indigenous peoples, with a participant in the Plains Wars, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, gaining celebrity and a reputation for authenticity in the Wild West performances he began in 1882.17 Even the venues where Cody’s show was performed could reflect the history of conquest, as with the Great Circle in Ohio, where the “Wild West Show” was held at the sacred mound site-­turned public amusement, Idlewild Park.18 After Cody added “Custer’s Last Fight” to performances in 1886, that scene became the centerpiece of the program.19 In 1899, he put on the show in 132 cities and towns in the US, traveling over eleven thousand miles in two hundred days; his show was one of the most successful commercial entertainments in the country for over thirty years.20 Cody was also popular beyond the arenas where he presented his show, featuring as the protagonist in popular dime novels. His Wild West featured sharp shooters, scenes of Indigenous life, and battle re-­enactments, and both Indigenous peoples and white frontiersmen, “Cowboys & Indians,” as posters advertised. He offered his audience a mythic west, a narrative of conquest, with Indigenous peoples battled, pacified, and described in the program as “the former foe—­present friend.”21 Native participants

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in Cody’s shows, paid for their performances, were at once the objects of white spectators’ curiosity as well as tourists themselves, who visited local attractions throughout the US and abroad as they traveled with the show.22 In May 1896, Cody brought his Wild West show to St. Louis. Coming back to familiar stomping grounds—­he had been stationed at Jefferson Barracks and married an Arnold woman, Louise Frederici, in 1866—­ Cody promoted his show in the week before its opening.23 Publicizing ticket sales, Cody advertised widely, including in the German-­language Anzeiger des Westens, the Globe-­Democrat, and the Post-­Dispatch, mentioning “100 Indian Warriors” from six different tribes.24 As they paraded through the streets of St. Louis the day before the show, his performers made a dramatic appearance. The procession was a mile long, and crowds of men, women, and children lined the entire route, crowding the sidewalks “to the doors and windows of the houses along the streets.”25 Observer James Gaston Brown, writing on Grand Avenue Hotel stationery, described the event to his grandson Guy, telling the boy, “If you were here to day we would go to see Buffalo Bill and his Troupe.” Their entrance into the city was impressive: “Buffalo Bill in the 1st carriage drawn by 4 gray horses, then next came a chariot with a band of music drawn by 6 gray horses—­then came 25 mounted Indians and a pretty dangerous looking lot they were too, with their bows and arrows, faces painted, and hats made of Eagle feathers, with their hairpipe and wampum moon ornaments, all over their buckskin coats.”26 With US hostilities with Native tribes largely over, whites could gaze upon Indigenous fighters for entertainment. The Post-­Dispatch report on the parade noted that “interspersed between each company of Caucasian soldiers were the Indians clad in their native costume.”27 Cody and the Indigenous performers were followed by a large number of other men on horseback: fifty “mountain cowboys” with rifles, twenty “Russian Cossacks from Caucasus,” eighty Mexican men, and a group of men he thought were “Arapahos, all on fine ponies,” as well as detachments of US Cavalry and an old overland stage coach.28 In the coach rode “an Indian family,” with a mother and child visible.29 Forty cavalry from the St. Louis Arsenal were there “to keep the whole in order.” Impressed by the sight and taking “particular pains to take” the details down for his

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grandson, Brown noted that “these chaps are going to exhibit themselves about a mile west of this hotel,” and that they were charging fifty cents admission for adults and twenty-­five cents for children.30 The performances drew large crowds, including some Black attendees, and rave reviews, despite poor weather. On May 19, heavy rain in the morning and “a severe electric storm” that lasted all evening “put the arena in a frightful condition,” wrote Cody.31 The Globe-­Democrat reviewer found the sight of “the best rough equestrians of sundry nations,” that is, “Indians, cowboys, Arabs, Cossacks, Mexicans, Germans, French and English, all superbly mounted and arrayed in the national garb of their respective countries” an “inspiring one.”32 Crowds of from ten to eighteen thousand attended each day. One audience member, William Reese of Webster Groves, found himself the target of police when he came to town “to see Buffalo Bill’s Indians, and brought a revolver with him.” When “overhauled” by police, Reese, who was Black, explained that he was carrying the weapon because he lived “so far out in the country.” Told there were “too many of you fellows armed out there in the suburbs,” Reese was fined for carrying a concealed weapon and resisting an officer.33 Rather different was the experience of “Boys at the Wild West Show,” presumably white, whose delight in the show was featured in an exuberant column. On Sunday, May 24, the day after the Wild West show concluded, the Post-­Dispatch printed an illustrated article about the “Great Week for Embryo Scouts and Indian Fighters.”34 The reporter suggested that “the juvenile readers of ‘Broncho Pete, the Terror of the Plains,’ were in a condition of delirious joy all of last week. The real thing was here, real cowboys and scouts and Indians.” As a result, the “youthful revelers” in such literature “were all at the show or thereabouts.”35 Some “imaginative youngsters” even ran away from good homes to “fight Indians,” not knowing, as the writer put it, “that at this writing no hostile Indians are roaming the plains.”36 Why was Cody so successful in capturing the imagination of such Western enthusiasts? As Richard White has argued, Buffalo Bill, like Frederick Jackson Turner, focused on important themes of American frontier mythology. But where Turner made the conquest of nature central, Cody centered his narrative on “the conquest of savages”; Indigenous people were essential, rather than peripheral, to his show.37

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Indeed, contemporary history became part of his Wild West extravaganza, with Sitting Bull, credited by white Americans as the architect of Custer’s defeat, touring with the show for a time; such historical reenactments involved white versions of events performed by Indigenous peoples who had sometimes participated in the original events.38 During the show itself, the “Deadwood mail coach” was used for a “show attack by the Indians” who were “driven off by the cowboys with Buffalo Bill at their head.”39 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show brought one vision of contemporary Indigenous people to the city as Cody emphasized his ties to the recent past and advertised his “historical sketches.”40 St. Louisans had the opportunity to see far greater numbers of Indigenous peoples and to encounter other interpretations of their cultures with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. The fair was the culmination of local efforts to promote the city. Though the 1890 census showed that St. Louis legitimately numbered more residents than Chicago, St. Louisans had been disappointed that the city had lost out on the bid to hold the 1893 fair. In February 1898, Missouri congressman Richard Bartholdt introduced a bill to authorize the Mississippi Valley International Exposition Company to organize an exposition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.41 Forest Park was selected as the site for the grand exposition. Sadly, the commemoration of one aspect of local history—­the celebration of the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase—­came at the cost of another, the historic mounds that stood in the way of the fairgrounds. It is not surprising, however, that the Louisiana Purchase, itself the imposition of US claims on Indigenous lands, would appropriate the mounds to celebrate that development. Located near today’s Art Museum in Forest Park, the low mounds stood in two groups and were razed as part of the development of the area for the World’s Fair. Preparations for the fair led to their excavation and leveling, which in turn generated news coverage. In an “editorial afterthought” published on November 6, 1901, the Globe-­Democrat suggested that “by exploring the Indian mounds at Forest Park it is possible that the lost town of Kaskaskia may be found.”42 On the seventh, the St. Louis Republic announced that “the work of opening several Indian mounds in Forest

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Park, those which it is impossible to preserve,” would begin the next morning. The operation would be overseen by archaeologist D. I. Bushnell, “who located the mounds and brought them to the notice of the Department of Works.” A group of laborers would do the work under Bushnell’s direction.43 These notices likely prompted visitors to the site, as “many persons journeyed to the park Saturday to watch the laborers delve into the burying place of an ancient race.”44 Thousands of visitors came by streetcar to the World’s Fair site, primarily to watch the work of clearing the “‘wilderness.’” Transit officials estimated that fifty thousand people came to the park that day.45 Among the sightseers, “the usual number of relic hunters was to be noticed.”46 Some gathered chips of fallen trees or bits of stone, but “great interest centered about the Indian mounds.” There “the relic seekers were greatly in evidence.”47 As on countless other occasions, a Native site was destroyed by those who hoped to plunder its contents. The excavations of the mounds in Forest Park made the front page of the Post-­Dispatch. On Sunday, November 9, 1901, the paper printed a photograph of a mound and several related stories. The first day of excavation, the preceding Friday, had uncovered “five Indian skeletons and much pottery” in three smaller mounds on the site of the arts building. On Saturday, Bushnell’s crew had excavated “the largest of the four Indian mounds on the World’s Fair site.” As a reporter noted, “The big mound is on the low meadowland at the foot of the hill where the Triple A golfers were wont to play.”48 The human remains and ceramics were given to the Historical Society for exhibition at the fair, part of the ongoing history of the display of Indigenous peoples’ bodies and artifacts for fairgoers’ gaze. After examining the human remains interred in the mound, Bushnell hypothesized they belonged to “Omaha Indians who once camped in Forest Park.”49 He thought the mounds were dugout homes, long since collapsed, that had been built by Omaha people passing through the area on a pilgrimage.50 Bushnell did not seem to realize that the Forest Park mounds would be leveled. “I have located the Forest Park mounds for the fair people and they will be preserved,” he wrote. “It would be a pity to have them destroyed, for they are quite an interesting little group.” Bushnell did not believe them to be burial mounds.51 “But they are mounds of a

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Fig. 11.3: Mounds in Forest Park, St. Louis, from D. I. Bushnell, “The Cahokia and Surrounding Mound Groups,” Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 3, no. 1 (1904), 14.

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type,” he added, “and they will be interesting to many persons visiting the Fair. It would be a mistake to destroy them.” Charles Peterson of the Missouri Historical Society praised Bushnell’s work and concurred in his interpretation of the mounds as house sites. Noting that the group of mounds was “familiar to many amateur archaeologists of St. Louis,” Peterson declared Bushnell’s plan to preserve them “gratifying to all of us.”52 Like Bushnell, he thought the Forest Park group “distinct from burial and religious mounds” like those of the great Cahokia group.53 On his way to explore mounds in Southeastern Missouri, Bushnell returned to St. Louis the following September. During his stopover, he suggested that St. Louis should have a permanent museum. Bushnell believed that the fair management should set aside funds for the collection of archaeological and historical specimens in the Mississippi valley and elsewhere, to form the nucleus for a permanent museum to be left by the Fair.54 Citing the example of Chicago and its Field Museum, Bushnell noted that after hearing of a planned museum, officials of numerous governments with exhibitions at Chicago’s 1893 Columbia Exposition donated display specimens. “This city is a splendid place for an historical museum, especially of specimens from the Mississippi Valley,” declared Bushnell. “I do not believe that too much importance can be attached to organizing such an institution.”55 Plans for a World’s Fair Museum comprised in part of such donations continued, with Archbishop John Joseph Glennon expressing hopes that special attention would be paid to a collection of the works of “the mound builders,” as St. Louis was “at the center of the region” they inhabited.”56 In the aftermath of the fair, the St. Louis Public Museum opened in 1905 but failed to secure sufficient funding to survive. When the temporary fair building was razed in 1906, the collections either went into storage or were sent to the art museum, historical society, or Chicago’s Field Museum; the material that went to the Field apparently did not include artifacts identified as linked to the Big Mound.57 In 1904, Bushnell’s work on “The Cahokia and Surrounding Mound Groups” appeared in a Peabody Museum publication.58 He summed up the Forest Park mounds succinctly: “Five and one half miles west of the river, near the small River des Peres, there stood, until two years ago, two groups of small mounds.”59 Before describing the mounds of St. Louis

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in depth, he noted that “there formerly existed a group of twenty or more mounds all of which have been destroyed.”60 Touching briefly on earlier reports on them and the destruction of the Big Mound, Bushnell added that north of where the group stood, “now a densely populated section of St. Louis, are many mounds, some of which remain in their original condition” and that a number of “very small low mounds” still existed in a public park.61 Two groups of mounds, one of seven and the other of nine, stood near the center of the western half of Forest Park.62 He framed their fate as a casualty of the Fair. “During the autumn of 1901,” he wrote, “it became necessary to grade that part of the park preparatory to the erection of certain buildings of the Exposition, and I was enabled to explore the mounds.”63 In the smaller group, the mounds ranged from 2.3 to 3.5 feet in height and 42 to 55 feet in diameter. Near the center of one, there were the remains of three people, their skeletons disturbed.64 In his survey, Bushnell included photographs of one Forest Park mound, which he labeled Mound F, “Elevation 3.2 feet. Diameter 55 feet. This was the largest mound in either group (PL. IV, Fig 2).”65 While Bushnell’s work drew attention to the place of earlier Indigenous peoples in St. Louis, the organizers of the 1904 World’s Fair focused a spotlight on Indigenous peoples both past and present. Those familiar with the history of the city and region knew that proximity to Indigenous peoples and their trading networks had influenced the siting of St. Louis. One reporter looking backward to those early years flagged the centrality of Native peoples to the city’s growth in an article about the Indigenous family of the Chouteaus. In April 1904, two weeks before the fair opened, the Post-­Dispatch highlighted the intertwined histories of St. Louis’s colonial founders and local tribes. C. M. Sarchet’s full-­page story on the “Wealthy Indian Chouteaus of the Osage Reservation” featured photographs of family members.66 Both their money and their ancestry interested the author. He explained that Osage wealth stemmed from a combination of interest paid by the US Treasury on moneys held in trust for land purchases, as well as income derived from leasing land to cattlemen; oil production, which began on Osage lands in 1897, later translated into dramatically increased wealth in the 1920s, with the revenue in 1923 alone totaling more than $27.6 million.67 Sarchet laid out for readers his proof

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Figs. 11.4a, 11.4b, & 11.4c: “Brave and Wife, Mary Chouteau” (top left); “A Grand-daughter and Great Granddaughter of Col. Chouteau” (top right); Aunt Sophia Chouteau and Grand-Child (bottom right), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 17, 1904 (p. 4, Sunday Magazine).

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of the connected lineages, noting that “the Indian Son of Col. Edward Chouteau Was Named Auguste, After the Founder of His Father’s Family.” Central to his analysis was Sophia Chouteau Littlebear, 62, who was living at Wooster Mound, six miles from the Osage reservation capital of Pawhuska, in Indian Territory, soon to become part of Oklahoma, with its entrance into the union as the forty-­sixth state in 1907. Sarchet reported that she and her sister Mary still received “an annuity, left to them by the will of their long-­deceased father, Col. Edward Chouteau.” Mary’s husband, “Brave, an Osage chief,” was described as “one of the bitterest opponents of the movement to abolish tribal customs in favor of the white man’s ways.” Sophia Chouteau Littlebear reportedly characterized her brother-­in-­law as “opposed to the land allotment” and said that he “mourned the loss of the Osage hunting grounds in the West.”68 Sophia Chouteau Littlebear acknowledged her St. Louis connections as well as her relationship, or rather lack thereof, with them. “Yes, I am a Chouteau,” she told the reporter. “My Chouteau kindred live in St. Louis, but it has been a long, long time since I have seen any of them.”69 She hoped to visit the city during the World’s Fair. Adjacent to Sarchet’s article was an inset comment by “Col. Pierre Chouteau, Head of the Chouteau Family in St. Louis.” Lending his authority to the story, Chouteau recalled that his father and grandfather had both paid an annuity “to certain Indian descendants of a Chouteau.” He also had heard of a Cyprian Chouteau “who also had married an Indian woman, but his wife, unlike the one of whom this story tells, did not return to Indian ways.” Though he was uncertain as to the identity of the Edward Chouteau featured in the article, he had “no doubt that these people are Indian kin of the Chouteau family of St. Louis.”70 That union was far from the only one between Osage women and Chouteau men. Several generations of the Chouteau family married into both Osage and Shawnee families.71 The Sarchet article and accompanying stamp of approval from Pierre Chouteau are replete with racist language and stereotypes, in the midst of the acknowledgment of the Osage-­Chouteau women’s dual heritages. They were “well born on both sides,” from proud people, wrote Sarchet. “And rich as are the Chouteaus, they are not so rich, proportionately, as are the Osages, who are conceded to be the richest people in the world today.”72 Much of the article detailed Osage landholdings, economic relations with the US government, and Osage history. Ultimately, it

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was the Chouteau Osage women’s apparent preference for Indigenous culture, clothing, and place of residence that Sarchet emphasized and presented as proof of a lesser degree of civilization. Casting himself almost as a scientific observer, the reporter made his own reactions to their appearance part of the story. “To say that the personal appearance of Aunt Sophy was a surprise is putting it mildly,” he wrote. “She came into the Indian trader’s store wearing a blanket, moccasins and the buckskin leggings” of an Osage woman. He emphasized her Indigenous attire and added that he thought that her face “not altogether Indian.” Sarchet quoted the trader’s introduction, “This gentleman wishes to make your acquaintance. He has heard that you are a Chouteau, and he is the correspondent of the Post-­Dispatch, which is published in St. Louis, where the white Chouteaus live.”73 Explaining why he found their history so compelling, Sarchet described himself as intrigued by “the story of the Chouteau who married an Indian maiden.” He characterized it as “a romance of American life,” with its beginning in the city’s origins as a trading post. “St. Louis is now a World’s Fair city and the Chouteaus are one of its richest and most influential families,” he wrote. “Historical fiction fails to parallel the contrast offered by the St. Louis Chouteaus and the Osage Chouteaus,” he suggested, “the one standing for the civilization of the white race, the other for the primitive existence of the aboriginal redskins.” In short, he thought the truth more remarkable than any fiction. His racist description of differences between two branches of the city’s most famed family echoed the social evolutionary theories of the day, which posited the progress of societies from savagery and barbarism to civilization, with Indigenous peoples representing the former and white American and European society the latter. Meanwhile, other members of the Chouteau clan, fourth-­generation St. Louisans, endeavored to assert their family’s significance in narratives of US history.74 Sarchet’s article and a host of other newspaper features in the early 1900s alerted readers to the contemporary presence of Indigenous peoples and their sense of their history and rights. His piece on the Osage Chouteaus reminded his audience both that their city had a recent Indigenous history and that St. Louis’s current “white Chouteaus” had Indigenous relatives very much alive in Indian Territory. Or take, for example, a January 1904 notice in the Globe-­Democrat. “Indians Sue Government for Recovery of

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Lands,” read the headline. Hearings were being held in Washington, DC, in a suit over three hundred thousand acres of land and timber rights in Minnesota and elsewhere, which Indigenous litigants contended had been taken away by an unconstitutional act of Congress.75 When plans emerged to merge the Indian Territory where the Osages and other Native peoples lived with the Oklahoma Territory to become the state of Oklahoma, Indigenous people protested. A Muscogee leader, Chitto Harjo, unexpectedly turned up to address the Congressional Select Committee holding hearings on Oklahoma statehood and to speak against the seizure of Indian Territory. He tried to explain the root of the issue, its history, stating, “I am telling you now about what was done since 1492,” but the chair, with impatience and arrogance cut him off, demanding he “condense everything.”76 In the spring of 1904, past and present Indigenous topics were juxtaposed on a page of the Post-­Dispatch. An article entitled “Will Rich Indians Become Poor When Given Freedom?” discussed the fate of tribes in Indian Territory, covered land ownership, mineral leases, and membership rolls of tribal members. It followed a piece on historic relics to be displayed at the World’s Fair, including “relics of the Louisiana mound builders.”77 The Missouri Historical Society loaned Indigenous artifacts for the exhibition and received Silver and Bronze medals for the items.78 As the Fair drew to a close, “a delegation from the Osage reservation,” according to The Indian Leader, a student newspaper out of the Haskell Institute, an Indian industrial boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, “was invited to lead the procession at the exposition on St. Louis day.” This invitation followed an examination of the records of the Louisiana Purchase that revealed “that the Osages were the original owners of the ground on which the exposition buildings stand.”79 As much as the evidence indicated the vibrant presence of Indigenous peoples and their efforts to protect their cultures and territories, there were many other images of Indigenous peoples circulating in conjunction with the fair—­programs, sculptures, and posters—­that perpetuated the tenacious myth that Native peoples were disappearing. A notable example is the image created by Alphonse Mucha, whose advertisement includes stylized Indigenous figures at the corners—­suggestive of ancient meso-­American peoples—­and a weary-­looking Indigenous man depicted behind an idealized, young white woman.

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Fig. 11.5: Exposition Universelle et Internationale de St. Louis (États Unis) du 30 Avril au 30 Novembre 1904, by Alphonse Mucha (Paris: Champenois, 1903), chromolithograph. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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His hand is held by hers, whether stopped in motion or supported. She faces forward, looking to the future, while his gaze is downcast, defeated. No longer a formidable foe, the Indigenous man is being supplanted by a white woman, a sign of how subdued his people had become. One scholar suggests that the white woman’s position and dress, in contrast with those of the Indigenous man, indicate that she does not consider him a threat and instead is relaxed, “poised to uplift him and guide him toward (white) civilization and the modern era.”80 As in other turn-­of-­the-­century world’s fair artworks, hers, not his, was the “ideal American head,” with the white woman representing civilization and the future and the Indigenous man represented as savagery and a bygone era.81 At times, the idea was stated quite explicitly, as when a reporter simultaneously referenced Custer’s “last stand” and the “Vanishing Indian” myth with a claim that “the North American Indian will make his last stand at the World’s Fair.”82 Scientific displays hammered home the idea further. An anthropology exhibition covered forty acres of the fairgrounds and presented living Indigenous peoples from throughout the world. The goal was to convey an idea of primitive societies progressing to become civilized ones, with white society—­and white visitors—­at the top, the “development of man from his primitive condition to the present height of achievement,” as the organizers of the anthropology exhibit put it.83 Among the organizers’ many goals was a desire to have attendees understand the significance of the US acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, appreciate the importance of St. Louis (and outdo Chicago), and be impressed by demonstrations of US superiority. To that end, while they included displays of Indigenous peoples from around the world, they were particularly interested in showcasing Native peoples from US territory. Scholars have described the “exposition anthropology” of the 1904 fair as “the swan song of American evolutionary progressivism, wherein Manifest Destiny was performed in contrast to primitivism.”84 Anthropologist W. J. McGee, who played a key role, believed that evolutionary processes had led inevitably to cultural, political, and economic superiority and domination by white Europeans and Americans.85 This view informed the juxtaposition of static and living displays of Native peoples and their cultures with new technologies and art.

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Indigenous peoples from around the world spent months at the fair, including individuals from twenty-­nine societies who occupied re-­created villages throughout the fairgrounds. They included groups occupying a Philippine Reservation, Anthropology Villages (for foreign Indigenes), and the many Native Americans involved in the Indian Service’s model school and Indian Village.86 Careful research has recovered the names of the Indigenous participants in the Indian Village.87 Exhibit creator William H. Holmes and McGee proposed villages centered around an island, where the ruins of a Mayan temple would stand at one end and the great mound of Cahokia at the other.88 The achievements of earlier peoples were featured in archaeological displays, with three states—­ Missouri, Louisiana, and Ohio—­presenting large exhibits; of the three, the Ohio exhibit contained the most organized materials on the region’s mound-­building peoples.89 To demonstrate how human beings had progressed, McGee sought groups whom he believed would embody different phases of evolutionary development: Australian Aborigines, African Pygmies (a group of Batwa eventually joined), Patagonians, and Seris from Northern Mexico, as well as members of numerous individual tribes in the US.90 An important feature of the fair was a model Indian school. McGee envisioned it as a place “where students would contrast with traditional Indians,” the students cast as the “solution” to the “Indian problem.”91 Indigenous participants in the fair were fair-­goers as well, acquiring souvenirs, including manufactured goods; McGee requested they not use or display these items from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. when they were officially demonstrating.92 Visitors to the “Indian Reservation” could see the “supposed evolution of housing styles,” with a Kickapoo bark house, a Cheyenne dance ground, Navajo hogans, and Chippewa birch-­bark dwellings.93 While performing, Native peoples engaged in daily activities, and artisans pursued their crafts, many producing wares which they sold; a group of Wichitas did a brisk business in moccasins and several Arapahos sold beaded buckskin items.94 Other Indigenous peoples attended the World’s Fair, most notably as participants who were put on display. They were embodiments of the spoils of wars waged against them by the United States. Famed resistance leaders were sought as exhibits whose presence confirmed notions

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of American conquest. Fair organizers wanted to include some of the most famous Indigenous men in the US—­Chief Joseph (Hin-­mah-­too-­ yah-­lat-­kekt) of the Nez Perces, Quanah Parker of the Comanches, and Geronimo (Goyathlay) of the Apaches—­though only Geronimo took part.95 These men were famed for their military past: they had fought US incursions into their territories in the 1870s and 1880s. But their tribes had been defeated and fallen under US control. Including these men in the fair would demonstrate to the world the imperial might of the US.96 Those who could refuse did so: Chief Joseph did not participate in the fair, nor did Quanah Parker, who later rejected a similar money-­making opportunity, on the grounds that he did not wish to be on display.97 Geronimo, who had been a prisoner of war since 1886, was the only one to attend, with his presence the result of discussions with the US War Department and prison officials in Oklahoma.98 Just before the fair opened in April, the Globe-­Democrat reported that Geronimo’s appearance was “the bone of contention between the Indian exhibit department and a concession” on the Pike at the Fair, “both of whom want the warrior as an attraction.” The title of the article captures the ways Geronimo was treated, as a pawn in white exhibitors’ wrangling: “Two Interests Want to Show Geronimo at Fair.”99 Despite his status as a captive, Geronimo was able to negotiate some of the terms of his appearance, sleeping in an army tent rather than an Indigenous dwelling, wearing Western clothes rather than Native garb, and visiting the rest of the fair as a spectator himself.100 Scholars argue that his celebrity enabled him to obtain a degree of autonomy.101 In St. Louis, Geronimo occupied a distinctive position as the most famous Indigenous person present. His actions, self-­presentation, and treatment variously confirmed and challenged white fairgoers’ notions. Geronimo’s infamous reputation was featured in advertisements about Indigenous people at the fair. Those who visited would be able to see “Indians! All kinds of them,” including Geronimo, the “Red Devil.”102 On the fairgrounds, Geronimo occupied a booth overlooking the Indian Village. There, he and other Native artisans engaged in traditional craftwork while Indigenous children studied across the hall in a McGowan’s Indian School meant to convey the goal and efficacy of assimilation.103 Geronimo was treated as an object at the St. Louis fair, in what one

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scholar has termed “commodity racism,” with visitors trying to touch him and cut his hair; he in turn chose to sell his coat buttons (replacing them as he did so), signature, photograph, and the bows and arrows he made, generating significant income.104

Fig. 11.6: Geronimo, Apache Chief from Arizona in the Department of Anthropology at the 1904 World’s Fair, photograph by Charles Carpenter, Louisiana Purchase Exposition Co., 1904. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

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There are numerous photographs of Geronimo at the fair, as visitors captured his image and performed “a personal colonization on a private scale.”105 In such interactions, Geronimo simultaneously satisfied some visitors by posing for photographs for a fee and challenged the assumptions of others through his dress and by saying “God bless you,” when they parted, conduct some whites thought too “civilized.”106 These exhibits were wildly popular, with McGee estimating that they attracted more than four million visitors; estimates of overall fair attendance exceeded nineteen million.107 For his part, Geronimo was interested in the fair’s displays, Turkish swordsmanship exhibits, and technological wonders, purchasing souvenirs to take home.108 While the fair’s promoters advertised the opportunities offered to see Indigenous peoples for the last time, the fair fueled interest in the distant Indigenous past. Scientists saw the fair as potentially shedding a welcome spotlight on the region’s earlier history. In “Cahokia Mound and the World’s Fair: What Scientists Expect to Find in the Great Pyramid When They Dig Into It,” a reporter noted that a former St. Louisan, D. I. Bushnell Jr., head of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, had asked the American Association for the Advancement of Science for support in conducting a dig while the World’s Fair was underway. “The mystery of the Cahokia Mound must be solved,” the journalist wrote. “And during the World’s Fair Period.” The purpose of the piece seemed in part to introduce, or re-­introduce, readers to the mound. “The Cahokia Mound is better known to the people of London or Paris or Berlin than to the people of St. Louis.” Though comparable to Egypt’s pyramids, it was poorly understood. He blamed both Indigenous peoples and earlier white settlers: Native peoples considered that “it would be sacrilege” “to disturb its sacred soil” and “the white race that came across the sea and drove the Indians from their inheritance” had been “too busy to concern itself with the Cahokia mound mystery.” Support would be sought from Congress for the excavation and for the creation of a national park to “contain one of the world’s greatest wonders.”109 Efforts to preserve the mounds continued over the next twenty years, culminating in the establishment of an Illinois state park in 1923. In the 1910s and 1920s, St. Louisans made

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their own efforts to commemorate the history of Missouri mounds as well, orchestrating local spectacles and preservation efforts that claimed the mound builders and their monuments as part of a “Mound City” identity and heritage.

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Celebrating Mounds and their Builders in the Pageant and Masque Endeavoring to promote civic pride, the organizers of the pageant hosted a “Native Born Week,” when those born in the city could register as locals by birth, proclaiming their identity as St. Louisans. Among the first to sign up during the “historical registration campaign” was Louis Joseph Manar, who paid the twenty-­five-­cent fee to record his name and heritage. He wrote that his father was from Wisconsin and a member of the Menominee Tribe and put “America” for his mother’s nationality and country of birth. Manar told reporters that he hoped to perform in an “Indian scene” in the forthcoming dramatic re-­enactment of the city’s history. He had experience, he said, having “appeared in Indian costume at least once in this city.” When the Pageant and Masque took place, Manar did indeed appear on stage, though not as an Indigenous character. White members of the Improved Order of Red Men, wearing heavy makeup, played the native roles. In the early 1900s, St. Louisans celebrated local history. The 1904 World’s Fair, with its archaeological displays and references to the Louisiana Purchase, stimulated support for history-­related activities and preservation projects.1 In 1909, city boosters, business leaders, politicians, and participants in civic organizations joined forces to commemorate the centennial of St. Louis’s incorporation. Elsewhere in Missouri, members of heritage societies worked to bring awareness of the past into the present, with a Kansas City chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution initiating the state’s first major historical marker program, and the legislature appropriating $3,000 for a project to commemorate 275

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the Santa Fe Trail.2 Support for such endeavors stemmed from the belief that expressing and celebrating a shared, distinctive past would unite people and bolster their sense of community. Thus both national history and local history were touted as sources of identity, with some finding inspiration in the area’s historic earthworks and their creators. In claiming Indigenous local history as their own heritage, white St. Louisans were not unique. In other parts of the country, white Americans drew attention to Indigenous cultures and artifacts in ways that insisted that white settlers were their rightful possessors.3 The era was one of ongoing contradictions regarding Indigenous peoples, their roles in American society and history, and their pasts. Even as some US policy makers and scientists treated Indigenous peoples as problems to be solved or as embodiments of primitive societies, other white Americans adopted or appropriated aspects of Indigenous cultures and histories, literally “playing Indian.”4 Even though the 1894 Smithsonian report on mounds put an end to debate among white scientists about who built the structures, many white Americans continued to characterize mound builders as a people separate from and more civilized than members of contemporary tribes. These themes came to the fore dramatically in the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, a grand, and some might say grandiose, celebration of the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the city’s founding. While St. Louisans today may know of the Pageant as a precursor to the much-­loved Muny, or St. Louis Municipal Outdoor Theatre, its cast and content are the focus here. Exploring the Pageant reveals a moment in which mounds and their builders were more celebrated in St. Louis than ever before. The Pageant and Masque performances were not the first local history extravaganzas. With historical pageants and commemorations the rage throughout the United States in the early twentieth century, St. Louisans put on a Centennial Week in October 1909, designed to commemorate the city’s incorporation in November 1809. Organizers decided to stage the event a month early, citing the likelihood of better weather.5 To promote commerce, two hundred new lamp posts were installed in the business district in time for Centennial Week. Throughout the city, special ceremonies, events, and presentations were scheduled. St. Louis University mounted an exhibition of ecclesiastical relics from early St. Louis, putting on display items never before shown publicly.

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Clerics were expected to preach sermons on the Centennial, which the Publicity Committee of the St. Louis Centennial hoped to publish for visitors. The historical highlight was Educational Day, scheduled for Friday, October 8, when schoolchildren were granted a holiday.6 An educational, historical, and military pageant took place, and students who participated in the Educational Day parade received a Centennial souvenir flag depicting four hundred years of history of the Mississippi valley condensed into one page.7 In keeping with national trends, the organizers applied the pageant label to some elements of the week’s celebration.8 At its conclusion, the Centennial celebration was pronounced a wonderful success, with a prediction that it would create a new era of civic co-­operation.9 Although the city’s Indigenous history was not the focus of the week, there was one local Indigenous man who participated in the commemorative events. Louis Manar, known as “Indian Lou,” was the proud owner of the oldest bell in the city. Manar told a reporter for the Post-­ Dispatch that the bell had belonged originally to the town crier, a French settler in the colonial era, who rang it to call people to auctions. For the centennial’s opening, Manar brought the bell to Third and Poplar and rang it; larger church bells rang throughout the city to proclaim “the dawn of Centennial week.”10 Unlike the Centennial celebration, the Pageant and Masque five years later was a vast undertaking focused entirely on a theatrical performance, a hugely popular form of historical commemoration of the day. In his wonderful book about pageants, David Glassberg details their sources, designs, and functions and the ways local groups throughout the country worked together to stage elaborate theatrical events to dramatize their communities’ histories. Organizers hoped to involve large numbers of residents, forge new and stronger civic identities, and foster a sense of citizenship informed by history. In many regions, with tides of immigration adding to ethnic diversity among white urban populations, local elites and political activists saw a need to unite disparate groups. Scholars have suggested that for members of patriotic and hereditary organizations, pageants served as a means to promote their own visions of civic identity and to preserve white Americans’ dominant positions in public life.11

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The goals and history of white elites and reformers in St. Louis were intertwined in such pageants. Coming from a different perspective, progressive educators and playground workers—­two groups involved in social work efforts among children and immigrants—­saw pageants as having recreational elements that would expose the public to history and art, not only from the podium but through play.12 A leading advocate of the form, poet Percy MacKaye, promoted civic theatre as a superior form of drama to commercial theatre and touted it as a means of awakening urban masses to a sense of their shared citizenship.13 In short, disparate concerns brought a range of groups together in embracing pageants. Organizers hoped the St. Louis pageant would cement the heterogeneous population of eight hundred thousand into a unified community. A city divided geographically, racially, and socially would develop a shared civic identity through participating in and viewing the pageant.14 In turn, the newly united populace would embrace shared commitments to needed reforms and counter negative images of the city, which had spread nationwide after political corruption had been exposed.15 Throughout, a spirit of boosterism prevailed. St. Louis pageant supporters wanted to foster locals’ sense of pride and identification with their community and, ideally, upstage rival Chicago. Like world’s fairs, pageants were major community affairs. Although pageants proved most feasible in small towns, a few cities staged huge, if not altogether successful, ones, including Philadelphia in 1908 and 1912, New York in 1909, and Boston in 1910.16 Despite the failure of other organizers of large pageants to achieve wide participation, civic officials in St. Louis decided in 1913 to fund their own ambitious historical pageant.17 Its purpose was civic unity and pride, a celebration of the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the founding of St. Louis. “It is given, not to make money or to advertise anything,” they promised, “but to bring all the people of the City together, to make them know each other, to make them proud of each other as citizens, and proud of their city.”18 “Each other” meant other white St. Louisans. The Pageant and Masque had no place for Black Americans, save one man who acted the allegorical role of “Africa” in the Masque, nor for Indigenous Americans, who were not cast to play Indigenous roles on stage. After months of planning, building, and other preparations, the St. Louis Pageant Drama Association mounted a spectacular performance,

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staged in Forest Park. The scope and scale—­both chronological and statistical—­were impressive. Covering hundreds of years of history, the show involved seventy-­five hundred performers; promoters noted that the number of performers required for the Pageant and Masque accounted for more than all Americans employed by all of the country’s circuses combined.19 Each evening, from Thursday, May 28 through Sunday, May 31, 1914, somewhere between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand St. Louisans gathered on Art Hill, in front of the Art Museum, one of the few permanent structures from the 1904 World’s Fair, to watch a performance of their city’s history unfold.20 Half of the forty-­five thousand seats were free, and many more people stood beyond the seats.21 The scale was vast and the crowds impressive.

Fig. 12.1 “The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, Art Hill, Forest Park, May 28–31, 1914,” photograph, 1914. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Promotional materials highlighted the participation of fifty-­six hundred actors and actresses; more performed in the Masque that followed the Pageant.22 There were musicians and dancers as well. The scale of the set was staggering: 125 feet of water representing the Mississippi flowed between the stage and the audience. The stage itself was 520 feet wide at the back with a semicircular front of 880 feet. A postcard advertised the Pageant as “a dramatic chronicle of the wonderful stream of life and romance which has flowed through the Mound City in the past two hundred years” and the Masque as the poetic and symbolic rendition of St. Louisans’ “civic experience,” all performed by the largest number of players ever gathered in the United States, on the largest stage, and in the largest theatre.23

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Pageant oranizers produced a pamphlet that explained why the show was being produced and tying it to mounds and their creators, as well as more recent Indigenous residents. A romantic history of the city, rendered as a gripping drama, the pageant would begin “with the Indian Mound Builders, from whom Saint Louis received its name the ‘Mound City,’” and conclude with the close of the Civil War.24 Joseph Leyendecker’s poster for the Pageant and Masque presented a striking visual interpretation of key themes.

Fig. 12.2: The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, by Joseph C. Leyendecker, poster, 1914. Courtesy of the St. Louis Public Library.

At the lower left, an Indigenous man, who appears to be sinking into waves, stands in front of a stylized meso-­American post. Saint Louis dominates the center of the scene, standing on the prow of a wooden ship, pointing upward and onward into a starry future. His appearance heralds the coming of several other figures: an explorer, a settler, a priest,

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a woman, and, not least in importance, a baby, the harbinger of a white civilization and a white population. Much more than the Centennial Week of 1909, the Pageant and Masque of 1914 featured Indigenous people’s histories, and indeed presented their distant and more recent pasts as key parts of the narrative. The images carried home the idea. Indigenous people would be there.

Fig. 12.3: “I will be at the Pageant & Masque, May 1914,” lantern slide with watercolor illustration, 1914, St. Louis Pageant and Masque Lantern Slides. Courtesy of the St. Louis Public Library.

Notably, the Pageant and Masque portrayed the mound builders as creators of a great, lost civilization, upon which later white settlers built. More recent Indigenous inhabitants of the region, who played important roles in the early parts of the performances, were represented as less civilized; as a separate, unrelated people responsible for the demise of the mound builders’ civilization; and as disappearing, tropes that were carryovers from the 1800s. Promotional materials highlighted the roles of Indigenous peoples in the city’s past, telling viewers that they could

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see the history of the city come to life: “Moundbuilders, the Indians, the explorers . . . the founders and early settlers . . . the pioneers and builders of the city’s greatness.” The phrasing suggests the copy writer saw “Moundbuilders” and “Indians” as distinct, disconnected peoples, though there were occasional references to the “Indian Mound Builders.”25 The establishment of the modern city of St. Louis, the message was, grew out of a European’s vision and ambition and replaced the Indigenous past, both distant and recent.

Fig. 12.4: “The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis to Be Enacted by Five Thousand of the City’s Citizens,” St. Louis Pageant Drama Association, postcard, 1914. Saint Louis Pageant and Masque Records, Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

The Pageant opened with the mound builders, the first peoples of the region, on a set that made their legacy visible. Reconstructed mounds, inspired by masque author Percy MacKaye’s visit to Cahokia and meso-­ American pyramids, provided the backdrop for the action.26 Cahokia Mound occupied the center, with lesser mounds to the right and left, and a façade of a great Mayan temple to the side. The temple was modeled on Chichén-­Itzá, the Mayan temple, considered a great architectural masterpiece.27 Spectators would witness the creation of a mound as long lines of men and women carried earth in baskets to build a mound and bury the chief of the tribe.28 According to the narrative, the mound builders embodied their civilization’s most tangible achievements, engaging in cooperative labor to support their social hierarchy. But then

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things changed. Buffalo hunters persuaded them to give up their way of life.29 The point was explicit: mound builders were not the same people as the Native peoples who followed them. The latter were seen not only as less civilized but as responsible for the demise of the great civilization of the mound builders. In subsequent scenes, the “Indians of the later period are seen in the acts of peace and war, in the calumet dance, the council, in battle, and in the division of lands.”30 In characterizing the “Mound Builders” as different from the “Savage or Nomadic Indians,” the pageant producers separated them.31 Despite a narrative that overall treated the groups as not connected, the Pageant did feature the moment when Spanish explorer De Soto’s expedition placed a cross on a mound then in use, a visual that established the continuity of cultures rather than discontinuity. Several early scenes featured Indigenous peoples interacting with explorers, priests, colonists, and other early settlers. But as the chronology moved closer to the present, they disappeared from the action. Following the Pageant was the Masque, a more abstract meditation on the past. On stage, the Spirits of the Mound Builders, who represented “the race at the very height of its civilization,” moved across the stage, before Cahokia, the Spirit of the Mound. Represented by a massive puppet, Cahokia bemoaned the fate of his people and wondered whether a child foretold to bring new life would “be a child of his red race who shall once more build mounds for his temples.”32 As the action progressed, Cahokia learned that Mississippi would instead bring forth “the child of a new race, a white child who shall bring back civilization.”33 Then, with responsibility for civilization safely in the hands of destiny’s white child, “Cahokia sleeps with his people.”34 Thus closed the Masque’s first act; Indigenous people did not appear in the second. Described as a representation of St. Louis’s history, with the fall and rise of civilization as its theme, the Masque made clear the sources of civilization and disruption in the region.35 Those who performed Pageant roles of the “Indians of the later period” in the De Soto scene played Wild Nature Forces in the Masque.36 Their dual roles reinforced a narrative that cast contemporary Native peoples as sources of disruption and responsible for the fall of a great civilization into barbarism.37 While Native roles were vital in the narratives of the Pageant and Masque, no Indigenous person was on stage in a Native role. The

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producers rejected the offer of members of a Chippewa band to perform such roles. In March 1914, two months before the Pageant was scheduled to open, Chief William Hole-­in-­the-­Day, from the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, home to many Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Chippewa) bands, contacted the organizers with a proposal. Though Hole-­in-­the-­Day’s original letter has not been located, its intriguing contents can be deduced from the reply. Hole-­in-­the-­Day offered to bring a group of Ojibwe men to St. Louis to participate in the Pageant as performers, or, if the organizers preferred, to put on a baseball exhibition.38 What led Hole-­in-­the-­Day to make the offer is unknown, but pre-­pageant publicity, detailing the numbers of performers and general historical content, appeared in newspapers in Chicago, where Hole-­in-­ the-­Day was likely living at the time, and in Minnesota as well.39 Hole-­in-­the-­Day’s suggestion of presenting a baseball exhibition in conjunction with the pageant is not as surprising as it may seem at first glance. Then around thirty years old, Hole-­in-­the-­Day likely learned to play baseball at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which he had attended for several years. Carlisle, located at the site of a former military barracks and in operation from 1879 to 1918, was a government-­run boarding school for Indigenous children; the goal of its curriculum was assimilation. Founder Richard Henry Pratt sought to eliminate all aspects of Indigenous culture from students’ lives, to “erase and replace,” or as he infamously put it, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”40 Sports were encouraged, and Carlisle produced some famous athletes, including Olympian and All-­American Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, who played for professional football, baseball, and basketball teams. Hole-­in-­the Day’s fellow tribal members, Charles Bender and William Choneau (Cadreau), both of the White Earth Band of Chippewa, went on to play Major League Baseball.41 Hole-­in-­the-­ Day’s particular baseball talent was on the pitching mound. In 1903, the Morning Oregonian in Portland printed a letter to the editor describing Hole-­in-­the-­Day’s trademark style. Responding to a previous column posing the question of whether there had ever been any ambidextrous pitchers in the country, the unnamed reader wrote, “I have seen a pitcher use this peculiar delivery to great advantage. The young man I refer to is a Minnesota Indian by the name of William Hole in the Day. He hails

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from the White Earth Indian Reservation of that state.”42 Baseball was an American sport, and Hole-­in-­the-­Day’s skill signaled his experience with assimilation. St. Louis had recently had a Native baseball player, when Garland Nevitt, who also played football at an Indian boarding school, joined the Cardinals’ roster as a catcher in the spring of 1913, earning $375 a month.43 Despite Hole-­ in-­ the-­ Day’s distinctive baseball talents, willingness to provide an athletic performance, and offer to inhabit the role of an Indigenous person on stage, Pageant officials declined his overture. Eugene Wilson, chair of the Cast Committee, explained, “We would, of course, like to have some real Indians in the Pageant, but have not any money to pay for securing the participation of the Indians from far off points.”44 It is difficult not to wonder how sincere Wilson was in writing that Pageant officials would welcome “some real Indians,” and other scholars have seen in Wilson’s rejection of Hole-­in-­the-­Day’s offer a racist refusal to allow Indigenous peoples to appear on stage. Yet, unlike cities with significant Indigenous populations, St. Louis at that moment did not have a large local native population. According to the 1910 US Census, only 313 Indigenous people lived in the entire state of Missouri, including those listed as members of the Sioux, Apache, Chippewa, Miami, and Missouri nations.45 No doubt that figure omits many Native people. Few towns or cities that hosted pageants “had full-­blooded Indians of the proper nation living nearby,” though there were some Iroquois who participated in a 1909 one in New York, and pageant-­masters often welcomed the participation of organizations with an interest in Indigenous traditions and lore.46 How Hole-­in-­the-­Day reacted when his offer was rebuffed is unknown. A few years later, he left home to fight in World War I. The Tomahawk reported that Hole-­ in-­the-­Day was “doing his bit’ for Uncle Sam as a member of Co. H., North Dakota National Guards.”47 He subsequently went overseas with Canadian troops and, after suffering a gas attack in France, died from influenza in a military hospital in Canada.48 Intriguingly, there was actually one Indigenous performer, Louis Joseph Manar, the same man who had played a part in the 1909 Centennial Week. Manar is a fascinating figure, a man whose participation in the Pageant has been entirely absent from scholarship about

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Fig. 12.5 Louis Manar, photograph, St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 17, 1902, p. 9.

it. In the spring of 1914, he took the initiative to participate in various capacities, registering himself as a native St. Louisan, lending a crucial prop, and appearing on stage. Each of these activities was profoundly connected to his identities: he was an Indigenous man, a St. Louisan with colonial-­era European heritage, a participant in his community’s civic life. When pageant producers invited local residents to register and contribute a bit of family history to become part of the official record—­to write themselves into history—­Manar stepped up to do so. The Ladies’ Finance Committee had suggested a historical registration campaign with a Native-­Born Week, when St. Louisans could pay a small fee, twenty-­five cents, to sign up. The idea was to enlist the support of St. Louisans, who had thus far failed to show much interest in the Pageant and Masque. Headquarters for the registration, which opened on May 4, were downtown, where visitors could also see costumes, weapons and other objects from the Pageant and Masque on display.49 The St. Louis Star and Times of May 7 reported the news of “Indian Lou” in the office: “The first Indian to register and furnish items of family history for the Pageant records of the Missouri Historical Society is Louis J. Manar.”50 His registration card provided his place and date of birth: St. Louis, 1864; his father’s nationality/country of birth: Menominee Tribe, Wisconsin (his father was also known as “Indian Lou”); and his mother’s nationality/country of birth: America.

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Fig. 12.6 Louis Manar registration card, “Sons and Daughters of St. Louis: A Roll of Native St. Louisans for the Historical Records of the Pageant,” Saint Louis Pageant and Masque Records, Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Archives.

Pageant records claimed that Manar’s bell was among the antiques brought to light by the registration campaign, though Manar had already brought it to civic leaders’ attention for the earlier commemoration. After Manar recorded the history of the bell, members of the Ladies Finance Committee persuaded him to lend it for exhibition in their window.51 “Throngs look at old St. Louis bell of village crier,” noted the press, after “Menominee Indian, born here, lends relic to Pageant Association, telling its history.”52 Manar had previously resorted to the press to publicize his Indigenous ancestry to counter discrimination he experienced from racist whites who thought he was Black. In 1902, the Post-­Dispatch published an account of discrimination Manar was facing. In “Handicapped by Dark Skin, Louis Manar Says Descendance From Indian and French Families Retards His Chances,” the writer reported that Manar described himself as “seriously handicapped in his efforts to support his family, consisting of wife and four young children, because, he says, though the son of an Indian father and a French mother, he is suspected, for reason of his swarthy complexion, of being a negro.” Told by prospective employers

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and landlords that jobs and homes were not open to “colored men” or “colored tenants,” Manar had grown discouraged. “The thing has become so common and so disastrous to me that I concluded to ask the Post-­Dispatch to set me right before the public,” Manar stated. His maternal ancestors included French residents who were “in St. Louis before the United States flag was raised here,” and his father’s mother was a Menominee woman from Wisconsin; whether his father “was a full blood” he did not know, “but he was an Indian, too” and took the surname Manar from his French-­Canadian step-­father. His father had married Matilda Glorie, of an old French St. Louis family. “In my youth,” Manar said, “my complexion was lighter and I never had the trouble I am having now.”53 Manar’s story is highly suggestive. At a time when white Americans were engaging in commemorative pageants and parades designed to unite communities and incorporate new immigrants, when an Americanization movement defined Americans as white, and when animus toward Blacks was on the rise, Manar tried to define himself as not black. White supremacy was at the heart of identity formation, in the city and the nation, and Manar asserted his Indigenous and European heritage in an effort to safeguard him and his family from the worst of racial discrimination US society had to offer. A dozen years later, in the context of the Pageant, Manar again asserted his Indigenous heritage and identity. He wanted to appear on stage in an Indigenous role, declaring his plans to enroll as a member of the Pageant cast and hoping to be assigned “one of the Indian scenes.” This remarkable assertion suggests that Manar was willing, indeed actively interested, in performing as an Indigenous person for his city’s pageant and his fellow St. Louisans. His efforts harken back to those of Geronimo at the 1904 World’s Fair: a man choosing what aspects of his Indigenous culture and identity to highlight in the context of being forced to be on display for white fair-­goers, even as he attended the Fair as a spectator himself. As evidence that he could play an Indigenous role, Manar reportedly mentioned that he had “appeared in Indian costume at least once in this city” and that he could “handle Indian implements of war with dexterity rivalling that of his paternal ancestors.” The reporter further observed that Manar spoke three languages: English, French and German.54 The Westliche Post announced that “eine der Indianerrollen”—­“one of the

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Indian roles”—­in the pageant would “by played by the descendant of a true full-­blooded Indian,” according to the biography Manar wrote for inclusion in the Pageant record.55 When Manar expressed his wish to appear on stage in an “Indian scene,” he may not have realized that the Indigenous roles had already been filled, and not by Indigenous actors. Or perhaps he had heard the news and hoped that the pageant producers could find a place for him, nonetheless. White St. Louisans played all the Indigenous roles in the pageant, appearing as mound builders and members of later local tribes. To play Indigenous roles, Pageant organizers accepted a group of white local volunteers with a self-­professed affinity for Native culture and traditions. Members of the local chapters of the Improved Order of Red Men put themselves forward. In April 1914, an officer of the organization, C. H. Heidbrink, had gone to pageant headquarters to offer the services of “550 members of the St. Louis tribes, as lodges of this order are known.”56 Pageant officials promptly accepted his proposal, and the organization sent out a call for five hundred volunteers to appear at their headquarters the next day.57 The casting made news: “‘Pale-­face’ Red Men to Play in Pageant,” reported the Post-­Dispatch.58 An officer of the organization, who estimated that there were fifteen hundred “Red Men” in St. Louis’s ten local tribes, believed they would have no difficulty finding the four hundred men, one hundred women, and fifty children requested for the “Indian life scene.”59 The St. Louis Star and Times announced that “the Indians in the Pageant are going to be real red men—­of an improved order, too.”60 The group’s patriotic history and lineage were also reported, with descent from the Sons of Liberty, “who, costumed as Indians, held the famous Boston Tea Party.”61 It was the oldest Indigenous fraternal benefit society, one whose members celebrated their early origins.62 The affiliated women’s group had a name with colonial connections as well, the Pocahontas Auxiliary. As Deloria has demonstrated, such assertions of an Indigenous identity as distinctively American reveal the complex relationship of white Americans to the continent’s Native peoples. Pageant organizers chose to have white Americans perform the roles of mound builders.63 Members of the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM) embraced titles and rituals they saw as rooted in Indigenous cultures. Tracing the history of the IORM, Deloria explains how its

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early revolutionary thrust shifted over time, with the white men who played Indians coming to view themselves as historians who kept alive the nation’s aboriginal roots.64 As Indigenous peoples vanished, the underlying assumption went, the members of the order would become crucial interpreters of Indigenous customs and repositories of their traditions.65 From that perspective, the IORM participants “desired Indianness, not Indians,” and had “no interest in querying Indian people about their customs or recruiting them into the society.”66 Thus, with Indigenous peoples largely characterized as vanished or vanishing, Pageant organizers’ decisions to use white locals fulfilled the logic of that false assumption; the Pageant itself celebrated a narrative that presented white civilization as supplanting Indigenous populations and societies.67 Once Pageant officials accepted the volunteers’ offer, they immediately scheduled a rehearsal so that the stage managers could “tell the Red Men what they are expected to do.”68 When it came time to rehearse, however, the director did not like the way the local members of the Improved Order of Red Men played Indians. “Red Men are Too ‘Noisy’ as Indians in Pageant Practice,” read one headline.69 Hearing the “chorus of Indian war whoops, Friday, in Red Men’s Hall, 918 Pine Street,” the author and stage director of the Pageant, Thomas Wood Stevens, leapt to his feet. “‘Stop!’” he exclaimed, “‘We don’t want any shouting there.’” Their hand gestures also provoked the director, who asserted that the “shading of the eyes with the hand is a genuine Indian characteristic,” but one that needed to be used in moderation, according to Stevens, who said it “‘has been overworked in the moving pictures.’” The Red Men clearly embraced performing enthusiastically, with almost one hundred members of the society giving “evidence of previous training in war whooping and war dancing, which are said to be included in the Red Men’s ritual.” The rehearsal convinced the reporter that even without their costumes, which were being made, “these Red Men closely resembled real Indians as in their crouching position they went through the war dance.” Stevens reportedly did not approve of the men’s “calumet (peace) dancing” either and informed them they would have an instructor.70 What constituted “Indian Dances” and how they functioned in pageants concerned their producers. As Virginia Tanner, the secretary

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of the American Pageant Association, stated, “Although they constitute our real American Folk Dance, we seem to know little about them.” Tanner considered the dances too subtle and too poorly understood, so much so that even when pageant performers “try to do those the Indians have taught us, they somehow do not seem to come out.” Given the failure to replicate Indigenous dances, pageant choreographers improvised. “So we make up wild things of our own, with whoops and leaps,” declared Tanner. “And the louder we hoop up and the higher we leap, the more the audience likes us.” Calling such inaccurate representations regrettable, particularly as “Indian rituals and ceremonials play so vital a part in all American Pageantry,” she opined that “America has never done the Red Man justice. It remains for her in Pageantry to finish him off completely.” Directors had to do what they could with what they “learned from the Indian first hand,” “from the descriptions of travellers and ethnologists” and then “infuse the whole with a sham authenticity created by imagination.”71 Heavy makeup was involved in preparing white St. Louisans for the “sham authenticity” of their performances as Indigenous people. The Globe-­Democrat reported on how “Painters Daub Indians,” with sixteen gallons of coloring matter. The reporter sketched a scene that may have been invented: “It required 16 gallons of copper-­colored paint to cover the bare legs, arms and shoulders of the redskins. For this task two house painters were employed. They used heavy brushes and daubbed [sic] the paint at the rate of one Indian a minute.” Men, women, boys, and girls all had their faces, necks, legs, arms, and shoulders covered. But the transformation was fleeting: “The 100 redskins who swim in the lagoon in the landing of Mississippi scene went into the water brown and came out white. The color was not fast.”72 In other words, an Indigenous identity—­for whites—­could be put on and taken off in a moment. Yet theatre critics were impressed. Struck by the beauty and scale of the performance on the great stage, reviewer George Baker wrote, “The Boy Scouts, clad only in breech-­clouts, their bodies stained a yellow brown” appeared “in Indian file, with right arm extended before them and right knee raised high like figures in Assyrian bas-­reliefs.”73 While the attire and makeup were created for the Pageant and Masque, some of the props the performers used may have been Indigenous. The properties committee

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report acknowledged Dr. Henry Milton Whelpley, a pharmacist with an interest in archaeology, as the source as “Indian implements.”74 The white men who played Indigenous roles came from across St. Louis and embraced participation in civic affairs. After the first practice, a reporter highlighted how the pageant drew in a wide swath of the community. “Many parts of the city were represented at the rehearsal,” he wrote, “among the most enthusiastic of whom were members of Wapello Tribe, No. 110, which consists of Italians, and has its headquarters in the Southampton district.”75 To play the role of a “silent chief ” possessed of “a magnificent build,” organization leaders recommended Everett Lewis, a city Water Department employee and member of the Wampum Tribe lodge, no 202; they thought the 6’3” Lewis would make an ideal sachem.76 Playing Indian on stage and in their fraternal lodges, these men participated in the civic life of St. Louis and indeed touted their affiliation as part of their résumé as public servants. Take, for example, William P. Lightholder, whose role as the six-­term Great Chief of Records of the Missouri Council of the Improved Order of Red Men, as well as his chairmanship of the group’s relief committee, were cited as qualifications for his candidacy for city Recorder of Deeds.77 Lightholder, a member of the Ivanhoe Tribe, no. 68, during the Pageant, played the role of a calumet bearer.78 And in June 1914, the Globe-­Democrat reported that lodge members of the Minnetonka Tribe of the Improved Order of Red Men approved and endorsed the proposed new city charter as “modern and progressive and what St. Louis needs.”79 Thus civic identity and fabricated Indigenous traditions were intertwined. Scholars have argued that images of Native peoples remained critical to white Americans’ imaginings of themselves and if anything became even more important in the late 1800s and early 1900s.80 All was not smooth sailing for the members of the IORM. On the last evening of the Pageant, the actors playing Indigenous roles balked. “Pageant Indians Go On Strike,” read the headlines. Apparently, members of the Improved Order of Red Men, who played all the Indigenous roles, threatened to walk out when a gatekeeper refused to let one of the men drive his car into the backstage enclosure. The driver and his passengers had gone out for sandwiches before the Pageant, but the gatekeeper refused to let them pass, though all of the men “were in

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their redskin regalia.” When the gatekeeper made a crack about the men lacking good judgment, saying they were working themselves to death for nothing by performing, they were offended and declared that they would not participate that evening. They soon changed their minds, and the performance went off as planned.81 The white performers featured in a Globe-­Democrat cartoon depicting a reconstructed mound built by the Mound Builders Union, Local No. 6, with numerous white St. Louisans positioned in their Indigenous garb and makeup, discussing the Cardinals, local transportation, and where they lived in the city.82 After the St. Louis pageant concluded, the organizers received an inquiry regarding Indigenous casting and participation. In June, William Anthony Aery, from the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, wrote to Luther Ely Smith, secretary of the St. Louis Pageant Drama Association’s executive committee, to request “any material dealing with the part that the Indians played in the recent St. Louis pageant.” His institution was “deeply interested in all that concerns the interests and activities of Indians and Negroes.” Smith replied with a copy of pageant materials to show “the Indian life as portrayed.” Stating that there were “no Indians who took part as such,” as far as he knew, Smith added parenthetically that “the Secret Order or [sic] Red Men took a great many of the Indian parts—­you are doubtless familiar with this order) There was one full blooded native Indian, who took a prominent part in the Madam Rigouche [sic] scene, ringing the school bell.” Smith left a blank space in the letter, as though he needed to find the man’s name, adding that “he was a very interesting character—­a native of Saint Louis.” That incomplete reference to Louis Manar aside, Smith did not provide more information about Indigenous performers and roles, but pronounced the whole undertaking a complete success in every way and democratic.83 Final reports from the Pageant, however, discussed Manar’s involvement in more detail. Although he did not appear in an Indigenous role, he did take the stage, as Smith had indicated, playing the part of an early French resident. His casting followed his loan of the bell to pageant producers: “Mr. Manar, many of whose friends and acquaintances know him as ‘Indian Lou,’ subsequently joined the cast of the Pageant. In the scene of the attack on the village, he used the old bell to warn villagers of

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the approach of the enemy.”84 The pageant scene recreated the assault by a combined Indigenous and British force, which featured schoolmistress Madame Rigauche rallying fellow residents to the defense the village.85 Although listed in the later report on the pageant, Manar’s name did not appear among the cast members listed as performing in the 1780 scene in the program available at the event.86 As it happened, there were more Indigenous people in the audience of the Pageant and Masque than there were on stage. Spectators rather than actors, a group of Blackfeet men were there, all expenses paid. On May 29, the Globe-­Democrat featured two articles about “Twelve Blackfeet Indian Pageant Visitors.” They had come to the city as guests of the Great Northern Railroad, whose representatives invited them to attend. The reporter commended the group’s assimilation, “In this generation the Blackfeet are forsaking the war path for the farm, and the present trip of these twelve is given to show the appreciation of the Great Northern of changed conditions.”87 On their way to their reservation in Wyoming, the men had stopped in St. Louis after attending a Shriners’ convention in Atlanta. During their St. Louis stay, the men would be “attired in full war garb,” and accompanied by a representative of the Great Northern Railroad, and driven around the city. “‘Thus the White men will entertain the red men,’” commented one of the organizers. The itinerary of the Blackfeet men included a meeting with the mayor at City Hall, a meeting with police chiefs at Police Headquarters, a baseball game, a visit to Jefferson Barracks to place wreaths on soldiers’ graves, and the Pageant.88 One reporter’s comments implied a contrast with the pageant’s performers: “Real Indians Give Show in City Hall,” read the headline; “Twelve Blackfeet, Here to Witness Pageant, Stage their War Dance.”89 After meeting with the absent mayor’s secretary, the Blackfeet men reportedly expressed their willingness to stage their war dance, and gathered at the rotunda on the first floor. A crowd of clerks, stenographers, and department heads crowded the railings above to watch.90 One cannot help but wonder what went through the men’s minds later that evening, as they sat, amongst an immense crowd, watching a group of white St. Louisans dance and perform Indigenous roles. Hailed as a resounding success, the Pageant and Masque was held in conjunction with a Conference of Cities, open to the public, which had

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a similar focus on promoting common causes and initiatives. Speakers addressed the civic and artistic significance of the Pageant and Masque and also presented a list of resolutions for an action plan for the city. These included establishing a permanent open-­air theater on or near Art Hill and the preservation of Cahokia Mound and its vicinity as a National Park.91 In one of many ironies, a civic pageant that involved white St. Louisans performing Indigenous history as their own may have played an important role in fostering preservationist sentiment. In a move undoubtedly designed to encourage support for that resolution, official envoys to the conference and members were taken by car to Cahokia Mound, “the historic place which gave Mr. Percy MacKaye the inspiration for his Masque.”92 This historical focus on preservation of the mounds and the heritage of their builders rests on an argument that they were important to St. Louis and St. Louisans, a key part of their origin story. While the founding of the Muny at another natural amphitheater in Forest Park followed in a few years’ time, the goal of a National Park at Cahokia Mound remains unfulfilled. In the short run, the spotlight the Pageant and Masque cast on the mounds, their builders, and their civilization may have contributed to local campaigns in the 1920s to preserve the mounds at Cahokia and commemorate the Big Mound.

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Commemoration and Preservation The weather was miserable that Saturday in May 1929. Heavy rain fell for hours. Event organizers had to adjust their plans, moving the ceremony to the open entryway of a nearby warehouse. They borrowed chairs for the audience from the mortuary next door. Standing before those gathered, a famous archaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution described the great mound that once stood at the site. Newspapers reporters took notes on the celebration of St. Louis’s past. After years of effort, the women of the patriotic society had succeeded in placing a historical marker at the Mound City’s greatest historic monument. They believed the granite boulder they installed would serve as a permanent and highly visible reminder to St. Louisans of the Big Mound’s place and significance in their city’s history. Enthusiasm for local history did not fade in the aftermath of the 1914 Pageant and Masque. Throughout the state, civic leaders and the members of community organizations staged pageants and hosted commemorations with regularity. In August 1921, Missourians honored the one hundredth anniversary of statehood with a two-­week Centennial Exposition and State Fair. Like so many history-­focused events of the period, it featured a historical pageant, this one with a cast of five thousand. Organizers hoped to generate a love of country and of state and to make the history of Missouri both vital and concrete in people’s minds.1 Educating Missourians about their past continued to be seen as a sound strategy for nurturing state pride, shaping identity, and uniting the community. Such staged celebrations reflected what Eric Hobsbawm calls 297

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the “invented traditions” of the era, practices designed to cement group loyalty and foster patriotism.2 Though the state’s Indigenous history featured in the Centennial pageant, its presentation was rather different from that on display in the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, with its emphasis on mound builders and their civilization. The 1921 pageant began with later Indigenous peoples, a tribe of Osages in camp.3 They were portrayed by “one hundred Indians from Oklahoma reservations,” wrote a reporter, who suggested their appearance would “lend a truly primitive atmosphere to this scene.” Another scene featured “Indian attacks upon the early pioneers.”4 Indigenous peoples were presented as primitive and violent, rather than as representatives of advanced civilizations. Regardless which period of Indigenous peoples were represented, both productions presented whites as triumphally supplanting Native peoples. Despite the omission of mound-­building peoples from the 1921 Centennial pageant, their legacies were not ignored in the St. Louis area in the 1920s. Indeed, the greatest mounds in the vicinity, those at Cahokia, Illinois, were in the spotlight, the focus of scientists and preservationists. One of the ironic legacies of the spotlight shown on mounds by the Pageant and Masque may have been a greater awareness of and interest among white audiences in preserving the mounds still standing around Cahokia. With archaeologists engaged in excavating mounds and publishing their findings, interested individuals on both sides of the Mississippi River increased their efforts to safeguard the site from development. Although the First World War interrupted attempts to preserve the mounds at Cahokia, the struggle resumed after the war. Newspapers tracked the progress. In St. Louis itself, where the monumental complex that once dominated the riverfront had been razed, preservation was not the focus. Instead, the members of the state branch of a women’s heritage group, the Colonial Dames of America, worked to bring recognition to the Mound City’s early Indigenous past. After years of research and effort, they achieved their goal in 1929, dedicating a granite boulder at the site of the Big Mound. The commemoration simultaneously marked an official recognition of the mounds’ place in the city’s history and yet another case of Indigenous history being recast to fulfill local agendas. It was an expression of white St. Louisans claiming

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the mounds as an earlier part of their history, not an acknowledgment of the intertwined and ongoing history of the city with Indigenous peoples’ histories. Nor were any Indigenous voices or perspectives part of the ceremony; white Americans were talking to themselves about the meanings of the mounds, not listening to Native peoples or enlisting their participation. Broader attention among non-­natives to contemporary Indigenous people’s ties to the mounds lay decades in the future when Sugarloaf Mound, the sole remaining mound within city limits, made the news in 2009 because of Osage Nation preservation efforts. Efforts to preserve the mounds around Cahokia pre-­dated the 1914 Conference on Cities’ resolution that called for the site’s protection and designation as a national park. Just a few years beforehand, members of the Illinois State Historical Society urged elected officials to support national recognition of Cahokia, proposing a 1910 bill that called for a commission to investigate the historic importance of the Cahokia mound, as well as assess its suitability as a state park and possible purchase price. Preservationists may have been inspired in part by the federal Antiquities Act of 1906, though its focus was southwestern sites.5 At the time, exposure to so-­called antiquities through World’s Fair displays in the late 1800s and early 1900s had increased white Americans’ interest in archaeology and fueled ongoing plundering and vandalism. Partly in response, the Antiquities Act outlined fines and imprisonment for those convicted of excavating, injuring, or destroying “any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity,” without permission.6 Growing out of decades of advocacy regarding the protection of early Indigenous settlement sites, the legislation established historic preservation policies for the United States and dictated requirements for permits for excavations. The first federal law designed to protect natural or cultural resources, the Antiquities Act enabled the President to set aside places designated as having historic or scientific interest on government-­owned lands as national monuments.7 For those who advocated preservation in the St. Louis area, the law was good news. In 1911, a group of local professional men formed the “Monks of Cahokia,” a secret organization whose goal was the preservation of Monks Mound. Its members met on the summit. As in the 1860s, when rail development proved fatal to St. Louis’s Big Mound, the railroad came into play

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again. In the 1910s, plans for rail line extensions from St. Louis included projects that would cross the Cahokia site, and the need for preservation became more urgent. Efforts to purchase two hundred acres in 1913 failed, and a new preservationist group, the Cahokia Mound Association, formed in 1914, with members drawn from both Illinois and Missouri.8 Although preservation activities paused during World War I, they picked up again afterward, when land developers grew more interested in the parcels around Cahokia.9 In turn, the threat of destruction prompted renewed efforts. As some of those opposed to preservation revived the discredited notion that the mounds were natural—­rather than artificial formations—­and thus not worth saving, some preservationists urged excavation as a means of promoting their goal. They believed that publicity about remarkable finds might generate support for the mounds’ protection. Accordingly, archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead, an instrumental figure in Cahokia’s modern history, conducted several seasons of fieldwork in the 1920s. His digs revealed clear evidence of human construction and settlement, including, in his first season in 1921, a clay altar.10 Such news thrilled many. “The work over at Cahokia,” wrote one reporter, “makes archaeologists of us all.”11 In conjunction with digs, Moorehead and others worked toward the purchase and preservation of Monks Mound and other mounds. A vocal advocate, Moorehead urged contemporaries to do their utmost to protect the mounds and criticized those who failed to do so. He lamented the ongoing destruction of the mounds, asserting that there was something abnormal in the brain of anyone who preferred to see the heritage of the ages destroyed and “two or three bungalows or a filling station or ‘hot dog stands’ erected in its place.”12 Partial success came in 1925, when the state created Cahokia state park, which opened in 1926. Though not the national site called for by the Conference on Cities, the park was nonetheless a crucial step. And, significantly, in contrast to the establishment of many national parks, which were predicated upon the removal of the Indigenous peoples from lands that were part of their cultural heritage and patrimony, this park marked a move in the opposite direction: recognition of the land as having been inhabited by Native peoples.13 In the case of Cahokia, the fact that the park was centered on massive, centuries-­old structures foregrounded the Indigenous context in contrast to national

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parks where Native peoples’ ties to and presence in their ancestral homelands were minimized or ignored. Even so, an archaeological park such as Cahokia was promoted as preserving an important part of the nation’s history by white Americans for their own purposes, not as a sacred Indigenous space for contemporary Native peoples descended from those who built it. In Missouri, historic preservation efforts outside of St. Louis incorporated some Indigenous sites, including mounds. Between 1921 and 1928, the University Club of Springfield, a men’s organization, placed thirteen historic markers on buildings, military sites, a Kickapoo village site, and at a mound site at Drury College, where the marker noted: “These mounds mark the site of pre-­historic Indian homes.” Declaring the mounds to have been destroyed by agricultural entities, the marker perpetuated the false notion that recent Indigenous inhabitants of Missouri had no connection to earlier peoples. “Their builders antedated the Osages. Meager evidence indicates a non-­warlike and agricultural race, probably effaced by pestilence or by warlike enemy tribes,” read the inscription, placed in May 1927.14 Such statements stood in contrast to an editorial inspired by Moorehead’s work in Illinois: Clark McAdams wrote that while he used to subscribe to an alternate theory that treated mound builders as a separate race, he now did not believe that Cahokia Mound or any other mound in American was built by “moundbuilders as distinct from the American Indians.” They were clearly the same people, he observed, citing early explorers’ journals full of comments about “Indians building mounds, living on mounds, burying in mounds and using mounds as religious structures.”15 His remarks serve to underline how often Indigenous knowledge about and use of mounds has been ignored, discounted, or marginalized. A focused effort to acknowledge and commemorate St. Louis’s Indigenous earthworks and mound-­building history arose from the women’s patriotic organization, the Colonial Dames of America. This group of descendants of seventeenth-­century colonists met in St. Louis with members of other women’s historical organizations throughout the state, including local chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the American Colonists, and the United States Daughters of 1812, to address patriotic matters, particularly as

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pertaining to history.16 According to the Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, the society’s members considered historical work to be one of their four main activities.17 That umbrella term covered preservation of unpublished records, the study of local or colonial history, and financial support for historical memorials.18 At a meeting of the Fifth Council in 1900, the society urged members to work to engage in work designed to preserve “Indian history, relics and nomenclature,” and the “Location of graveyards and Indian mounds, securing if possible blue prints of the same.”19 While members contributed to projects they considered of national interest, such as preservation at Monticello or Valley Forge, they also embraced enterprises of special local interest, like the St. Louis Pageant.20 Elsewhere in the US, monuments to Indigenous history reflected white Americans’ conceptions of national narratives. In 1921, the fraternal organization of the Improved Order of Red Men was responsible for installing a huge sculpture of Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader whose assistance enabled the English Pilgrims to avoid starvation in the 1620s, in 1921. In a fascinating study of the place of the statue and its history, Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien explore how the figure conveyed the IORM members’ interpretation of a history of Indigenous acquiescence and peaceable interactions, rather than the violence of the colonial encounter.21 Particular attention to the mound part of St. Louis’s Mound City history emerged in 1913, at the same time much of the city was focused on the Pageant and Masque. Given the emphasis in the Pageant and Masque on the roles of the mound builders, such interest is unsurprising. At their annual meeting in 1913, the Missouri Colonial Dames formed a Committee on Historic Research, whose members prepared and delivered papers on various subjects. They were interested in “the big Indian Mound which with numerous others gave St. Louis the title of ‘the Mound City.’” They described it as having been destroyed for commercial reasons.22 Eventually, the Colonial Dames decided to work toward establishing a monument of their own at the mound’s site downtown, which they would give to the city as a commemorative symbol of an early people and their place in the origin story of the city.

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Preparing for the installation of the historical marker required research. For two years in the late 1920s, the Historic Research Committee of the Missouri chapter of the Colonial Dames focused all its attention on the study of the “old St. Louis Indian Mound and the region around it.”23 The members interviewed “old settlers” and passed along relics and photographs to the Missouri Historical Society.24 Two brothers, Philip C. Weber and Charles C. Weber, were particularly helpful. The Weber brothers also donated a string of beads, described as of very primitive workmanship, to the Colonial Dames for its safe keeping in the Missouri Historical Society. It is unclear if these beads are one of two sets identified as coming from the Big Mound, still at the society; one set of eighteen came from the estate of David Ives Bushnell Sr. in the 1920s, and the other, between four hundred and five hundred shell beads, is labeled as coming from the Big Mound, source unknown.25 The two men had taken the beads “during their boyhood explorations, from a sepulcher within the Great Mound while it was being demolished.”26 In 1929, the Webers, then seventy and sixty-­seven, had been holding on to this string of beads for sixty years.27 Eleven and eight at the time the Big Mound was leveled, they were likely among the crowds of boys contemporaries described as combing through the site, part of the frenzy of relic hunters. One wonders what compelled the Weber brothers to make the donation and what they had done with the sacred funerary objects throughout the previous several decades. In addition to conducting research, members of the society oversaw the proposed marker’s design. In the summer of 1928, three of the Colonial Dames traveled to the Ozarks to choose a boulder that resembled “in outline the old Indian mounds,” finding one in Arcadia that suited their vision. Soon thereafter, they reported to the national society they that had situated a red granite boulder at the intersection of Broadway and Mound streets to mark the site of the mound and would present it to the city with appropriate ceremonies at a later date in the spring.28 In December 1928, the Globe Democrat reported the arrival of the boulder, noting that it would be put in place within two weeks, with a celebration dedicating the marker to follow.29 The Colonial Dames considered the monument itself noteworthy. On one side was a work of

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Fig. 13.1: “Boulder Marking the Site of Great Indian Mound,” Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri (St. Louis, 1932), 78.

art representing a mound builder: “the bronze head of an Indian has an especial interest of its own.” The mold for it was reputedly used in the decorations of a government building at the 1904 World’s Fair.30 On the other side was a tablet, facing Broadway “and the site of the former great masterpiece of the Mound Builders.” It bore an inscription, which is oddly imprecise, in fact flat-­out wrong, in terms of chronology: “This boulder stands near the site of the Great Indian Mound leveled about 1870[,] Which gave to the City of St. Louis the name Mound City[,] placed by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri 1929.”31 The Big Mound was leveled not around 1870 but in April 1869, an event widely reported at the time. The mound itself, the imprecision suggests, was not important enough for the writer of the inscription to get its history right. In other words, nostalgia for St. Louis as Mound City, rather than an interest in Indigenous heritage, held greater sway. The dedication of the marker was a major event, covered in the media, and scheduled to coincide with an important scientific gathering. The St. Louis Star and Times announced: “Colonial Dames to dedicate boulder on historic site.” Repeating the date error of the plaque, the reporter

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described the six-­ton boulder of natural granite as “a replica of the great St. Louis Indian mound which was leveled in 1870 to make way for the railway entrance to St. Louis.” Reflecting the interest groups involved, participants in the ceremony included numerous distinguished citizens and representatives of historical and patriotic organizations. Dr. Matthew Williams Stirling, chief of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, DC, was scheduled to deliver an address. After the speeches were delivered, city officials would formally accept the gift of the boulder. The state society’s president, Mrs. Benton H. Pollack, would be assisted by Mrs. E. Lemoine Skinner, chair of the committee in charge of marking the site of the mound, “which was obliterated long ago by the march of progress.” The public was invited.32 The Globe Democrat carried an announcement of the ceremony as well.33 The program was slated to be broadcast on radio on KMOX, as were the addresses at the dinner for the regional archaeology conference meeting.34 The meeting of the Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, was also held on the marker dedication day, May 18, 1929.35 Organizers noted that St. Louis, the Mound City, was selected as the place for the Conference, “both because of the wealth of archaeological material in the State of Missouri and because of the generous cooperation of the Governor and citizens of that state.”36 That combination of reasons—­the significance of the state’s archaeological record and political and civic support—­underlines the involvement of multiple constituencies. Mounds and the mound marker ceremony did more than coincide with the archaeological conference; they featured in it prominently. In his welcome to attendees, Governor Henry Caulfield invoked not only the city’s central location as a railroad center but its distinctive mound history. “St. Louis was formerly called the Mound City, and of course that was because of the large number of mounds that were here,” he explained. Understating the number, he said, “I think that quite a group, of nine or ten great mounds, were on the original site of St. Louis; and unless they have been recently obliterated, there are some here yet, I am told.”37 Whether he was referring to Sugarloaf Mound, within city boundaries and overlooking the Mississippi to the south, is unclear. Caulfield reminded his audience that there had been some mounds in Forest Park as well. Acknowledging the heavy rain falling that day, Caulfield mentioned the planned dedication ceremony that

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afternoon of the Colonial Dames, and others who dared face the inclement weather.38 They planned “to put a tablet where there was formerly the sepulchral mound, called the Big Mound, and you know that was at the foot of Broadway and Mound Street.”39 Sharing his own memories, Caulfield said that he had lived on Mound Street when he was a little boy and remembered playing on the mound. “So when I read the other day concerning Big Mound that it was destroyed in 1869, I did not believe it,” he said. “It is either my imagination, or the author was wrong, because I have a very distinct recollection of seeing at least parts of that mound when I was a youngster playing there, and I know I was not born until four years after 1869.”40 Either Caulfield’s memory was faulty, or enough of the embankment below the mound site stood for some time, as suggested by the 1875 pictorial St. Louis drawings, that he accurately remembered that area as mound-­like. In the course of the speeches delivered at the conference, including Caulfield’s, several themes emerged: how to monetize the mounds, preserve them, and educate people about them. Boosters and scientists alike championed the mounds, speaking from differing perspectives that overlapped on the goal of protection. As on numerous occasions before and after, the history of the mounds was presented as something that had been lost to time and only discovered by white Americans: Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and practices did not feature. Whites saw themselves as the ones who discovered, studied, and preserved the legacies of a vanished people, saving their histories from oblivion and incorporating their legacies into a national narrative that celebrated white expansion across the continent. None of those speaking at the dedication of the mound acknowledged contemporary Native peoples’ traditions about the mounds, their visits for ceremonial purposes, or their protests of whites’ encroachments on and abuses of their ancestors’graves.41 Native traditions about the mounds, mostly reported and then discounted by white Americans well before the “Mound Mania” of the mid-­1800s took over, were recorded in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as with, for example, Arthur C. Parker’s account of the construction practices involved in mounds built for defensive purposes.42 Parker, a Seneca scholar and great-­nephew of Ely Parker, became an anthropologist and helped found the Society of American Indians in

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1911, an organization “by Indians and for Indians,” designed to foster unity among and education for and about Native peoples.43 The society sought to preserve Native histories, fought for citizenship for Indigenous peoples, and supported the creation of an American Indian Day. Their first annual meeting, held in a state notable for both historic Native architecture and mass removal of Native peoples, convened in Columbus, Ohio, to coincide with Columbus Day 1911, and included visits to Indigenous mounds.44 The site was the famed Newark Earthworks, the largest geometric enclosures in the world; though part of public parks in 1911, the Octagon Earthworks section was leased to Moundbuilders Country Club as of 1910 and has been used for a golf course since 1911.45 There, they sang “America” atop Observatory Mound, an act imbued with many nuances.46 The organization published a journal as well, The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, which began publication in 1913. Its first issue featured an article about the organization’s second annual meeting and a discussion of a tour participants took of an Indian Museum containing relics “of the mound-­building Indians who formerly inhabited Ohio.”47 Part of the group assigned to choose a symbol for the organization, Parker and his fellow committee members selected the eagle because it was venerated by their ancestors as well as almost every modern tribe. Wishing to make a good selection for the symbol, they “took the copper eagle found in a mound built by American Indians many centuries ago”; it came from a mound in Peoria, Illinois.48 Members of the group clearly understood contemporary Indigenous cultural traditions as deeply tied to those of mound-­building peoples. This palpable sense of cultural continuities, important to the leaders of the Society, was not on display at the 1929 St. Louis meeting, where the economic potential of mounds most interested the Missouri governor. Caulfield saw the attention paid to mounds as potentially important and lucrative, and he wanted to enlist those gathered in coming up with reasons to preserve Missouri’s mounds. In the late 1920s, there were still thousands of mounds in the state, if not in St. Louis itself. “I was asking a while ago whether there was any money in this mound-­preserving business,” he told the conference attendees. “You know nowadays we, of course, have a great many people who are interested in things from

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Fig. 13.2: “Drawing of the Copper Eagle found at Peoria, Ill.,” from “Our Emblem, the Copper Eagle,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 1, no. 3 (July– September 1913), 304–5.

a cultural standpoint, and I believe that there are enough of those to preserve the mounds” elsewhere in the state. Cultural commitments might not be enough, however, in his view. He advised that preservation depended on dollars: “just show how there is going to be some money in it for somebody, and I will guarantee that they will be preserved.” Delighted to learn there was a potential for profit, Caulfield reported that sightseers, using the country’s excellent new road systems, were paying enough in admission fees alone to justify preserving mounds. The money to be earned was worth chasing, as tourists would enrich the city and the state.49 But money alone did not motivate Missourians, who had supported establishing parks in the Ozarks, an initiative Caulfield did not consider at all commercialized. In other words, he urged, “If you can show the people of Missouri that there is a reason for preserving the mounds, it does not have to be a purely commercial or financial reason.” If adequate artistic or romantic reasons for maintaining the mounds were found, people “through their government” would preserve them. If the conference generated any “thought in that direction,” it would accomplish “a great thing for the people of Missouri.”50 Caulfield’s comments reveal no consciousness of how Native peoples viewed the mounds or of the anger and grief the destruction of these earthworks engendered.

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The mounds and Native cultures were presented as important aspects of white American history. Speakers debated how best to preserve mounds and where they fit into local traditions. Rufus Dawes, president of the Chicago World’s Fair Centennial Celebration, invoked both religion and history: “I think I shall begin my talk tonight with a text from Deuteronomy: ‘Thou shalt not remove the landmark which they of old time have set in thine inheritance.’” He expressed a hope that many would accept this Biblical injunction literally and follow its prescriptions against “removing the relics of the mound builders and of the ancient people who once dwelt in the land of our inheritance.”51 In addition to the mounds, Dawes believed, all of Indigenous peoples’ innovations and knowledge were part of an inheritance the citizens of the United States enjoyed. Deftly, and tidily, he claimed the Indigenous peoples and cultures of the region as his birthright. “These men who occupied this land before us are a part of our tradition,” Dawes declared. “Their mounds remain. We use the corn which they developed, the Irish potatoes, the peanuts, the tomatoes. And we have their love of nature and the enjoyment of the woods and streams—­we profit by their knowledge and we hand it down through our Boy Scouts for the young to enjoy.”52 In Dawes’s view, Indigenous histories, engineering and agricultural achievements, and attitudes toward the natural world were important and should be cherished as part of white American society, traditions, and cherished organizations like the Boy Scouts. In some speakers’ opinions, the economic and cultural debts owed to Indigenous peoples by the US and its citizens were immeasurable. Dr. George R. Throop, the Chancellor of Washington University, thought it almost impossible to estimate the wealth Native peoples brought to the country. Not only did contemporaries “owe the American Indian the corn produced in the United States . . . [and] all of the Irish potatoes produced in the entire world,” but many other fruits and vegetables as well. “We should go farther than that and show that the native Indian actually had an art, and still has an art, which is very important,” visible in their cliff dwellings, arts, and “manufactures of various kinds.”53 Indigenous place names, medicinal plants, and myriad other Indigenous contributions lay behind the foundations of modern life and culture in the United States. Rather than looking to “our forefathers of the Old

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World,” declared one speaker, contemporaries should look to Native peoples for the “historical background” of “modern American life.”54 This Indigenous legacy had myriad repercussions, paramount among them a need to acknowledge the historical, cultural, and economic influences and contributions through education. Given the profound debts owed to the “earliest Americans,” said Samuel A. Barrett, director of the Milwaukee Public Museum, studying the remains of their early cultures would foster “a full appreciation of the truly intimate, historical relation existing between us, with our special culture, and the American Indian with that great early culture which flourished in the Western hemisphere so long before our coming as a conquering race.”55 While Barrett’s comments contain the problematic element of claiming the Indigenous past as an inheritance to which whites were entitled as descendants of “a conquering race” who were possessed of a “special culture,” his closing statement serves as a reminder of the importance of studying history and an injunction that retains its merits in the US today: “Thus may we come to realize the importance of the American Indian in our every day life.”56 To save mounds and to understand the debts owed to Indigenous peoples, preservation and history education were needed. Dawes thought only one course reasonable: “I think we may regard it as a part of our duty in preserving tradition to maintain these mounds which adorn these states of the Mississippi Valley.”57 Dawes defined tradition as remembering and using the best of the past, the “facts and monuments” and “all that has gone before which would enable us to build up for ourselves and to maintain for ourselves those standards of conduct which have been created out of our past.”58 After Dawes concluded his remarks, Stirling put in a word for the Smithsonian, his home institution, and in particular its Bureau of American Ethnology. There, he said, many letters “consisting principally of inquiries concerning subjects relating to the Indians and Indian remains” arrived daily. He attributed the “naïve” contents to “the simple reason that the great mass of our population has had no opportunity to become adequately educated upon these subjects.” Echoing earlier speakers, Stirling urged the distribution of textbooks in grade schools and high schools “giving accurate and up-­ to-­date information upon the native period of American history,” a

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development that made good sense, he argued, particularly given “that the few hundred years that have elapsed since” Columbus constituted “but a small fraction of the entire period of the time that human beings have occupied this continent.”59 Stirling’s comments amplified those of Throop, who declared that students knew very little about Native peoples. “Despite the fact that there is no subject in the United States about which our people should be so well informed,” Throop insisted, “I believe there is no subject about which the ordinary student at the present day is less informed.” Throop made that comment “advisedly” but believed it “entirely true.” In his view, not one student in twenty knew “that the Indians were the real mound builders.”60 The presence of contemporary Indigenous people, however, was not part of their focus, an oversight which contributed to the narratives of a vanished people. William John Cooper, US Commissioner of Education, echoed Throop’s and Stirling’s emphases on both education and contemporary connections to the Indigenous past. Cooper argued that archaeological meetings were of value to schools and colleges, as they sparked “an interest in a civilization that has been superseded and largely supplanted by our own.” White Americans should be interested in “the culture of the natives” because their “own economic greatness has foundations in aboriginal culture, and that from that culture we take much of value in character training for our Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls and similar organizations.”61 Fay-­Cooper Cole, an anthropology professor at University of Chicago, believed that everyone was interested in the subject, in part because “every boy has played Indian and at some time has longed for the traditional care-­free life of our predecessors”; his characterization of “everyone” clearly indicated he meant white Americans.62 Cole, who also served as Chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology for the National Research Council, hoped that meetings, new textbooks, US National Park Service initiatives, and other efforts would produce valuable results. He hoped to see “a popular interest in the peoples who lived here before our ancestors came,” “a popular demand that the remains of the prehistoric culture remain intact and protected from the ignorant and the vandal until they may be studied scientifically,” and “a realization on the part of chambers of commerce that these remains are community assets worthy of their careful consideration.”63

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Such sentiments would have no doubt been welcomed by the Colonial Dames as well as the governor. As final preparations for the marker dedication ceremony were underway, the heavens opened. That Saturday, May 18, 1929, a deluge forced the event planners to relocate. Using a neighboring warehouse, they gathered inside its wide, open motor entrance, where they could enjoy an unobstructed view of the boulder.64 Almost one hundred people braved the downpour to attend the ceremonies.65 Described as enthusiastic lovers of history and tradition, the guests sat on chairs borrowed from a mortuary next door, listening “with rapt attention as the story of the Mound Builders, with the significance of the great demolished mound” was presented.66 Six speakers addressed the crowd, including Stirling, Colonial Dames research committee chair Lemoine Skinner, George Turner Parker of the Missouri Historical Society, and Guy M. Wood, Associate City Counselor, who accepted the monument on behalf of the city.67 Reflecting on the day’s events, the Colonial Dames report mused about how the scene of dedication must have “contrasted strangely with a conception of the great St. Louis Mound as it must have appeared to early explorers and pioneers”; they described its summit as then standing sixty or seventy feet above Broadway’s present grade and more than one hundred feet above the Mississippi, which it overlooked.68 They also recalled its later fame, when the locale was the site of General William Henry Ashley’s home, where a memorable barbecue was reportedly held in honor of General Lafayette during his 1825 visit to St. Louis.69 Invoking the poet Lord Byron’s phrase about gladiators being killed for others’ entertainment, the report declared “this ancient landmark was butchered, more ignominiously than ‘to make a Roman holiday’, to make ballast for the bed of an early railroad, seeking a comfortable terminal.”70 The Colonial Dames no doubt envisioned the historical marker as an important feature of the location, fulfilling the functions of monuments by declaring the site’s distinctiveness and permanence.71 The Dames hoped the approach to the boulder would serve as a safety-­zone while the monument called attention to the location’s historic associations.72 Yet it neither survived intact nor in place. At some point, it was vandalized. It stood, bereft of explanation, in the weed-­ridden circle of cobblestones,

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which I described in the preface, until the 2010s. The vandalism left it in a state that seemingly paralleled how many white Americans historically saw Indigenous peoples in relation to mounds: they viewed the mounds’ creators as unnamed, unknown, and without voice. Yet many Native traditions regarding the histories of the mounds survive, as Barbara Alice Mann’s Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds abundantly demonstrates. Mann argues that western scholars, operating from closely guarded positions of authority, routinely dismissed Indigenous knowledge regarding the mounds, with negative effects.73 In St. Louis, the base of the Colonial Dames mound marker exists today as an untended circle of stones in the middle of an intersection. When the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, which opened in 2014, went up, the site of the Big Mound underwent archaeological excavations. And a new commemorative plaque, replicating the original wording, was affixed to the boulder, relocated to 1700 North Broadway. As relocated and refurbished, the Big Mound marker continues to present an incomplete acknowledgment of the history of people and place. The wording on the boulder remains problematic: it states that the Great Mound gave St. Louis its nickname and emphasizes the modern city. It is definitely not about the culture and peoples that gave rise to the mounds, or for that matter, about the mounds themselves. Indeed, even the imprecise dating, which noted that the mound was “leveled about 1870,” underlines how little the point of the original marker was to commemorate the mound, its history, its long-­dead creators, or their modern-­day descendants. Even a cursory bit of research in local newspapers or the historical society would have revealed the correct year of the mound’s demolition: 1869. As a symbol, the marker as created in 1929 spoke volumes. The Indigenous past had been repurposed by outsiders for their own boosterism, and very little commemoration of Native peoples was actually involved.

Chapter fourteen

Layers of Indigenous Histories The myth of the Vanishing Indian has never reflected the reality of St. Louis history. Native history in St. Louis did not end at the end of the 1800s, nor did it disappear in the face of practices of erasure and appropriation evident in civic events like the Pageant and Masque and the installation of the Big Mound marker. While dispossession through treaties and forced removal left Missouri with no federally recognized tribes or reservations, St. Louis was and has remained a place where Native peoples live. Their presence, voices, and actions reveal the incompleteness of dispossession. That is, those who occupied Native lands or wrote Native peoples out of historical narratives never accomplished their goals. A few episodes in St. Louis in the 1900s and early twenty-­first century attest to their presence as students, athletes, soldiers, workers, artists, and activists, as well as to representations of and perceptions of Native peoples among the city’s non-native population. Meanwhile, Native-­led organizations in the 1950s and 1970s, protests over plans to build a football stadium on sacred ground in the early 2000s, and ongoing efforts to preserve Sugarloaf mound point to Native peoples’ commitments to create and maintain Indigenous spaces and communities in St. Louis. Such examples serve as reminders that no matter how devastating the actions of white settlers or destructive the policies of government officials directed at removing, containing, and destroying Indigenous peoples and their cultures, Native peoples have been at home in St. Louis and have practiced—­and continue to engage in—­acts of resistance, criticism, and self-­determination. Stories of loss and stories of survival co-­exist. Thus, while developers continue to raze mounds in suburban St. Louis, for example, other mounds, like Sugarloaf, survive as Indigenous tribes like the Osages reclaim and protect them. Press coverage of mounds has continued. 315

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In the twentieth century, Indigenous peoples’ experiences in St. Louis continued to be profoundly influenced by the assimilationist policies of the federal government. Between 1900 and 1950, Native athletes, students, and workers came to St. Louis, in part because of the city’s historic connections to governmental initiatives targeting them. Relocation policies in the 1950s, designed to further assimilation through urban resettlement, brought hundreds of Native people to St. Louis, where discrimination and isolation prompted them to form a mutual support organization. The problems faced as well as experiences shared by Native peoples in cities fueled their engagement in Indigenous protests. As Frederick Hoxie put it, Native peoples in the twentieth century engaged in “talking back” to the American public, with educated Indigenous activists in the early 1900s and Red Power activists in later decades joining an older tradition of tribal leaders’ criticism of white policies, presumptions, and practices from the 1500s onward.1 In St. Louis in the early 1900s, one visible outcome of federal boarding school programs was the presence of Native youths in sports venues, playing baseball, basketball, and football, and engaging in boxing competitions and track and field meets. Sports were seen as an important vehicle of assimilation. Like Garland Nevitt, who briefly played for the Cardinals, or William Hole-­in-­the-­Day, who offered to stage a baseball exhibition, numerous early-­twentieth-­century athletes had a boarding school background. Regular visitors to St. Louis included the football squad from the Haskell Institute, in Lawrence, Kansas, which came to play a powerhouse football machine from St. Louis University (SLU). Founded in 1884 as a boarding school for children, and today known as Haskell Indian Nations University, Haskell grew out of the official US effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples through schooling that prohibited the use of Native languages and religious practices. When the Haskell team held the SLU players to sixteen points in a 16–0 game, the school newspaper declared the score came almost as a victory, given pre-­ game predictions of a blowout.2 Haskell’s team defeated a Washington University football team 18–0, with the school’s newspaper noting how the St. Louis Globe-­Democrat covered the game: “‘The Indians,’ it said, ‘are a novelty here, and from the time they came on the field until they left it they were objects of curiosity to the spectators,’” who came onto

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the field to inspect them at close range.3 Haskell students played on football, basketball, boxing, track, and baseball teams, competing with those of smaller four-­year colleges and junior colleges in Kansas and Missouri.4 Haskell also sent many graduates to St. Louis for work, many in the Indian Warehouse. By the mid-­1930s, Haskell was a post-­secondary, vocational-­technical training institution, and many Haskell alumni settled in St. Louis.5 The pages of the school newspaper, The Indian Leader, are full of references to current and former students, like Ed Peters, “vocational ’38,” and his wife Tocoa Baker Peters, “commercial ’39,” who found jobs in St. Louis, as did Clarence Chicks, “commercial ’37.”6 Numerous young women worked at the supply depot administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, including Martha St. Clair, Juanita Butler, Beatrice O’Jibway, and Waunetta McClellan, all class of 1939.7 In 1941, Vernon Green and Ruth Holmes were also employed at the warehouse.8 In “Grads Get Jobs,” The Indian Leader reported that Celia Cook, Ida Holmes, and Olga Martin, Indigenous women who had earned degrees at Haskell, were all employed at the warehouse in 1942.9 Former Haskell student Robert Summers also worked there; his job appeared in a 1942 birth announcement for his daughter, Robin Patricia.10 Townsley Hare, another former Haskell student, had a job in St. Louis, as did Sullivan Miller.11 This smattering of announcements and names suggests the tip of an iceberg. Many Native people with Haskell connections lived in as well as visited St. Louis regularly. A new staff member notice from 1942 pointed to the mobility of Native people and the place of St. Louis as an employment site; the Christmas issue of The Indian Leader reported that graduate Ira L. Cowan, formerly of Cowlington, Oklahoma, was leaving St. Louis after ten years there, relocating to Haskell with his wife and two sons to join the staff as assistant printer.12 Other notices mention students visiting relatives and friends in St. Louis.13 Native youth also attended school in St. Louis, as suggested by the Haskell principal spending a weekend in St. Louis “to interview Indian students attending colleges in that city” in Fall 1940 and then visiting the following spring “to interview Indian students in attendance in institutions of higher learning.”14 With World War II breaking out in Europe in 1939 and the US entrance into the conflict in December 1941, many Indigenous

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men entered the armed forces and spent time in St. Louis as a result. Approximately twelve thousand Native men had served during World War I, and more than twice that number fought in World War II.15 Some trained at Jefferson Barracks, southwest of downtown St. Louis, the former launching point for military expeditions against Native peoples in the 1800s and an Army Air Corps facility during WWII. The Indian Leader highlighted Native students’ service, with a caption under the masthead declaring the paper “Dedicated to the Haskell Men in the Armed Forces.” Current students Clifford Cuellar, Eugene DeCora, and Lester Jefferson went to St. Louis to train as parachute troopers.16 In 1943, The Indian Leader reported that Clifford Walker, an Omaha man from Macy, Nebraska, was stationed in St. Louis. A sergeant with the Guard Squadron at Jefferson Barracks, Walker had studied auto mechanics before he left the Haskell vocational department in 1940.17 A star student athlete at Haskell as well, Walker repeatedly won or placed repeatedly in shot put, high jump, and hurdles at track meets and earned athletic awards in both track and basketball.18 These young men served the United States, despite the fact that Native peoples were fully recognized as citizens only in 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act; their right to vote was governed by state law and not guaranteed throughout the country until 1957. Sports news continued to regularly highlight the presence of Native peoples in St. Louis and elsewhere. A columnist in The Indian Leader celebrated when James Roberts, a Creek man from Oklahoma City, punched his way to victory in the Missouri Golden Gloves tournament in Kansas City, making him the state champion for 1943. An auto mechanics student at Haskell, Roberts had a date with Uncle Sam for May 25, but was slated to represent Kansas City in a bout with the St. Louis Golden Gloves team before shipping out.19 St. Louis sports pages regularly featured reports on the performance of Haskell Institute students and teams comprised of Indian Warehouse workers.20 A 1941 article about Native basketball players in the Globe-­Democrat opened with the writer’s speculation as to how “an Indian reporter” would have described one evening’s game: “Rain Water of the Oneida Tribe and Running Deer of the Cherokee Tribe shared scoring honors for the squad from the

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city by the Big Lake . . . and Big Elk from the Sioux country paced the home team.” Alerting the reader to the alternative opening, the reporter asked, “Hold on, what’s this?” and answered his own question: it was the fanciful account of a basketball game “in which a team of Indians from Chicago defeated a team of Indians from St. Louis.”21 The reporter went on to list the Native men’s names: Rain Water (George Summers) and Running Deer (Art Willis) . . . and Big Elk (Ike Johnson). The game was the second in a series between employees of the Indian Warehouses of the two cities.22 The caption below the accompanying photograph proclaimed, “Basketball, like baseball, is a typical American game, so there is no reason why the first Americans should not play it.”23 The St. Louis players were listed with dual names: Art Le Claire (Little Thunder, Sioux tribe); Coach Ed Peters (Negonegesh, Chippewa tribe); Cornelius Carshall (Meintachubee, Choctaw tribe); Ike Johnson (Big Elk, Sioux tribe); Bob Summers (Charging Bull, Oneida tribe); Clarence Chick (Charging Bear, Stockbridge tribe).24 Awareness of Native athletes had both local and national dimensions. In 1950, former Haskell student and renowned athlete Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox) received extensive newspaper coverage in St. Louis. After a boyhood on an Oklahoma reservation, Thorpe had attended Haskell for a year and then the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where his athletic career started in 1907. His extraordinary record featured not only stellar records with the Carlisle teams but stints with professional baseball, basketball, and football teams, as well as gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympic games in Sweden. In 1950, an Associated Press poll of 391 sports writers and broadcasters resulted in Thorpe being voted the number one gridiron performer of the previous fifty years, and he was acclaimed as the outstanding male athlete in the first half of the century; the Post-­Dispatch sports editor named Thorpe, Ty Cobb, and Bobby Jones as his choice for the top three athletes in all sports.25 Reporting on an interview with Thorpe, then sixty-­one, a writer shared Thorpe’s current interests: “a moving picture on the story of his life, which is scheduled to go into production this spring.” Thorpe hoped his son, a talented athlete, would play him in the film, but the role went to a white actor, Burt Lancaster.

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Fig. 14.1: Football Player Jim Thorpe, photograph by Harris & Ewing, c. 1910–1920. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, https://www.loc.gov /item/2016854474/.

Beyond his athletic fame, Thorpe was noted for his advocacy. Papers reported Thorpe’s efforts to collect more than $4,000,000 owed to his tribe by the federal government. Thorpe traveled to the east coast to press the claim for the funds representing the principal and compound interest for “land purchased by the United States from the Sac and Fox tribe in 1814.”26 Using racialized language, the Globe-­Democrat described Thorpe as “on the warpath, looking for $456,760,000 that should be on deposit in some St. Louis bank for his tribe.”27 Following the story, the Post-­Dispatch added that “the Sac and Fox tribe and the Iowa and Kickapoo tribes of Kansas also are trying to collect $850,000,000 for all the land in northwest Missouri.”28 Forced treaties and their violations had a long history in the US, and the Supreme Court had unanimously declared that the US government had the unilateral authority to void treaties negotiated with tribes in the 1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock decision. The early 1950s witnessed important shifts in US policies, notably the 1953 Indian Termination Act, aiming to disband tribes and sell

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their lands. A companion policy focused on urban relocation and assimilation led the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to designate relocation cities, St. Louis among them, along with Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Cincinnati, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Dallas. In July 1956, the BIA opened an office in St. Louis to encourage and facilitate the relocation of Indigenous people from reservations in the Southwest and the Dakotas. Located in the Federal Building on Market Street, the St. Louis office was headed by Eudora Reed. Reed explained that St. Louis was selected for a new office as a result of a survey that indicated excellent opportunities for Native peoples in local industry and manufacturing. Stressing that “Indians would not be ‘dumped’ here, but carefully supervised and integrated into the community,” Reed praised the cooperativeness of city, state, and civic groups. To facilitate relocation, Reed’s six staff members were supposed to help Indigenous individuals and families find housing, employment, and health and welfare services.29 A subsequent report described the relocation program as designed to “find employment for Indians from reservations where the population vastly outnumbered the available jobs.”30 Anticipating the program’s growth, Reed estimated that “350 Indian units”—­with a unit indicating either a family or a single individual—­ would come to St. Louis over the next fiscal year, with members of several tribes, including “Sioux, Navajo, Comanche, Apache, Choctaw, and Cherokee groups,” expected.31 The first Indigenous families relocating to St. Louis under the auspices of the program arrived in October 1956. Heralded as “American Indian families” who were beginning new lives as St. Louisans, Mr. and Mrs. Clifton Tongkeamah, members of the Kiowa tribe, drove from their home in Carnegie, Oklahoma.32 Also arriving by automobile were Mrs. and Mrs. Joseph K. Martine and their nineteen-­month-­old daughter Victoria, members of the Navajo tribe from Ramah, New Mexico. Their journeys to St. Louis were challenging, with the Martines’ car breaking down on the way. Trading cars with Joseph Martine’s brother in Lawrence, Kansas, the family continued their trek, carrying with them clothing, bedding, and other possessions. Newspaper accounts highlight the search for economic opportunity as the motivation for the families’ moves, as well as the military service background of the men. Both were veterans of the Korean War, Martine, twenty-­eight, having served from

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1951 to 1953, and Tongkeamah, twenty-­four, from 1953 to 1955.33 The day after they arrived, both men interviewed for jobs at a St. Louis aircraft plant. Martine found a job as an apprentice carpenter at the St. Louis Fixture Company, and Tongkeamah became an apprentice in the McDonnell Airport Corporation riveting department.34 Martine had decided to leave New Mexico because of limited job opportunities.35 His wife expressed her hopes of making friends quickly in St. Louis, adding, “We would like to live in a small house with a yard for our daughter.” Mrs. Tongkeamah, twenty-­five, echoed the economic incentive: “‘We picked St. Louis because there are many kinds of jobs available here. My husband is a printer and I worked in an electrical products manufacturing plant in Shawnee, Okla.’”36 Two other couples, Mr. and Mrs. Willie Gruber, Navajos, and Mr. and Mrs. Walter Henry, Kiowas, arrived a couple of days later, all from the Gallup, New Mexico, area. Both families included young children, the Grubers bringing their toddler sons and the Henrys arriving with their seven-­and eight-­year-­ old daughters.37 One remarkable article in the Post-­Dispatch celebrated Indigenous peoples who relocated as newly minted St. Louisans, comparing them to other ethnic immigrant groups that settled in the city over the previous two hundred years. The April 1957 piece opened: “ST. LOUIS, for many years the home of Murphy and Schultz, of Chong and Gonzales and Pierre and Czarnecki, is weaving new names into its bright tapestry of national and racial cultures. Names such as Good Thunder and Pretty Bear, Kingbird and Tonkama.”38 According to the reporter, the newcomers had chosen to leave their reservations, and “by their own request, they have been transplanted into an alien culture,” “to live side by side with the French and the Spanish, the Germans and the Irish and the Chechoslovakians[sic].”39 Though they came “with a distinct culture and tradition of their own,” they were, the reporter declared, “anxious to be absorbed into the life of a big Industrial city.”40 In response, the column continued, “The Bureau of Indian Affairs is attempting to make that transplanting as painless and as happy as possible, hoping that still another racial strain will take root in St. Louis and become a part of its life.”41 Nowhere does the reporter recognize or acknowledge that St. Louis was planted on Indigenous lands, or that Indigenous peoples had

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long called the city home. The piece noted that of two hundred seventy-­ six Indigenous people who had relocated through the federal program, “only about” twenty had “given up in discouragement,” while the rest were “adjusting to city life.”42 What life was like for these individual families and others who came to St. Louis is difficult to determine, but newspaper coverage suggests some of their difficulties, their efforts to foster a sense of community and to provide mutual support to each other, and the racism they confronted. They straddled social spheres, maintaining tribal identities with monthly meetings and taking an active part in “civic, church, and social affairs of the community.”43 Behind a new organization, the All-­ American Indian Club, were members of the Tahchawwickah family, who told the former relocation office director, Eudora Reed, about a club at an Indian school. Allen Tahchawwickah said that “getting lonesome for more Indians” was a problem for those in St. Louis. Reed agreed that a club would be helpful to newcomers. According to a profile of the organization and the progress of the relocation program, Indigenous families living in the same apartment building as the Tahchawwickahs formed the nucleus of the club.44 The group held dances and holiday celebrations, with those in charge of the social club insisting that the group be for all ages. The director of Kingdom House, a community settlement house operated by the Methodist church and the site of the All-­American Indian club’s meeting, noted that “an Indian organization is a family organization,” with families “closely knit. The entire family comes along to these Saturday night get-­togethers.” 45 By early 1958, 375 recently arrived Indigenous men, women, and children were living in St. Louis. Club President John King estimated that members of fifteen tribes were present, including members of the Sioux, Comanche, Navajo, Cherokee, Chippewa, Winnebago, Oneida, Menominee, Sac and Fox, and Zuni nations.46 Charles Coffee, Reed’s replacement as the local director of the BIA office, believed that early efforts to support newly arrived Indigenous peoples had been inadequate, resulting in some returning to their reservations, “disappointed.”47 Part of the problem, he believed, was placing families singly throughout St. Louis, rather than in proximity to other Native peoples who had relocated. While some whites thought that scattered residential patterns

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preferable, believing that “‘the Indian needs to be accepted by non-­ Indian groups,’” Indigenous peoples were “living in communities” in St. Louis, with “50 to 60 per cent of them in housing projects, most of them at Darst.”48 By mid-­1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced plans to expand its presence in St. Louis with a field office. Two of the other relocation cities, Denver and Cleveland, were also slated for new offices. By July of that year, an estimated four hundred Indigenous people were living in St. Louis as a result of relocation over the previous two-­year period.49 Indigenous peoples who relocated to St. Louis encountered both assimilationist pressures as well as support for their efforts to maintain their cultural identities and traditions. Describing the BIA offices as places where the “re-­location and re-­education of the Indians” would be handled, reporters and non-­Indigenous supporters of the program championed assimilation. They also deployed racial stereotypes in discussing those who came to St. Louis under the auspices of the project.50 Yet others urged the retention of Indigenous practices. Ralph Koeppe, for example, a social worker who was appointed head of Kingdom House in 1955, advocated support for Indigenous peoples’ cultures and identities, saying, “The most horrible thing that could happen would be if the Indian were swallowed up and didn’t retain his Indian heritage.”51 He recalled the comments of a young Indigenous boy who purportedly said, “‘Johnny’s daddy used to be an Indian but he lives in St. Louis now.’ We hope we’re never guilty of trying to over-­Americanize the original American.”52 In the 1960s, as activism in many sectors of US society emerged, Americans of many different racial, ethnic, economic, gender, and regional backgrounds organized to address structural inequalities. In his State of the Union Address in January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson included Indigenous people and reservations in his focus for the war on poverty. In 1969, Vine Deloria Jr.’s treatise, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, presented a widely read and influential critique of anthropologists, termination policies, and aid organizations and their negative impacts on Indigenous peoples and communities.53 The promotion of Indigenous identity and an agenda of Indigenous

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concerns were expressed in the Red Power Movement, with activists staging protests designed to raise awareness, and local groups working throughout the country to serve urban Indigenous communities as well.54 A group occupied Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971, proclaiming the decommissioned prison island a spiritual center and galvanizing public attention. In 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis and became a key organization, planning the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, a cross-­country caravan of protesters. Among the best-­known Indigenous protests of the period was the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, where two hundred Sioux men and women gathered at the site of the 1890s massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a community suffering from serious poverty. In the 1970s and after, these events, and many others, drew increasing attention to Indigenous peoples’ concerns, problems, and aspirations. Activists sued the federal government to honor treaty stipulations. In 1975, the US government ended its termination policy, with the Indian Self-­Determination and Education Assistance Act signaling a new era in tribal self-­governance. In the 1970s, a local organization run by Indigenous people sought to serve the needs of St. Louis’s Native urban population. Brenda Underwood (Comanche-­Cherokee), originally from California, helped establish the Mid-­American Cultural Center of St. Louis in 1974. Estimating the local Indigenous population at around six thousand in 1975, Underwood said she began the project after her visiting mother asked where the local Indian center was, wanting to stop by. Discovering there was no such center, Underwood, with the support of interested faculty at Washington University, met with other supportive individuals at the university, holding a first official meeting in January 1974.55 Getting the organization up and running was challenging, and Underwood felt that some of the problems her group encountered stemmed from local attitudes. “St. Louis has not traditionally been a city that thought of itself as having Indians here,” she stated.56 Both Native and non-­native peoples came to organizational meetings, and an “all Indian” board, with one exception, was elected. On some occasions, white St. Louisans attempted to dominate meetings, taking all the chairs in the front of the

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room, trying to restructure the organization’s by-­laws, and monopolizing the discussion. “All the Indians couldn’t even get a word in edgewise, and got disgusted with the whole thing,” Underwood recalled.57 Harrison Cornelius, an Oneida man who worked with Underwood, assumed leadership after Underwood. Previously a member of the Kansas City Commission on Human Relations, as well as a regional president of the American Indian Council, Cornelius was a staunch critic of federal policies and local practices. An early supporter of AIM, he thought that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had outlived its usefulness and that the state of Missouri had work to do. Though the state had no reservations and no organized tribes, it did have an “Indian problem” of defamation, he stated, citing the Army Corps of Engineers’ use of the names Indian Creek and Tomahawk for reservoir projects and derogatory representations of Native peoples in advertising and sports-­writing.58 Interviewed on June 1, 1976, his last day as interim director, Cornelius explained the organization’s goal: “a full-­service program for the American Indian in the greater St. Louis area to meet his needs,” whether in employment, education, housing, welfare, or legal matters. Cornelius anticipated great things for the future, “a well-­funded, well-­founded American Indian center, in the interest of the American Indian population in the greater St. Louis area.” Support for training for unemployed Native peoples came from a $280,000, five-­month federal grant, shared among centers in St. Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Lincoln, and Sioux City.59 Both Underwood’s and Cornelius’s comments about St. Louis and the center were collected in conjunction with an important oral history initiative in St. Louis, “Listening to Indians.” In 1975, Samuel L. Myers, a history professor at St. Louis Community College-­Florissant Valley, recorded interviews with 144 Indigenous people from fifty different tribes across the country, nine in St. Louis. The interviews provide insight into the interviewees’ views on Native peoples’ histories, relationships with the federal government, Indigenous peoples’ problems with alcoholism, issues of identity, and ongoing struggles.60 Indigenous activism features significantly in this important resource for Native history. Among the transformational forces shaping Native peoples’ lives in the 1970s and beyond was the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. This act protected Native peoples’ religious traditions and sacred

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ceremonies. The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 represented a step toward promoting civil liberties by protecting the rights of affiliated tribes to human remains, sacred funerary items, and cultural patrimony objects housed in federal agencies and institutions. NAGPRA presented the prospect of change for the fates of Indigenous sites like mounds. Mann described this legislation as a moment interpreted in widely divergent ways: “natives cheered while archaeologists cried in their beer,” when the law dictated the return and reburial of human remains and artifacts to Indigenous peoples.61 The law requires that anyone “who knowingly discovers Native American human remains, funerary or sacred objects, or objects of inalienable communal property on Federal or tribal lands,” must notify authorities and requires that “if the discovery occurred in connection with an activity, to cease the activity in the area of discovery, make a reasonable effort to protect such items, and provide notice to the tribe or organization.”62 But NAGPRA was not the conclusion of the story, and its execution has been complex and flawed.63 Tribal leaders, curators, and archaeologists have worked together, painstakingly and diligently, to support NAGPRA goals. But throughout the country, incidents of destruction and grave desecration have continued. Recounting numerous appalling instances that have taken place in Ohio alone, Barbara Mann provides compelling evidence of individuals flouting NAGPRA and the crucial actions of Ohio Natives in protesting, resisting, and stopping such actions.64 On separate occasions, Indigenous peoples who had gone to Ohio mound sites to pray encountered mound destruction: in the first case, archaeologists, who had a permit from the Ohio Historical Society but had not consulted with or informed Ohio Natives, dug into a mound and later attempted to fill the trench they dug with trash, and in the second, workers using bulldozers destroyed part of an effigy mound while supposedly only clearing underbrush.65 The protection of sacred sites remains a real and ongoing challenge in the face of the willingness of individuals to sidestep the law and communities to ignore Indigenous peoples’ histories, rights, and concerns. While the law dictates that any construction project must stop when human remains or cultural artifacts are uncovered, unethical individuals ignore the evidence and approve

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moving ahead with projects in violation of the law and over the protests of Native peoples. Members of the Native American Alliance of Ohio consider a 2001 agreement between the Ohio Historical Society and the Moundbuilders Country Club one of the most irresponsible acts, an extension of a lease until 2088 over the Circle-­Octagon ceremonial complex that keeps the site a golf course.66 NAGPRA, its implementation, its successes, its challenges, and its ongoing importance are clear. The Association on American Indian Affairs, founded in 1922, hosts an annual repatriation conference devoted to furthering the aims of NAGPRA. According to the website for the Ninth Annual Repatriation Conference, scheduled for November 2023, the conferences are “intended for American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Nations—­Native Nation leaders, practitioners, elders and representatives, museums, institutions, government agencies, academics, attorneys, collectors, artists, cultural preservationists and others engaged or interested in the repatriation of cultural heritage.”67 The group defines repatriation as “the return of Native American Ancestors and their burial items, as well as the return of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.”68 Around the country, the skeletal remains of large numbers of Indigenous people, disinterred from Native cemeteries, are in university collections, museums, science centers, and other settings. In February 2022, in her statement before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Joy Beasley, Associate Director of Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science in the National Park Service, reported that the remains of eighty-­ four thousand Indigenous ancestors and 1.5 million funerary objects had been repatriated to “lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.” More, however, remain unrepatriated. Beasley noted, “Over 117,576 Native American individuals are still in museum and Federal agency collections and 94% of those have not been culturally affiliated with any present-­day Indian Tribe or Native Hawaiian organization.” Beyond those problems, she also noted that “some collections subject to NAGPRA remain unreported” and that museums are continuing to identify collections “that were unknown or unreported.”69 Two weeks later, on behalf of the Association on American Indian Affairs, Association CEO Shannon O’Loughlin submitted a statement

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in response to Beasley’s statement and the hearing to the Senate committee, raising other, additional concerns, and passing along recommendations and issues raised by the association’s Repatriation Working Group and Tribal Partners Working Group. The statement highlighted problems with the language of current NAGPRA regulation that “created complicated bureaucratic processes” that in turn “allowed institutions to get away with 30 years of refusing to repatriate and properly consult.” It further urged steps to improve compliance with and enforcement of NAGPRA, to expand the application of NAGPRA to wherever “stolen and looted Ancestors and cultural items are held or are discovered,” and to amend NAGPRA so as to support the repatriation of “children and others that are in marked or unmarked graves of boarding schools and other institutions so that lineal descendants and Native Nations can bring their stolen Ancestors home for reburial.”70 As of summer 2023, digs are underway at the site of one such institution, the Genoa Indian Industrial School in Nebraska, which ran from 1884 to 1931, where at least eighty-­six children died from diseases like tuberculosis and typhoid.71 While the human remains and sacred funerary objects held within the Indigenous graves of the Big Mound were largely scattered, with those who took them and what they did with them largely unknown, the fate of some can be traced. Beyond those destroyed as the mound was razed—­most skeletal remains fell apart when touched, according to contemporary reports—­and those burned in the fire at the Academy of Science a few weeks after the mound was fully leveled, some materials clearly identified with the Big Mound remain in museums and other institutions. The remains of seven ancestors are held at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, as noted earlier. At the Missouri Historical Society, an oval hoe blade bears an inscription inked on its surface long ago: “Mo. St. Louis Big Mound 2nd & M[oun]d Sts.”72 At the Peabody Museum at Harvard, among the vast holdings of Indigenous materials, are strings of perforated shell beads identified as coming from the Big Mound, one set donated by John F. Madison in 1870, and another as collected by Dr. George Englemann and Prof. W. B. Potter in 1878, and donated by Engelmann in 1895.73 According to the descriptions in early catalogs, the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution

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has fifty “Shell beads from grave” “Big Mound St. Louis, Missouri,” which came to it in January 1876, from Father Oswald Moosmuller, listed as president of St. Benedict’s College in Atchison, Kansas, as well as a December 1887 donation from Dr. Charles Rau of “ornaments of shell, Found with skeletons in the ‘Big Mound’ in St. Louis, Mo.”74 The notations in the museum ledgers recording the accessions make clear that at the time of their donations the objects were clearly associated with gravesites and human remains. In Illinois, human remains and associated funerary goods from the Cahokia area are in the process of NAGPRA consultation and review, with the reassessment of collection inventories in the state and wide consultation and cooperation among different entities. A federal grant for NAGPRA consultation, awarded to the University of Illinois, Champaign-­Urbana, is being implemented, with representatives from a dozen tribes and fifteen museums involved. Over the next several years, according to the university’s NAGPRA program officer, Krystiana Krupa, the hope is that that the human remains of over one thousand ancestors, by far the majority coming from Mound 72 at Cahokia, and tens of thousands of funerary objects, will be repatriated to the affiliated tribes and reburied at the site.75 The university has issued statements regarding commitments to NAGPRA, as have others. Under the heading “A Respectful Return,” the university’s NAGPRA website declares the university “is fully committed to the repatriation of our Native American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian collections.”76 In 2021, the Peabody issued a formal apology regarding the history of collecting human remains, drawing attention to its roots in “settler colonialism and imperialism.”77 At the Missouri Historical Society, registrar Beth Carter has recommended, “in the spirt of transparency and consultation,” that all of the more than 12,000 Native American objects in MHS collections be reviewed, a process that will be underway soon.78 The underlying point of this very brief discussion of NAGPRA for this study is that NAGPRA is in one sense yet another chapter in the story of the mounds and Indigenous histories in St. Louis, the wider region, and elsewhere. It is part of the response, long overdue, to the desecration of Indigenous cemeteries, the disinterment of human remains, the disrespect shown Native peoples, and the robbing of graves.

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A slow and painstaking process, NAGPRA is in part a reckoning with the legacies of dispossession and destruction inherent in the actions of white Americans who claimed the right to possess Native territories, to destroy Indigenous mounds, and to take, use, and display whatever they removed from Native graves and lands. Efforts to preserve sacred sites and to reclaim ancestors and cultural objects, including those once buried within the vast sepulchral monument that was the Big Mound, continue, with efforts like that at the Genoa boarding school serving as reminders of how this history persists into the present moment. In St. Louis, preserving and protecting the sole large surviving mound within city borders, Sugarloaf Mound, has been another important development in recent years. Thought to predate the major mound complex that stood to the north of downtown St. Louis, Sugarloaf has escaped excavation, though it has sustained significant damage. Located to the south of the 1764 French village and subsequent early city center, the mound was largely protected from the development that doomed the mounds downtown as industrial, residential, and commercial growth moved northwards. In 1928, however, Sugarloaf took a direct hit when a home was constructed on its summit.79 As though it had been lost, a 1932 article in the Globe-­Democrat reported “Indian Mound Found in South St. Louis.”80 According to the piece, “One of the Indian structures that gave St. Louis its name of ‘Mound City,’ is still extant and perceptible here.” That was the conclusion of McCune Gill, “authority on St. Louis history, who recently came upon the matter while examining titles for the city.”81 The location as well as the mound’s dimensions were described: “conical in shape,” the mound stood on a 4500 south block, bounded by Wyandotte Street, Osceola Street, and Ohio Avenue, approximately forty feet high, one hundred feet long from north to south, and seventy-­five feet from east to west.82 This newspaper article suggests that what had been lost was the active memory or firsthand awareness of the mound. Too often, the mounds have been forgotten, yet another act of erasure, only to be remembered or re-­introduced before being forgotten yet again. Sugarloaf was not immediately forgotten this time, as the following month featured a longer piece, this one in The St. Louis Star and Times, entitled, “‘Sugar Loaf ’ in South St. Louis Last of Mound City’s Famous Mounds.”83 Over several

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years, starting in 1937, quarrying by the Hoffman Quarry damaged the south side, with the Post-­Dispatch documenting the destruction.84 In 1942, Anheuser-­Busch, Inc., bought the abandoned quarry, planning to “use it as a dump for waste materials.” Operated by the Hoffman Brothers as a quarry until late 1941, the space was thought so large that “it would take the purchaser more than 100 years to fill the quarry.” The article noted that “an Indian mound at the foot of Wyandotte street adjoins the property on the north” and quoted McCune Gill on its function as a boundary marker and measuring point as “the dividing mark between St. Louis and Carondelet” that showed up all over property deeds “as late as 1819.”85

Fig. 14.2: Photograph of quarry damage to Sugarloaf Mound, St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), October 13, 1940, p. 3.

As had some St. Louisans in the 1850s, Gill urged preservation and the establishment of a park both for historic reasons and recreation purposes. Primarily, he urged the city to protect the mound. As the Post-­Dispatch reported in 1940, the mound had been “discovered by Gill several years ago.” A photograph (see Figure 14.2) documented how part of the mound had been “gouged out by a quarry.” Joining Gill, then a trustee of the Missouri Historical Society, was Stratford Lee Morton, chairman of the board of the St. Louis Academy of Science and president of the William Clark Society. According to the article, the two suggested that the property “probably could be acquired for a reasonable expenditure and converted into a permanent park, with the assistance of Federal funds.” The reasons were straightforward: “Not only does its

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great historic value merit its preservation, they told a Post-­Dispatch reporter, but its scenic location would constitute an outstanding attraction for a riverfront park.” The article linked Sugarloaf and the Big Mound, noting that both had served as important boundary and survey markers to the south and north of downtown.86 Though the 1940 push for the preservation of Sugarloaf and a park idea did not succeed at the time, others worked to gain recognition for the site. Robert P. Weigers submitted a successful application for Sugarloaf to be added to the National Register of Historic Places, a designation it received in 1984. Elsewhere in the state, identifying Indigenous sites in the 1930s was championed by the members of the State Archaeological Society of Missouri. Founded in 1935 by Professor Jesse E. Wrench and J. Brewton Berry of the University of Missouri, the group had early funding from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which supported eighty-­ five workers conducting surveys in seventy-­eight counties.87 Over the next decades, members engaged in excavations in several areas, advocated for legislation to provide funding for excavations, and supported 1977 laws to protect archaeological sites.88 Mounds, their histories, and their fates continue to be in play. Such issues received coverage in St. Louis news media in early 2000. In January, the Post-­Dispatch devoted a full two-­page spread to “Cahokia Mounds: Saving the Past.”89 The subtitle captured the argument: “Much evidence of Mississippian culture has succumbed to bulldozer and plow.” Yet “archaeologists fight to preserve the history under our feet. But development threatens their efforts.”90 Hearkening to the history of destruction driven by development in St. Louis history, the newspaper printed one of Easterly’s final daguerreotypes of the Big Mound as it was nearly leveled. The reporters featured Washington University archaeologist John Kelly, structuring their story around his encounters with the landscape, his scientific observations, and his criticisms, and noted Kelly’s important work in East St. Louis in the 1990s, when he and others conducted excavations along Interstates 55 and 70, identifying sites that had been presumed destroyed in the 1800s. Even as Native earthworks and sites received attention in the press, demolition continued. Near the intersection of Highway 70 and 270, at the Bridgeton Site, or Boenker’s Hill, an important burial and residential site was destroyed after an archaeologist deemed it not worth

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preserving, opening the way for workers to scrape the top layer of dirt, “including whatever artifacts, houses and post pits remained,” to cover a landfill in Earth City, according to the reporter.91 Laws forbidding such acts did not prevent them, however. A side column urged the public to support efforts to safeguard such sites: “We can all help archaeologists preserve the past.”92 A list of relevant phone numbers for those interested in learning more or helping the preservation efforts, followed, as did directions on how to get to Cahokia, a list of endangered sites in the region, and a map showing mound locations in St. Louis. More recently, the sale of the home atop Sugarloaf has opened the way for an important new chapter in the site’s history, with the Osage Nation entering the picture as new owners. Occupied until 2008, the house on the summit, at 4420 Ohio Street, went on the market. Preservationists worked toward protecting the mound, and the Osage Nation purchased it in August 2009 and held a blessing ceremony.93 “In a display of historic justice and bittersweet irony, the Osage Nation reclaimed Sugarloaf Mound by purchasing a significant portion of the property with assistance from the Osage Nation Historical Preservation Office and Principal Chief Jim Gray,” stated Osage Historic Preservation Director Dr. Andrea Hunter and Landmarks Association of St. Louis assistant director Andrew Weil, in their report on the mound and the role of the ancestors of the Osage in mound construction.94 While noting that the mound may not be a burial mound, they explained that the Osage hold it sacred nonetheless and “consider it an honor to protect the last mound of their ancestors in St. Louis for all of the tribes that are heirs of the Mississippian culture.”95 According to an article in the Osage News, “Chief purchases Sugarloaf Mound,” the principal chief of the Osage Nation, Jim Gray, “bypassed the Osage Nation Congress and bought the property . . . in what some are calling a historic move in the tribe’s history.” Dr. Andrea Hunter was quoted as saying, “The clock was ticking, we had the resources, so the Chief re-­prioritized and took the appropriate action,” adding that she was “absolutely thrilled.”96 The article also recounted some disagreement among Osage representatives about both the tribe’s connection to the mounds and to the appropriation process. Several years later, the national NAGPRA review committee implicitly addressed one of the controversial issues, when it “ruled unanimously

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the Osage people are culturally affiliated with the Late Woodland people in Missouri, Illinois and the Mississippian culture,” a determination that “ties the Osage people with the mound building culture.”97 Again, Hunter was quoted, declaring the decision “huge,” coming after some Osage people had publicly doubted the tribe’s connection to Sugarloaf and Cahokia.98 Both Hunter’s comments and the Osage purchase of Sugarloaf Mound point to the importance of Indigenous peoples as stewards of their own historical and cultural traditions. Acknowledging and being acknowledged for their historic ties to and deep sense of responsibility toward such sacred sites, they implicitly challenge the nearly monopolistic influence that archaeologists, grounded in Western scientific methods and assumptions, have exerted over the representation of Indigenous peoples’ customs and heritage.99 Transferring legal title to the property is only the first step in protecting and preserving Sugarloaf Mound. In 2016, “St. Louis on the Air,” a program on St. Louis Public Radio, featured Andrea Hunter and John Kelly responding to questions about the state and fate of the mound. They shared the Osage hopes of creating an interpretive center at the site and noted that the Osage Nation Foundation has established a fund for Sugarloaf.100 Such a center will have to wait at the moment. Occupied homes still stand on the lower parts of the mound. Moreover, damage from quarrying, home construction, trees, and erosion has rendered the mound unstable. Addressing all of these issues requires careful planning and significant financial resources. Initial efforts have centered on stabilizing the site, demolishing the house on its summit, and removing a large tree.101 In the spring and summer of 2023, as part of Counterpublic 2023, an art installation adjacent the site features “Way Back,” work by Osage artists Anita and Nokosee Fields, involving forty painted, wooden platforms, adorned with ribbon and tile, based on ones used in tribal gatherings, and accompanying sound.102 Counterpublic’s founder and participating artists are working to support the Osage in their effort to rematriate the mound “in accordance with the Osage Nation’s Sugarloaf Mound Management Plan.”103 The billboard Give It Back: Stage Theory, created by New Red Order artists, riffs on the famous advertising campaign, Got Milk?, posing the question Got Land?, references the mound scenes in John Egan’s 1850 Panorama of the Monumental Valley of the

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Fig. 14.3: Demolition of the house on top of Sugarloaf Mound, St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 23, 2017, p. H5.

Mississippi River, and calls commuters’ attention to Sugarloaf Mound, with its proximity to Highway 55. At the same time that the Osages have been involved in preservation efforts regarding Sugarloaf Mound, they have also been active in advocating for the recognition and protection of the site of the Big Mound. Hunter described visiting St. Louis when plans for a new stadium to be located on the footprint of the Big Mound were under discussion and mentioned that the Osages sent letters expressing opposition to the Rams, City of St. Louis, NFL, and state, and “were extremely happy when we heard what the NFL had decided.”104 Construction and development continue to pose threats to Indigenous sites. It is abundantly clear that as long as there are people willing to break the law and desecrate graves, such crimes will take place. To take just one example, while doing the research for this book, I was interviewing someone by phone who had to cut short our call; we were interrupted when word came in that human remains had just been uncovered by heavy machinery at a building site and were about to be destroyed. Flouting the law, those in charge chose to proceed.

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Fig. 14.4: Give it Back: Stage Theory, by New Red Order, commissioned by Counterpublic. The billboard is adjacent to Highway 55 in St. Louis. Photograph by the author, April 2023.

Someone at the construction site had recognized what was going on and had hurried to contact individuals who might help put a stop to it. Nor have the sale, display, or collection of human remains come to an end.105 Loopholes have limited the full implementation of NAGPRA, particularly in the eastern United States, with remains from mounds still subject to trafficking.106 In St. Louis, plans for a new bridge across the Mississippi, the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, constructed between 2010 and 2013, led to a new phase of excavation and building on the site of Big Mound. This map (Figure 14.5), based on the 1819 Peale and Say survey, other surveys from 1847 and 1852, and contemporary mapping technology (ArcGIS), suggests the approximate position of the St. Louis mound group around a central plaza, as well as the overlapping footprints of the Big Mound and the new bridge.

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Fig. 14.5: Blue lines indicate cardinal directions, red mound sites are based on 1847 and 1852 maps and other sources, blue sites are based on 1819 survey, and black dots indicate caves. ArcGIS basemap with St. Louis Mound Group, in William F. Romain, “In Search of the St. Louis Mound Group: Archaeoastronomic and Landscape Archaeology Implications,” Journal of Astronomy in Culture 2, no. 1 (2023): 17. Courtesy of William F. Romain.

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Federal law requires archaeological surveys to be conducted before construction begins on projects involving federal money. Teams worked on both sides of the river. In July 2008, the Post-­Dispatch reported a “last look for local history,” with archaeologists described as hoping to find materials pertaining to ancient Indigenous history on the Illinois side and the lives of working-­class immigrants in the nineteenth century on the Missouri side.107 When those digs were underway in early 2010, archaeologists in Missouri worked at the site of Big Mound, where the Gestring Wagon Factory later stood.108 A later report revealed that excavations conducted in East St. Louis before and during construction of the new bridge uncovered more than fifteen hundred homes of earlier Indigenous peoples.109 Today, the relocated mound marker highlights the ongoing privileging of non-­Native voices and actions in the treatment and presentation of mound sites sacred to Indigenous peoples. A short distance from its

Fig. 14.6: Big Mound marker with the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. Photograph by the author, September 2019.

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1929 location, the boulder placed by the Colonial Dames now stands near the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. It has a new plaque, repeating the original language, with its historical inaccuracies and interpretation of the mound’s significance created by white St. Louisans of a century ago.

Fig. 14.7: Site of the 1929 Colonial Dames Big Mound marker. Photograph by Kevin Cleary, April 2022.

A few steps away, a sign for the Mounds Heritage Trail, put up by Great Rivers Greenway, includes two images of the Big Mound from the mid-­1800s. The site is not well cared for, and one wonders if its fate will mirror that of the mound itself and the first marker, with neglect and vandalism its destiny. Partly in response to the recent discoveries on both sides of the Mississippi River, advocates for preservation have worked toward having the area declared a national historical park or national monument, building on and expanding the area recognized as culturally important around Cahokia. Since 1982, Cahokia mounds has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of only twelve cultural sites in the United States and twenty-­four natural and cultural sites overall in the country.110 UNESCO

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sums up its significance succinctly: “the largest pre-­Columbian settlement north of Mexico.”111 The park hosted its ten millionth visitor since its designation as a World Heritage Site in 2013.112 A leading advocacy group, the HeartLands Conservancy, published a study, “The Mounds—­ America’s First Cities,” in March 2014.113 The study urged “the preservation of the greater mounds community” as “a national responsibility.”114 Newspaper coverage echoed the early-­ nineteenth-­ century claims of antiquities comparable to those across the Atlantic. “Ancient Greece had its Parthenon, Egypt its Pyramids St. Louis its Cahokia Mounds and more than 550 other Mississippian mounds,” one 2014 article begins.115 In April 2021, Illinois Representative Mike Bost and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin introduced, and Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth and Missouri Representative Cori Bush co-­sponsored, bipartisan legislation designed to transform Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site into the Cahokia Mounds and Mississippian Culture National Historic Park.116 The legislation was first introduced in 2019: “This bill provides for the establishment of the Cahokia Mounds Mississippian Culture National Historical Park in Collinsville, Illinois; Monroe, Madison, and St. Clair Counties, Illinois; and St. Louis City County, Missouri, as a unit of the National Park System.”117 If approved, the new park would include not only Cahokia mounds, but sites in Madison, St. Clair, and Monroe counties; the status of Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis is not promising. A 2019 reconnaissance survey conducted as part of the legislative process found that the “St. Louis Mound Group, East St. Louis Mounds, Mitchell Mounds, and Sugar Loaf Mounds were determined to be unlikely to meet the criteria for inclusion and were not recommended for additional study.”118 National park status would contribute to greater visibility of the sites and the existing mounds, as well as increased funding for their preservation and protection. Missouri Humanities, founded by Congress in 1971 and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, has initiated a Native American Program, with the goal of increasing “understanding of the American Indian experience in Missouri through preservation, interpretation, and public programming.” In 2021, in conjunction with the state’s bicentennial, it issued a Native American Heritage Challenge, urging Missourians to visit important Indigenous sites throughout the state and declaring: “Missourians know so little of our rich Native

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American presence—­mainly because a state law in 1839 made it illegal for Indians to reside in our state, a statute that was reinforced as late as 1899, and only repealed in 1909.”119 Providing details of sites and visitor instructions, the statement cites the historic ties of Osage, Otoe, Missouria, Sauk and Fox, Ioway, Kansas, Illini, Kickapoo, Peoria, Shawnee, Delaware, Sioux, Piankashaw, and Cherokee peoples to a Missouri homeland, and acknowledges ongoing sacred relationships to the land among these peoples today.120 Signs of commitments to restoring Indigenous histories include funding for Missouri Humanities Grants focused on Native peoples; in 2021, those grants included projects for “Reviving Osage Heritage in Missouri,” centered on Meramec Spring Park; a project to promote economic opportunity, leadership opportunities, and community programs at the Buder Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University; work on an interpretative plan for the National Trail of Tears Association (Missouri Chapter); and a planning study for a National Museum of Indian Removal, in St. James.121 In his 2006 book on Philadelphia, Steven Conn writes about how cities are full of stories—­stories that span urban spaces at any given time and stories that cross time. “Just as the city belongs to those who occupy it from day to day, their stories carry on a conversation with the stories—­histories—­of those who have been there before.” He believes that this ongoing dialogue between past and present is “part of what makes any great city great” and that these conversations across time and space contribute “to the unique sense of place every real city has.”122 Those who know St. Louis or live in it know it is a real city; it is this author’s hope that this book enables conversations across time and space that acknowledge its deep and profound connection to Indigenous peoples, distant, recent, and present.

Afterword

Another book—­or rather several shelves of books—­could easily be written about Indigenous peoples’ histories in St. Louis. My hope is that this study—­an attempt to trace the practices, perspectives, and policies of white settlers, political figures, and civic boosters that led to the destruction of historic earthworks and the appropriation of Indigenous histories as well as the continued presence and efforts of Indigenous peoples to nurture and protect their communities and cultures—­will help to clarify the history of erasure and dispossession in St. Louis. To

Fig. A.1: Before They Built the Arch, We Built the Mounds, ©2009 Osage Nation. Used with permission.

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the extent my efforts are successful, I hope I will have contributed to what I believe are worthy goals: new understandings of the history of St. Louis that will help to restore Indigenous peoples’ histories to it, as well as new perspectives on how local history has been taught that will enable non-­native people to think differently about St. Louis’s past and encourage them to act as allies to Indigenous communities in the present and future. With permission, I include the image above and refer those interested to the statement below. “. . . The Osage Nation is currently engaged in the protection and preservation of one of our ancestral mounds, Sugarloaf Mound in south St. Louis. The Nation accepts donations to help support our effort to preserve one of the last remaining mounds in the St. Louis area by specifying Sugarloaf Mound support when donating to the Osage Foundation. We welcome you to visit the Osage Nation headquarters on our reservation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The Osage Nation respectfully requests that you honor our land, thank you.” —­Osage Lands Acknowledgment Statements, June 20191

Notes

Introduction

1. Kevin Cleary, email communication, April 27, 2010. John E. Kelly, “The Preservation of the East St. Louis Mound Group,” 20–23. 2. Denise Hollinshed, “Authorities eye ways to limit copper theft in St. Louis area,” St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, March 25, 2011, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime -­and-­courts/authorities-­eye-­ways-­to-­limit-­copper-­theft-­in-­st-­louis/article_eaffaf2f -­673f-­58ac-­86fe-­6d6a80efe8fa.html (accessed October 4, 2018). 3. Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, 1–2. 4. Johnson, Broken Heart of America, 5. 5. Johnson, Broken Heart of America, 4. 6. Christen Mucher, Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession, xv. 7. Christine DeLucia, “The Memory Frontier,” 977. 8. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples; Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire, ix–xi. 9. My thanks to Andrew Hurley for his thoughts on this subject. 10. Anna Haebich, “Forgetting Indigenous Histories: Cases from the History of Australia’s Stolen Generations,” 1033–46. 11. David B. MacDonald, “Canada’s History Wars: Indigenous Genocide and Public Memory in the United States, Australia and Canada,” 411–31. 12. “Circleville, Ohio,” Ohio History Central—­an Online Encyclopedia of Ohio History, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=686&nm=Circleville-­Ohio, (accessed June 30, 2011). Susan L. Woodward and Jerry N. McDonald, Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley: A Guide to Mounds and Earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Cole, and Fort Ancient People. 13. Dwight H. Brown, comp. State of Missouri Official Manual for Years Nineteen Thirty-­nine and Nineteen Forty, 774. 14. David W. Eaton, “How Missouri Counties, Towns and Streams Were Named,” 174. 15. William Henry Perrin, ed., History of Alexander, Union, and Pulaski Counties, 541.

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16. Patricia J. O’Brien, “The ‘World-­System’ of Cahokia within the Middle Mississippian Tradition,” 391. 17. Tim McLandsborough, “Archaeological Atlas of the Greater St. Louis Region and the State of Missouri,” 2–35. 18. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in Colonial New England; foreword by William Cronon in Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-­Over Place; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian. 19. Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” n.p.; Mucher, Before American History, xiv–xv. 20. Warren K. Moorehead, The Cahokia Mounds, ed. John E. Kelly, 7. 21. George Lipsitz, The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City, 28.

Chapter One Metropolis on the Mississippi

1. Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi, 6. 2. Timothy R. Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, 79. 3. Pauketat, Cahokia, 2. 4. Timothy R. Pauketat, Susan M. Alt, and Jeffrey D. Krutchen, “City of Earth and Wood: New Cahokia and Its material-­historical Implications,” in The Cambridge World History, ed. Norman Yoffee, 3:440. 5. Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, 71; John E. Kelly, “East St. Louis Yields a Satellite Settlement,” 36–­37. 6. Pauketat, Alt, and Krutchen, “City of Earth and Wood,” 440. 7. Susan M. Alt, “Histories of Mound Building and Scales of Explanation in Archaeology,” in Ideologies in Archaeology, eds. Reinhard Bembeck and Randall H. McGuire, 198. 8. Barbara Alice Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 116. 9. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 116–­28, 135, 151–­54, 158. 10. Pauketat, Cahokia, 17; William R. Iseminger, “Culture and Environment in the American Bottom: The Rise and Fall of Cahokia Mounds,” in Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis, ed. Andrew Hurley, 39, 41. 11. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 105. 12. Timothy R. Pauketat and Susan M. Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” in Archaeologies of Memory, eds. Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock, 157, 168–­69. 13. Carl M. Wright, “Middle Mississippian Supernova Petroglyph,” 54–­55. 14. George Pawlaczyk, “Did an Exploding Star Inspire Cahokians to Build Monks Mound?”; John E. Kelly and James A. Brown, “Cahokia: The Processes and Principles of the Creation of an Early Mississippian City,” in Making Ancient Cities: Space and Place in Early Urban Societies, eds. Andrew Creekmore and Kevin D. Fisher, 319. 15. Pauketat, Cahokia, 7–­8. 16. Pauketat, Cahokia, 21–­23.

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17. Vincas P. Steponaitis, Megan C. Kassabaum, and John W. O’Hear, “Cahokia’s Coles Creek Predecessors,” in Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World, eds. Timothy R. Pauketat and Susan M. Alt, 13, 18. 18. Pauketat, Cahokia, 2. 19. C. J. Bareis, “Report of 1972 University of Illinois-­Urbana excavations at the Cahokia site,” In Cahokia Archaeology: Field Reports, ed. M. L. Fowler, 12–­15; reference to 13, quoted in Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 157–­58. 20. Sarah C. Sherwood and Tristram R. Kidder, “The DaVincis of Dirt: Geoarchaeological Perspectives on Native American Mound Building in the Mississippi River Basin,” 76. 21. Susan M. Alt, email communication with author, October 25, 2020. 22. Sherwood and Kidder, “The DaVincis of Dirt,” 72; Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, edited and with an introduction by David J. Meltzer. 23. James Mooney, “Cherokee Mound-­Building,” 167–­71. My thanks to Susan M. Alt for this reference. 24. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 164. 25. As many as 10,560 person-­days (or a crew of 100 working 105 days) were necessary for the construction of one third of the plaza. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 77. 26. Susan M. Alt, Jeffery D. Krutchen, and Timothy R. Pauketat, “The Construction and Use of Cahokia’s Grand Plaza,” 142. 27. On the evolution of chunkey, see Thomas J. Zych, “The Game of Chunkey,” in Medieval Mississippians, eds. Pauketat and Alt, 72. 28. Warren R. DeBoer, “Like a Rolling Stone: The Chunkey Game and Political Organization in Eastern North America,” 83. 29. Timothy R. Pauketat, “America’s First Pastime,” 20; The “Chunkey Player” is a 8.5 inches (22 cm) high by 5.5 inches (14 cm) wide Missouri flint clay statuette, Henry Whelpley Collection at the St. Louis Science Center; Susan C. Power, Early Art of the Southeastern Indians: Feathered Serpents and Winged Beings, 123–25. 30. Pauketat, Cahokia, 9. 31. Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, 69. 32. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 165. 33. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 166. 34. Charles R. Cobb, From Quarry to Cornfield: The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe Production, 15–18. 35. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 158. 36. Pauketat, “America’s First Pastime,” 24–­25; George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 1:132; George Catlin,

348

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Tchung-­kee, a Mandan Game Played with a Ring and Pole, 1832–­1833, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr., 1985.66.431. 37. Amber M. VanDerwarker, “Mississippians and Maize,” in Medieval Mississippians, eds. Pauketat and Alt, 49–53. 38. Iseminger, “Culture and Environment in the American Bottom,” 42; Timothy R. Pauketat and Susan M. Alt, “Medieval Life in America’s Heartland,” in Medieval Mississippians, eds. Pauketat and Alt, 2. 39. Timothy R. Pauketat, The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America, 62, 65. 40. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 164. 41. Pauketat, Alt, and Krutchen, “City of Earth and Wood,” 449. 42. T. R. Peale, “Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1819,” 388. 43. The mound map was not published until 1861. Peale, “Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1819,” 386–91. For the first published account of their survey, see Edwin James, compiler, Account of an expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, performed in the years 1819, 1820, 56–­64. John Marshall discusses reasons for discrepancies in the number of mounds described in early accounts in “The St. Louis Mound Group: Historical Accounts and Pictorial Depictions,” 51–52. 44. Pauketat, Cahokia, 103–04. 45. Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, 75. 46. James Loring, “The Big Mound. Its Excavation and Important Developments,” Missouri Democrat, April 19, 1869, in James M. Thomas, 1869 Scrapbook, Mercantile Library, St. Louis. 47. Richard H. Townshend, “American Landscapes, Seen and Unseen,” in Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, eds. Richard H. Townshend and Robert V. Sharp, 33. 48. Susan M. Alt, “The Fabric of Mississippian Society,” in Medieval Mississippians, eds. Pauketat and Alt, 76, 78–79. For an account of a fragment of cloth recovered during the final demolition of the Big Mound, see J. Thomas Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, 1: 97. 49. The collections of the Missouri Historical Society contain artifacts taken from Big Mound at the time of its destruction, such as a “Mississippian Oval Hoe Blade from the ‘Big Mound’ at Second and Mound Streets in St. Louis, Missouri; Identifier: 1993-­ 099-­0001,” Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 50. Stephen Williams and John M. Goggin, “The Long Nosed God Mask in Eastern United States,” 4–72; Pauketat, Cahokia, 143–45. 51. Henry Lewis, The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated, 334. 52. M. J. Morgan evokes the centrality of water to this area in Land of Big Rivers: French and Indian Illinois, 1699–1778, 11–15. 53. Susan M. Alt, “Chapter 2: From Weeping Hills to Lost Caves: A Search for Vibrant Matter in Greater Cahokia,” in New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms., eds. Susan M. Alt and Timothy R. Pauketat, 30–31. William F. Romain, “In Search of the St. Louis Mound Group: Archaeoastronomic and Landscape Archaeology Implications.”.

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54. Pauketat et al., “City of Earth and Wood,” 3:447–48. 55. Pauketat, Alt, and Krutchen, “City of Earth and Wood,” 3:449. 56. James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 184. 57. Iseminger, “Culture and Environment in the American Bottom,” 42. 58. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 169. 59. Stephen Williams, “The Vacant Quarter Hypothesis and the Yazoo Delta,” in Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodland Indians, A.D. 1400–­1700, eds. David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., 191. 60. Scott, Against the Grain, 186. 61. Pauketat, Alt, and Krutchen, “City of Earth and Wood,” 3:450. 62. Beth R. Ritter, “Piecing Together the Ponca Past: Reconstructing Degiha Migrations to the Great Plains,” 272. 63. Shannon Shaw Duty, “Natl. NAGPRA Review committee confirms Osages part of Mound Culture,” Osage News, December 4, 2015, http://osagenews.org/en/ article/2015/12/04/natl-­nagpra-­review-­committee-­confirms-­osages-­were-­part-­mound-­ culture/ (accessed October 29, 2018). 64. Alice Beck Kehoe, “Osage Texts and Cahokia Data,” in Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms, eds. F. Kent Reilly and James F. Garber, 246–61. 65. Alt, “Chapter 2: From Weeping Hills to Lost Caves,” in New Materialisms Ancient Urbanisms, eds. Alt and Pauketat, 19–39. 66. Andrea Hunter, “The Osage Nation: A Brief History,” presentation at Rogers State University, Claremore, Oklahoma, January 31, 2018, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=BBGQT-­eXNWg (accessed October 29, 2018).] 67. Pauketat, Cahokia, 159–60. 68. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 126–27. 69. Pauketat and Alt, “Mounds, Memory, and Contested Mississippian History,” 169–70.

Chapter Two Indigenous Migration and Early Europeans

1. A. J. White, Samuel E. Munoz, Sissel Schroeder, and Lora R. Stevens, “After Cahokia: Indigenous Repopulation and Depopulation of the Horsehoe Lake Watershed AD 1400–1900,” 263. 2. Garrick Bailey, “Continuity and Change in Mississippian Civilization,” In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, eds. Townsend and Sharp, 84–85. 3. Vincas P. Steponaitis and Vernon J. Knight Jr., “Moundville Art in Historical and Social Context,” in Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, eds. Townsend and Sharp, 167. 4. Robert F. Boszhardt, Danielle M. Benden, and Timothy R. Pauketat, “Early Mississippian Outposts in the North,” in Medieval Mississippians, eds. Pauketat and Alt, 65; Susan M. Alt, “The Fabric of Mississippian Society,” in Medieval Mississippians, 77. 5. Amanda L. Regnier, Reconstructing Tascalusa’s Chiefdom, 131–32; Thomas E. Emerson, “The Earth Goddess Cult at Cahokia,” in Medieval Mississippians, 54–61;

350

Notes to Chapter Two

Boszhardt, Benden, and Pauketat, “Early Mississippian Outposts in the North,” in Medieval Mississippians, 65. 6. Brad H. Koldehoff, “Crafting the Medieval Landscape with Stone Tools,” in Medieval Mississippians, 95. 7. Alt, “The Fabric of Mississippian Society,” in Medieval Mississippians, plate 18 after 64, 76–79. 8. Phillip H. Round, “Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies,” 445. 9. Round, 445–47, 451. 10. Round, 447–48, 465; Sam Blowsnake, Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian. 11. Round, “Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies,” 447–48. 12. James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” 451–512. 13. Round, “Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies,” 449; Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” 458. 14. John E. Kelly, “The Mississippian Period in Florida: A View from the Mississippian World of Cahokia,” in Late Prehistoric Florida: Archaeology at the Edge of the Mississippian World, eds. Keith Ashley and Nancy Marie White, 296–309. 15. Jay Miller, Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility of Native America, 62. 16. Regnier, Reconstructing Tascalusa’s Chiefdom, 37–39; H. Terry Childs and Charles H. McNutt, “Hernando de Soto’s Route from Chicaça through Northeast Arkansas: A Suggestion,” 165. 17. Regnier, Reconstructing Tascalusa’s Chiefdom, 1, 18. 18. Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715, 62. 19. Rodrigo Rangel, “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto,” in The De Soto Chronicles, eds. Lawrence Al Clayton, Vernon J. Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore, I:290–91. 20. Regnier, Reconstructing Tascalusa’s Chiefdom, 2; Rangel, “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto,” in The De Soto Chronicles, eds. Clayton, Moore, and Knight, I:291. 21. Kathleen Duval, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent, 40. 22. Jeffrey Mitchem, Arkansas Archaeological Survey, “Investigating the Possible Base of the Cross Raised at Casqui by Hernando de Soto in 1541,” University of Arkansas, https://archeology.uark.edu/who-­we-­are/50moments/parkincross/ (accessed October 28, 2021). 23. Luys Hernández de Biedma, “Relation of the Island of Florida,” in The De Soto Chronicles, eds. Clayton, Knight, and Moore, I:239; Miller, Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility of Native America, 77. 24. Duval, The Native Ground, 36–37. 25. Robert Mazrim and Duane Esarey, “Rethinking the Dawn of History: The Schedule, Signature, and Agency of European Goods in Protohistoric Illinois,” 150. 26. Mazrim and Esarey, “Rethinking the Dawn of History,” 147, 178.

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27. J. A. Brown and R. F. Sasso, “Prelude to History on the Eastern Prairies.” In Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodland Indians, A.D. 1400–1700, eds. Brose, Cowan, and Mainfort, 211. 28. Brown and Sasso, “Prelude to History on the Eastern Prairies,” 212. 29. David G. Anderson, “The Role of Cahokia in the Evolution of Southeastern Mississippian Society,” in Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World, eds. Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, 249, 251; Vernon James Knight, Jr., “Some Developmental Parallels between Cahokia and Moundville,” in Cahokia: Domination and Ideology, 229–247. 30. Duval, The Native Ground, 59. 31. Quapaw Nation, https://www.quapawtribe.com/401/Tribal-­Name, accessed September 10, 2020. 32. Beth R. Ritter, “Piecing Together the Ponca Past: Reconstructing Degiha Migrations to the Great Plains,” 275. 33. Ritter, “Piecing Together the Ponca Past,” 277. 34. Dan F. Morse and Phyllis A. Morse, Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley, 300. 35. Morse and Morse, Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley, 300. 36. Alan G. Shackelford, “The Frontier in Pre-­Columbian Illinois,” 194. 37. Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” 448–49. 38. Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw, 4–5. 39. White, Munoz, Schroeder, and Stevens, “After Cahokia,” 263–78; see also DuVal, “Table 1. Indian Peoples of the Mid-­Continent, 1670s–1750s,” in The Native Ground, 66. 40. Shackelford, “The Frontier in Pre-­Columbian Illinois,” 198; Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, 37–40. 41. Robert Michael Morrissey, “Bison Algonquians: Cycles of Violence and Exploitation in the Mississippi Valley Borderlands,” 309. 42. Morrissey, “Bison Algonquians,” 314–15, 318. 43. Shackelford, “The Frontier in Pre-­Columbian Illinois,” 196. 44. Shackelford, 196. 45. David J. Costa, “The Kinship Terminology of the Miami-­Illinois Language,” 28. 46. Mazrim and Esarey, “Rethinking the Dawn of History,” 155; Brown and Sasso, “Prelude to History on the Eastern Prairies,” 206. 47. Brown and Sasso, 206–07. 48. Brown and Sasso, 212–13. 49. Shackelford, “The Frontier in Pre-­Columbian Illinois,” 199. 50. Alice Beck Kehoe, “Osage Texts and Cahokia Data,” in Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, eds. F. Kent Reilly and James F. Garber, 246. 51. Michael McCafferty, “Jacques Largillier: French Trader, Jesuit Brother, and Jesuit Scribe ‘Par Excellence,’” 190.

352

Notes to Chapter Three

52. “Voyages du P. Jacques Marquette, 1673–1675,” in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, Volume LIX: Lower Canada, Illinois, Ottawas, 1667–1669, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901), 141. 53. “Voyages du P. Jacques Marquette,” in The Jesuit Relations, 145. 54. Christopher Bilodeau, “‘They Honor Our Lord among Themselves in Their Own Way’: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois Indians,” 354–55. 55. Patricia K. Galloway, ed., La Salle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 11. 56. Daniel Hechenberger, “The Jesuits: History and Impact: From Their Origins Prior to the Baroque Crisis to Their Role in the Illinois Country,” 96–97. 57. McCafferty, “Jacques Largillier,” 188. 58. Myaamia Center, https://miamioh.edu/myaamia-­center/research/publications/ miami-­peoria-­dictionary/index.html (last accessed September 17, 2022); Daryl Baldwin, Linguist and Cultural Preservationist, Class of 2016, MacArthur Fellows Program, MacArthur Foundation, https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-­of-­2016/daryl-­bald win#searchresults (last accessed September 17, 2022). 59. Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. 60. Daniel Hechenberger, “The Jesuits: History and Impact: From Their Origins Prior to the Baroque Crisis to Their Role in the Illinois Country,” 99. 61. Étienne Veniard de Bourgmont, “Exacte description de la Louisiane, de ses ports, terres, et rivières, et noms des nations sauvage qui l’occupent et des commerce et avantages que l’on peut tirer dans l’établissement d’une colonie,” in La Découverte du Missouri et L’histoire du Fort D’Orleans (1673–1728), ed. Marc de Villiers de Terrage, 60. 62. Carl H. Chapman, “The Little Osage and Missouri Indian Village Sites, ca. 1727–1777 A.D.” 63. Carl J. Ekberg and Anton J. Pregaldin, “Marie Rouensa-­8cate8a and the Foundations of French Illinois,” 146–60; Robert Michael Morrissey, “Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-­Illinois Borderlands, 1695–1735,” 103–46; Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Society. 64. Elizabeth Benchley, An Overview of the Prehistoric Resources of the Metropolitan St. Louis Area, 13. 65. Benchley, 16. 66. Shackelford, “The Frontier in PreColumbian Illinois,” 195. 67. Shackelford, 196.

Chapter Three War and the Missouria Foundation of St. Louis

1. Jennifer Clark, “The Settlement of Saint Louis or The Founding of Saint Louis by Fernand LeQuesne,” Artifact of the Month blog, September 9, 2013, https://www. nps.gov/jeff/blogs/The-­Settlement-­of-­Saint-­Louis-­or-­The-­Founding-­of-­Saint-­Louis -­by-­Fernand-­LeQuesne.htm. The painting is currently in storage at the Old Post Office. Email communication, Jennifer Clark, September 15, 2023.

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2. Mark Bennitt, ed., History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 512. 3. Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America, 18. 4. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, 125; Carl Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier. 5. Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Society. 6. Hugh Crawford, Declaration, July 22, 1765, in The Critical Period, 1763–1765, eds. Clarence Walworth Alvord and Clarence Edwin Carter, 484. 7. Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person, St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, 53. 8. Rouge, French for red, appears in the original French translation. Translation of speech in minutes, signed and certified by St. Ange, John Ross, and others, May 16, 1765, in The Critical Period, eds. Alvord and Carter, 480; see Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” 625–44. 9. James Julian Coleman, Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent: The Spanish-­Frenchman of New Orleans, 16–17; William E. Foley, A History of Missouri, Vol. 1: 1673–1820, 16. 10. Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion, 13–14; Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 52–53. 11. September 8, 1766, deed of sale from Thomas Smallman to Edward Code, regarding a house “late in the Occupation of Monsr la Cled, with the Outhouses, Land, and all the appurtenances thereunto belonging, as they now stand, for and in consideration of the Sum of Six hundred Dollars,” in The New Regime, 1765–1767, eds. Clarence Walworth Alvord and Clarence Edwin Carter, 372; Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 55–56. 12. Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 15. 13. Auguste Chouteau, “Narrative of the Settlement of St. Louis,” in The Early Histories of St. Louis, ed. John Francis McDermott, 45–60; Gregory P. Ames, ed., Auguste Chouteau’s Journal: Memory, Mythmaking & History in the Heritage of New France; Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 57. 14. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 70. 15. Ames, 70. 16. Ames, 70; Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 52. 17. Journal of Governor D’Abbadie, in The Critical Period, eds. Alvord and Carter, 189–90. 18. Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 46, 158–60. 19. A rich body of scholarship on such relationships exists. A useful collection is Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, which includes Stoler’s important essay, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” 20. St. Ange to D’Abbadie, August 12, 1764, in The Critical Period, eds. Alvord and Carter, 292–93. 21. St. Ange to D’Abbadie, 292–93. 22. St. Ange to D’Abbadie, 292–93.

354

Notes to Chapter Three

23. Michael E. Dickey, The People of the River’s Mouth: In Search of the Missouria Indians, 85. 24. There is disagreement as to the exact date of their arrival in St. Louis. J. N. Nicollet reported that the Missouri Indians arrived in St. Louis on October 10, 1764; see Nicollet, “Sketch of the Early History of St. Louis,” in Early Histories of St. Louis, ed. McDermott, 138. Repeated by other scholars, an October arrival date conflicts with Auguste Chouteau’s narrative recollection. Chouteau recalled requesting that Laclède come to St. Louis from Fort de Chartres to deal with the Missourias; Laclède was in residence in St. Louis by September, when his partner Marie-­Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau and their four children arrived from New Orleans. 25. Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 59–60. 26. Patricia Rice, “Old Maps Indicate That Laclede and Chouteau Weren’t First,” St. Louis Public Radio, October 12, 2012, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/ arts/2012-­10-­26/old-­maps-­indicate-­that-­laclede-­and-­chouteau-­werent-­first. 27. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 70. 28. Ames, 70. 29. Ames, 70. 30. William Iseminger, email communication, October 2, 2022. My thanks to Bill for all his suggestions regarding basket images. 31. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 72; Patricia Cleary, “Fashioning Identities on the Frontier: Clothing and Cultural Cross-­Dressing in Colonial and Creole St. Louis,” in French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy, eds. Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor. 32. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 70, 72. 33. DuVal, The Native Ground, 72. 34. Amélie Allard, “Relationships and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-­Century Fur Trade,” 149–70; Alicia Caporaso, “Six Upper Missouri River Fur Trading Posts: Trends in Organization,” 312–34. 35. In a 1765 speech, the Missouris and Osages also declared they only wanted “to have the French” among them, not the English. “Another speech by the chiefs of the Osage and Missouri,” enclosed in letter of M. Aubry, May 16, 1765, in The Critical Period, eds. Alvord and Carter, 480. 36. Gabriel Marest to Louisiana Governor Pierre Lemoyne d’Iberville, June 10, 1700, quoted in Dickey, The People of the River’s Mouth, 33–34. 37. Dickey, 4–6. 38. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 72. 39. Gilbert C. Din and A. P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-­Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley, 54; Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 72. 40. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, 197. 41. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 72. 42. Raymond E. Hauser, “The Fox Raid of 1752: Defensive Warfare and the Decline of the Illinois Indian Tribe,” 210, 211, 217–18, 222. 43. Ames, Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, 72. 44. Ames, 74.

Notes to Chapter Four

Chapter Four The Indigenous World of Eighteenth-Century St. Louis

355

1. Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 437. 2. DuVal, The Native Ground. 3. In order to plan for the construction of two Spanish forts, French engineer Guy Dufossat charted the territory, labeling St. Louis the vilage Francois du paincourt. The nickname—­short of bread—­has usually been interpreted as a commentary on food shortages. Pierre Gendreau-­Hétu, “St. Louis Once Was P(a)in-­Cour(t)—­But Was It Ever ‘Short of Bread?’” French Colonial History 20 (2021): 1–28; Guy Soniat du Fossat, Map of the Mississippi River from Pain-­Court to Cold Water Rock: Ecelle de Trois Mille Six Centstoises, 1767, St. Louis Mercantile Library, University of Missouri-­St. Louis. https://dl.mospace.umsystem.edu/umsl/islandora/object/umsl%3A62598 (last accessed November 21, 2018). 4. Charles E. Peterson, “Notes on Old Cahokia,” 11. 5. Guy Dufossat map, 1767, reproduced in Ekberg and. Person, St. Louis Rising, color plate after 216; email correspondence with Sharon K. Person, December 14, 2017. 6. W. Raymond Wood, “The Missouri River Basin on the 1795 Soulard Map: A Cartographic Landmark,” 183; George de Bois St. Lys, “Plan de la Ville de St. Louis des Illinois sur le Mississsippi avec projets de la fortifier,” 1796 map, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 7. W. Raymond Wood, “Nicholas de Finiels: Mapping the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, 1797–1798,” 387–402; Nicolas de Finiels, An Account of Upper Louisiana. 8. See “Plats of the Land in 1830,” in Dec. 15-­1856-­Oct. 1857 folder, Hamilton R. Gamble Papers, MHS; Portion of survey No. 3333, n.d., Lous LaBeaume Papers, MHS. 9. Noah Webster, “Correspondence between Noah Webster Esq. and the Rev. Ezra Stiles, D.D. President of Yale College Respecting the Fortifications in the Western Country,” LETTER II, 136; Webster, “Correspondence between Webster and Stiles,” LETTER III, 232. 10. George Rogers Clark, undated manuscript, printed in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, 4:133. Whether Clark did not send the letter or Carey did not publish it is unclear, but it came to light after Clark’s death in 1818. Terry A. Barnhart, American Antiquities: Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, 138. 11. Clark, in Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information, 4:133. 12. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:133. 13. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:135. 14. Robert M. Owens, “Jean Baptiste Ducoigne, the Kaskaskias, and the Limits of Thomas Jefferson’s Friendship,” 113. 15. Owens, “Jean Baptiste Ducoigne,” 114. 16. Raymond E. Hauser, “Illinois,” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society (2005) http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/625.html (accessed November 8, 2021); Ducoigne later signed the 1803 Treaties of Vincennes, developed a relationship with Thomas Jefferson, dined with him at the White House, and maintained a pro-­American stance through the War of 1812; Frederick Webb

356

Notes to Chapter Four

Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, 1:405; Treaty between the United States of America and the Kaskaskia Tribe of Indians, August 13, 1803, https://congressional-­proquest-­com.csulb.idm.oclc.org/congressional/result/congressional/congdocumentview?accountid=10351&groupid=106184&parmId=17C66E508CA#323. 17. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1 February 1793, Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 25, 1 January–10 May 1793, eds. John Catanzariti, 133. 18. “Minutes of a Conference with the Illinois and Wabash Indians, [1–4 February 1793],” Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 25, 1 January–10 May 1793, 113. 19. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:135. 20. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:135. 21. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:135. 22. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:135–36. 23. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:136. 24. Clark, in Schoolcraft, 4:148. 25. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 112–15. 26. Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion, 15–19, 26–45. 27. Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 227–46. 28. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717; James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands; Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America. 29. Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, 4, 5, 324. 30. O’Reilly decree, December 7, 1769, in Spain in the Mississippi Valley (henceforth abbreviated as SMV), ed. Lawrence Kinnaird, I:125–26. 31. Luis Unzaga to Pedro Piernas, [undated], in SMV, I:191. 32. Carl J. Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country, 29. 33. Russell M. Magnaghi, “The Role of Indian Slavery in Colonial St. Louis,” 266. 34. Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women, 63. 35. Only one Indian couple lived in a Spanish Illinois town in 1770: Pawnee Indians Suzanne and Joseph Canghé of Ste. Genevieve; Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women, 68. 36. In their work on early St. Louis, Carl Ekberg and Sharon Person argue that it was likely that Angélique, the other adult Indian slave woman in St. Ange’s household, followed Lizette in that role. Both women gave birth to three children, and for each, two of the three appear in baptismal records with no father listed, a bit of negative evidence they think suggests that the high-­ranking St. Ange was the father. Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 158–59. 37. The baptismal rate for Indian slaves was lower in St. Louis, roughly half, than in the longer settled Ste. Genevieve, where it was ninety percent. Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women, table one, 48, 49. The others were: two Litanes, three Panis, two Panmahas, one Panis Noire, one Illinois, one Scioto, and one Sioux.

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38. Among the sixty-­nine enslaved adults were eight young men between fifteen and thirty years old, six of whom had been baptized. There were eighteen women, sixteen baptized, between the ages of fifteen and forty. Among children, the sex ratio was nearly equal: twenty-­one boys, ten baptized, and twenty-­two girls, eight baptized; Piernas’s report of Indian slaves at St. Louis, July 12, 1770, in Kinnaird, SMV I:172–79; Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women, Table 3, 61–62. 39. Barr, “From Captives to Slaves,” 46. 40. Patricia Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis, 119–20; Jack B. Tykal, “Taos to St. Louis: The Journey of María Rosa Villalpando,” 161–74; “Catholic Baptisms, St. Louis Missouri, 1765–1840,” St. Louis Genealogical Society, Catholic Baptisms: St. Louis, 1765-­1840 (St. Louis: St. Louis Genealogical Society, 1982), 82; Marriage contract of Marie Rose Vidalpane and Jean Salé, July 3, 1770, instrument #2023, St. Louis Archives, MHSA. 41. Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 157. 42. Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 157–58; Deed, Instrument #406; André Roy Will, 1796, Instrument #2251; St. Louis Archives, cited in Gilbert, “Free Women of Color,” 5–6; Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri, 79–80. 43. Thorne, Many Hands of My Relations, 82–83. 44. William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis, 45. 45. “General Instructions of O’Reilly,” February 17, 1770, in The Spanish Regime in Missouri (henceforth abbreviated as SRM), ed. Louis Houck, I:78; Kathleen DuVal, “The Education of Fernando de Leyba: Quapaws and Spaniards on the Border of Empires,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 4. 46. “General Instructions of O’Reilly,” February 17, 1770, in Houck, SRM, I:83. 47. Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 91; Ríu to Ulloa, May 2, 1768, AGI-­PC 109-­1145, MHSA microfilm; Jennings, May 5, 1768, Fort Chartres, in Trade and Politics, 1767–1769, eds. Clarence Walworth Alvord and Clarence Edwin Carter, 275–78; Ríu to Ulloa, May 12, 1768, AGI-­PC 109-­1147, MHSA microfilm. 48. Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 91; Ríu, lists of Indians receiving presents at St. Louis (various dates, Fall 1767–Spring 1768), AGI-­PC 109-­1117 to 109-­1124, MHSA microfilm. 49. Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 91–92; Louis Houck, A History of Missouri from the Earliest Explorations and Settlements Until the Admission of the State into the Union, II:67; Ríu, lists of Indians receiving presents at St. Louis (various dates, Fall 1767–Spring 1768), AGI-­PC 109-­1117 to 109-­1124, MHSA microfilm; Thorne, Many Hands of My Relations, 30–40. 50. Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 93–94; Ríu to Ulloa, May 2, 1768, AGI-­PC109-­1145, MHSA microfilm; Ríu to Ulloa, May 26, 1768, AGI-­PC109-­1164, MHSA microfilm. 51. Francisco Cruzat to Bernardo Galvez, November 15, 1777, “Summary of the Indian tribes of the Misuri river,” in Houck, SRM, I:141–48. 52. Houck, SRM, I:142–43.

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53. Cruzat to Galvez, November 15, 1777, “Summary of the Indian tribes of the Misuri river,” in Houck, SRM, I:141–48. 54. Gilbert C. Din and A. P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-­Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley, 85, citing Piernas to Unzaga April 24, 1773, AGI-­PE 81. 55. Din and Nasatir, Imperial Osages, 91, citing Piernas to Unzaga, St. Louis, Sept. 14 and Dec. 12, 1773, AGI-­PC 81 and “Consejo formado por Pedro Piernas, Luis de San Ange, Pedro de Volsay, Luis de Belêtre, Pedro Labadia, Antonio Hubert, Nicholás Chauvin . . . ,” St. Louis, August 21, 1773, AGI-­PC, leg. 81. 56. The scale of the trade was vast. In one report on traders given passports to travel to Indian villages, Cruzat noted five French villagers trading with the Osages, two each to the Little Osages, Kansas, Omahas, Panis; and one to the Hotos generated 55,800 value in furs: otter, processed and unprocessed deerskin, beaver, bearskin, buffalo, and wildcats. Cruzat to Galvez, November 28, 1777, in Houck, SRM, I:140. 57. Piernas to Unzaga, May 8, 1774, AGI-­PC 81-­508, MHSA; Piernas to Unzaga, July 2, 1774, AGI-­PC 81-­515, MHSA; Piernas to Unzaga, November 6, 1774, AGI-­ PC 81-­524, MHSA. 58. A. P. Nasatir, “The Anglo-­Spanish Frontier in the Illinois Country during the American Revolution, 1779–1783,” 7, citing Cruzat to Unzaga, St. Louis, 26 Nov. 1775, AGI-­PC 81. 59. On the Sioux, see Cruzat, November 21, 1776, in Kinnaird, SMV I:235–236. 60. William E. Foley, The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 42, n.38, citing letter of this date in Kinnaird, SMV I:298–99. 61. Bernardo Galvez to Fernando de Leyba, September 2, 1778, in Kinnaird, SMV I:305. 62. Carolyn Gilman, “L’Année du Coup: The Battle of St. Louis, 1780, Part 1,” 141. 63. Gilman, “L’Année du Coup, Part 1,” 144–45. 64. Carolyn Gilman, “L’Année du Coup: The Battle of St. Louis, 1780, Part 2,” 195–96. 65. Nasatir, “The Anglo-­Spanish Frontier,” 39; Navarro to Galvez, August 18, 1780, in Houck, SRM, I:168; Juan Delavillebreuve to Berdo. De Galvez, June 24, 1780, in Kinnaird, SMV I:378, Bancroft Library, Pinart transcript marked AG Cuba, Fl. Occ.2-­1218. 66. Francisco Cruzat to Estevan Miró, August 23, 1784, in Kinnaird, SMV II:117. 67. Cruzat to Miró, August 23, 1784, in Kinnaird, SMV II:117. 68. Cruzat to Miró, August 23, 1784, in Kinnaird, SMV II:117–118. 69. Cruzat to Miró, August 23, 1784, in Kinnaird, SMV II:118. 70. Cruzat to Miró, August 23, 1784, in Kinnaird, SMV II:118–19. 71. Daniel H. Usner Jr. “An American Indian Gateway: Some Thoughts on the Migration and Settlement of Eastern Indians around Early St. Louis,” 44. 72. Cruzat to Miró, August 23, 1786, in Kinnaird, SMV II:185–86. 73. Henri Peyroux to Estevan Miró, December 29, 1790, AGI-­PC 203-­508, MHSA. 74. “Miamisburg Mound,” Ohio History Connection, https://www.ohiohistory.org /visit/browse-­historical-­sites/miamisburg-­mound/, (accessed June 29, 2023). 75. Foley and Rice, The First Chouteaus, 50–51.

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76. Trudeau intervened, then hid the Little Osages that night. Undeceived, their pursuers stayed for ten days before Trudeau came up with a new plan that involved liberally distributing alcohol. Trudeau assisted the Little Osages in leaving St. Louis while the other tribes were drinking and even accompanied them for the first league out of town. Zenon Trudeau to Carondelet, March 2, 1793, in A. P. Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of The Missouri, 1785–1804, I:167–69. 77. Foley and Rice, The First Chouteaus, 52; Trudeau to Carondelet, March 2, 1793, in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, I:167–69. 78. Foley and Rice, The First Chouteaus, 53. 79. Foley and Rice, The First Chouteaus, 54–55. 80. Houck, History of Missouri, II:210–11; contract Houck, SRM, II:106–08; John Joseph Mathews, The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 285; Foley and Rice, The First Chouteaus, 53–54. 81. Zenon Trudeau to Baron de Carondelet, May 30, 1795, in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, I:325–27. 82. Jacob F. Lee, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi, 187–88. 83. Zenon Trudeau to Baron de Carondelet, May 24, 1794, in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, I:214–17. 84. Houck, SRM, I:324–25. 85. Trudeau, January 15, 1798, in Houck, SRM, II:248. 86. Houck, History of Missouri, II:62, 209.

Chapter Five Claiming the Mounds for the Nation

1. Christian B. Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian Removal Policy,” 45. 2. Barnhart, American Antiquities, 97–105. 3. Barnhart, American Antiquities, 95–96. 4. Gordon M. Sayre, “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand,” 226; Barnhart, American Antiquities, 115–16; “Circular Letter,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): xxxvii–xxxix. 5. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, 28, 86–87. 6. Thomas Jefferson, The writings of Thomas Jefferson; containing his autobiography, notes on Virginia, vol. 2, eds. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 138. 7. Douglas L. Wilson, “The Evolution of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” 98– 133; Gene Zechmeister, “Jefferson’s Excavation of a Native American Burial Mound,” November 2010, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-­and-­collections/jeffersons-­exca vation-­indian-­burial-­mound (accessed October 17, 2018). 8. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 92. 9. David Hurst Thomas, “Thomas Jefferson’s Conflicted Legacy in American Archaeology,” in Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America,

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eds. Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey L. Hantman, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 84–131. 10. See Jason Colavito, The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race.” 11. Rob Mann, “Intruding on the Past: The Reuse of Ancient Earthen Mounds by Native Americans.” 3. 12. Mann, “Intruding on the Past,” 2. 13. Barnhart, American Antiquities, 5–6. 14. Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910, 29. 15. Barnhart, American Antiquities, 6. 16. John Lewis Peyton, The Adventures of My Grandfather: With Extracts from His Letters, and Other Family Documents, 122; Donald J. Blakeslee, “John Rowzée Peyton and the Myth of the Mound Builders,” American Antiquity 52, no. 4 (1987): 788. 17. Jeremy Belknap, A Discourse, Intended to Commemorate the Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. . . , cited in Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian, 49–50. 18. Mann, “Intruding on the Past,” 2. 19. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 58. 20. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 51–53. 21. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, 37–38. 22. Christen Mucher, Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession, 55. 23. Michael J. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past: The Story of Missouri Archaeology, 40; Mucher, Before American History, 56. 24. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 52; Mucher, Before American History, 53–57. 25. Curtis Dahl, “Mound-­Builders, Mormons, and William Cullen Bryant,” 187. 26. Dahl, 187–88; Elizabeth Fenton, Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel, 113–41. 27. Barnhart, American Antiquities, 16. 28. Mucher, Before American History, 10. 29. Mucher, Before American History, 10; Josiah Priest, American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, i. 30. Priest, American Antiquities, 54. 31. Priest, 54. 32. Priest, 188. 33. Sayre, “The Mound Builders,” 229. 34. Sayre, 243. 35. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xiii–xiv. 36. Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian; Deloria, Playing Indian, 64–65. 37. William Cronon, “Present Haunts of an Unvanished Past,” foreword to Native Seattle, by Coll Thrush, ii–viii.

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38. Deloria, Playing Indian, 73–74. 39. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804–1806 William Clark, July 12, 1804, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8419/8419-­ h/8419 -­h.htm (accessed December 8, 2020). Clark described mounds with remains of houses on October 24, 1805, noting the mound, thirty feet above the ground level, “has every appearance of being artificial.” 40. Norbury L. Wayman, Map le of the Mississippi country, [S.I. N. L. Wayman, 1953] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005625349/. Also identified as “Copy of a map of St. Louis village, ca. 1804–05. Now in possession of U.S. War Dept., Washington, DC [Stoddard map].” 41. Amos Stoddard, Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana, 350–51. 42. John Francis McDermott, “Henry Marie Brackenridge and His Writings,” 182. 43. McDermott, “Brackenridge and His Writings,” 183. 44. St. Louis Missouri Gazette, January 9, 1811, 2. 45. H. M. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana: Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811, 181. 46. Saint Louis Enquirer, October 7, 1820, quoted in McDermott, “Henry Marie Brackenridge and His Writings,” 186. 47. Missouri Gazette and Advertiser (St. Louis, Missouri), March 14, 1811, 2. 48. H. M. Brackenridge, “On the Population and Tumuli of the Aborigines of North America. In a Letter from H. H. [sic] Brackenridge to Thomas Jefferson.—­Read Oct. 1, 1813,” 151. 49. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 181. 50. St. Louis Missouri Gazette, March 21, 1811. 51. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 183. 52. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 184. 53. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 185. 54. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 187. 55. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 187. 56. H. M. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana; Containing Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Notices of That Vast and Important Portion of America (Baltimore: Schaeffer & Maund, 1817), 173. 57. Brackenridge, “On the Population and Tumuli,” 154. 58. St. Louis Missouri Gazette, March 14, 1811, 2. 59. Missouri Gazette (St. Louis, Missouri), April 20, 1816, 4. 60. James, comp., Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, performed in the years 1819, 1820, I:61. 61. Marshall, “The St. Louis Mound Group: Historical Accounts and Pictorial Depictions,” 55; Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, I:151. 62. Advertisement, Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, August 7, 1818. 63. Missouri Republican, April 11, 1825. 64. Advertisement, Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, December 15, 1819. 65. Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, I:151.

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Notes to Chapter Six

66. St. Louis Missouri Republican, April 11, 1825. 67. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape, 25. 68. “Town of Fenton,” Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, April 7, 1819. 69. Cleveland Register in the Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, July 7, 1819; Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, March 21, 1811; Historicus and J. M. Peck, “Number of graves containing dwarf skeletons are discovered on the bank of the Merrimac Description of bones and the graves,” St. Louis Missouri Gazette, February 17, 1817. 70. The author further opined, “It appears to have been arranged by government with great conviction of its importance, and the design bears a strong resemblance to the French expedition into Egypt.” Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, May 26, 1819. 71. Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, May 26, 1819. 72. Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, May 26, 1819. 73. James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, I:4. 74. Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, May 26, 1819. 75. Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, May 26, 1819. 76. James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, I:59. 77. T. R. Peale, “Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1819,” 386–91; James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains; Caleb Atwater, Description of Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. With a New Introduction by Jeremy A. Sabloff (New York: AMS Press for Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1973). 78. James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, I:64. 79. James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, I:63. 80. Michael Kammen, Digging up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 81. John A. Paxton, The St. Louis Directory and Register, 262. 82. W. M. Smit, “Old Broadway, a Forgotten Street, and Its Park of Mounds,” 155. 83. St. Louis Missouri Argus, July 17, 1835. 84. St. Louis Missouri Republican, September 13, 1827. 85. St. Louis Missouri Republican, September 13, 1827.

Chapter Six The Indigenous Reputation of “Red-Head’s Town”

1. Jay H. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 148. 2. See William E. Foley’s Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark, Jay Buckley’s William Clark: Indian Diplomat, and Peter Kastor’s William Clark’s World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns. 3. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 75–76. 4. Buckley, 76–77; Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State, 143. 5. Aron, American Confluence, 142. 6. Aron, American Confluence, 143–44. 7. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 77; J. Frederick Fausz, “Becoming ‘A Nation of Quakers’: The Removal of the Osage Indians from Missouri,” Gateway

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Heritage Magazine 21, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 34–36; Grant Foreman, ed. A Traveler in Indian Country: The Journal of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Late Major-­General in the United States Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 56; Aron, American Confluence, 148; Foley, Wilderness Journey, 174. 8. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 69–70. 9. Buckley, 114. 10. Buckley, 124–28. 11. Buckley, 112. 12. Buckley, 113. 13. John Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature, 60–61. 14. Landon Y. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 259. 15. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 87–88; Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 112. 16. Buckley, 134. 17. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 259, 261. 18. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 276–77. 19. James Barbour to John Cocke, “Letter from the Secretary of War to the Chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, Transmitting a Report of General Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, in Relation to The Preservation and Civilization of the Indians,” March 9, 1826, Washington, Gales & Seaton, 1826, Doc. No. 124, House of Representatives War Department, 19th Congress, 1st Session, “Civilization of the Indians,” reprinted in Thomas C. Cochran, ed., The New American State Papers, 1789–1860: Indian Affairs, vol. 2, General, 2:682–85. 20. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 79. 21. John C. Ewers, “William Clark’s Indian Museum in St. Louis, 1816–1838,” 49–72, in A Cabinet of Curiosities, 53, citing deed book E, Recorder of Deeds, St. Louis, MO; Scharf lists Clark as constructing both a large two-­story residence and a “Large brick for Indian office and museum” at 103 and 101 N. Main respectively, History of Saint Louis City and County, 150; Scharf further notes that Clark’s ground at the southeast corner of Vine and Main Streets extended east to the bank of the river, 315; Kathey Petersen, “William Clark and His Indian Museum,” Missouri Historical Society, May 14, 2014, https://mohistory.org/blog/william-­clark-­and-­his-­indian-­museum/. 22. John Francis McDermott, “William Clark: Pioneer Museum Man,” 370. William Foley covers much of the story of Clark’s museum and the visitors who frequented it in Wilderness Journey. 23. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall, eds., Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 2. 24. Castle McLaughlin, Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clark’s Indian Collection (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 70. 25. Foley, Wilderness Journey, 232–33. 26. Daniela Bleichmar, “Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections,” in Collecting Across Cultures, eds. Bleichmar and Mancall, 16–17. 27. McLaughlin, Arts of Diplomacy, 59–60, 71–73.

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Notes to Chapter Six

28. McLaughlin, 54–55, 57. 29. Henry Vest Bingham, “The Road West in 1818, the Diary of Henry Vest Bingham,” 184; McDermott, “William Clark,” 370. 30. Bleichmar, “Seeing the World in a Room,” 24. 31. St. Louis [1821] Directory, 262, reprinted at back of The St. Louis Directory, for the years 1854–5, containing A General Directory of the Citizens, and a Business Directory, with an Almanac, From July 1854, to January 1856. 32. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, A view of the lead mines of Missouri, 241. 33. Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg, Travels in North America, 1822–1824, 191–92. 34. Eugène Ney, “Voyage sur le Mississipi,” 484. 35. Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-­Weimar Eisenach, Travels Through North America, during the Years 1825 and 1826, 2:101. 36. Bernhard, Travels Through North America, 2:101–02. 37. Simon Ansley Ferrall, A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America, 124. 38. A. Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, by A. Levasseur, Secretary to General Lafayette during His Journey, trans. John D. Godman, 2:123. 39. Lafayette in America, 2:123. 40. Lafayette in America, 2:123. 41. Lafayette in America, 2:123. 42. Lafayette in America, 2:124. 43. Lafayette in America, 2:124. 44. Lafayette in America, 2:126. 45. Bernhard, Travels Through North America, 2:102. 46. Bernhard, Travels Through North America, 2:97. 47. Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 63–65; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 48. Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 21; Gareth E. John, “Cultural Nationalism, Westward Expansion and the Production of Imperial Landscape: George Catlin’s Native American West.” 176. 49. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat, 84–85. 50. William Clark Kennerly, Persimmon Hill, a Narrative of Old St. Louis and the Far West by William Clark Kennerly as told to Elizabeth Russell (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948), 47, 50. 51. Joseph Ketner, “St. Louis: Cradle of Western American Art, 1830–1900,” in St. Louis and the Art of the Frontier: Proceedings of a Symposium, St. Louis: Cradle of Western American Art, 1830–1900, ed. John Neal Hoover (St. Louis: St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, 2000), xv. 52. Foley, Wilderness Journey, 233–34; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 225. 53. John, “Cultural Nationalism,” 184. 54. Letter signed “R.,” St. Louis Beacon (St. Louis, Missouri), December 12, 1829, quoted in Karen McCoskey Goering, “Peter Rindisbacher (1806–1834): First Artist of

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the North American Frontier,” 46; see also John Francis McDermott, “Peter Rindisbacher: Frontier Reporter,” 129–45. 55. C. F. Hoffman, A Winter in the Far West, 2:78. 56. St. Louis Republican, August 15, 1834, excerpted in Grace Lee Nute, “Peter Rindisbacher, Artist,” 286. 57. Goering, “Peter Rindisbacher,” 48. 58. Hoffman, Winter in the Far West, 2:80. 59. Ferrall, A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles, 138–43. 60. Ferrall, 142. 61. D. L. Ashliman, “The American Indian in German Travel Narratives and Literature,” 833. 62. Harry Liebersohn, “Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing,” American Historical Review 99, no. 3 (June 1994): 765–66. 63. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 65–66; Andrew Jackson, Message to Congress, December 7, 1830, in Annual Messages, Veto Messages, Proclamation, &c. of Andrew Jackson. President of the United States (Baltimore: E. J. Coale, 1835), 60. 64. Wilhelm, Travels in North America, 181. 65. Wilhelm, 181–82. 66. Wilhelm, 190. 67. Wilhelm, 191. 68. Wilhelm, 191. 69. Wilhelm, 192–93. 70. Wilhelm, 194. 71. Wilhelm, 194. 72. Wilhelm, 194–95. 73. Wilhelm, 197. 74. Wilhelm, 201, see also n.18 on 201. 75. Patrick Shirreff, A Tour Through North America: Together with a Comprehensive View of the Canadas and United States, 263. 76. Edmund Flagg, The Far West: Or, a Tour Beyond the Mountains, 1:128–29. 77. Charles Joseph Latrobe, The Rambler in North America: MDCCCXXXII–MDCCCXXXIII, 2 vols. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1835); Shirreff, A Tour Through North America. 78. James Stuart, Three Years in North America, 2:344. 79. Stuart, 2:345–46. 80. Stuart, 2:346. 81. C. F. Hoffman, A Winter in the West. By a New Yorker (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), 2:74, 75. 82. Hoffman, Winter in the Far West, 2:72. 83. Hoffman, Winter in the Far West, 2:80. 84. Hoffman, Winter in the Far West, 2:80–81.

366

Notes to Chapter Seven

85. Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832–1834, in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites and trans. Hannibal Evans Lloyd, pt. 1, 218. 86. Joseph Ketner, “St. Louis: Cradle of Western American Art,” in John Neal Hoover, St. Louis and the Art of the Frontier, xv; Joseph Porter, “Cradle of Western American Art: Karl Bodmer and George Catlin in St. Louis and on the Upper Missouri Frontier,” in Hoover, St. Louis and the Art of the Frontier, 6. 87. Ketner, “St. Louis: Cradle of Western American Art,” in Hoover, St. Louis and the Art of the Frontier, xv. 88. Porter, “Cradle of Western American Art,” in Hoover, St. Louis and the Art of the Frontier, 9. 89. Maximilian, Travels in the Interior of North America, pt. 1, 216–17. 90. Porter, “Cradle of Western American Art,” in Hoover, St. Louis and the Art of the Frontier, 6–-­7. 91. Patrick J. Jung, “Toward the Black Hawk War: The Sauk and Fox Indians and the War of 1812,” 30–31. 92. Herbert S. Channick, “William Henry Harrison Steals Western Illinois from the Sauk and Fox,” 8. 93. Johnson, Broken Heart of the Republic, 55–57. 94. Maximilian, Travels in the Interior of North America, vol. 22, pt. 1, 223. 95. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 225. 96. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 226. 97. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 227. 98. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 228. 99. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 229. 100. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 229. 101. Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 115. 102. Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, vol. 2, no. 56. 103. Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 117–18; Benjamin Drake, The Life and Adventures of Black Hawk: With Sketches of Keokuk, the Sac and Fox Indians, and the Late Black Hawk War (Cincinnati: G. Conclin, 1839), 202–03. 104. Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 117–18. 105. Maximilian, Travels in the Interior of North America, vol. 22, pt. 1, 111 106. Maximilian, vol. 22, pt. 1, 112 107. Brandon K. Ruud, ed., Karl Bodmer’s North American Prints (Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 93–96, 259–63. 108. Thomas Maitland Marshall, ed., “The Journal of Henry B. Miller,” Missouri Historical Society Collections 6, no. 3 (1931): 215. 109. Perry McCandless, A History of Missouri, Volume II: 1820–1869, 54–55.

Chapter Seven Repurposing the Mounds for Urban Development

1. Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape, 38–41. 2. Sandweiss, St. Louis, 38–41.

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3. Missouri Republican, July 16, 1823 (2:4), quoted in Sandweiss, St. Louis, 27. 4. Smit, “Old Broadway, a Forgotten Street, and Its Park of Mounds,” 156. 5. Whitney Martinko, Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States, 16, 17, 20. 6. Martinko, Historic Real Estate, 20. 7. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 135. 8. Sandweiss, St. Louis, 44. 9. Glen Holt and Tom Pearson, St. Louis Streets Index 1994, St. Louis Public Library, 85; cites also Old North St. Louis by Yeatman, no page. The street index refers to Bogy Street as having been the name of Brooklyn Street from the wharf to Twelfth until 1883, p. 16, citing Yeatman, notes Brooklyn street part of Western Addition laid out by Charles Collins in 1845. 10. My thanks to Andrew Hurley for his observations on these points. 11. Martinko, Historic Real Estate, 111. 12. Martinko, 8. 13. Martinko, especially chapters 1 and 2. 14. “1831: The City of St. Louis contracts with Abraham Fox and John Wilson to build a waterworks. 1835: The City of St. Louis buys out the bankrupt Fox and Wilson, becoming sole owner of the St. Louis Waterworks.” From History of the City of St. Louis Water Division, https://www.stlwater.com/about/history.php (accessed June 14, 2021); Board of Aldermen of the City of St. Louis, “Report of Water Works Committee, May 20, 1831,” St. Louis Beacon, May 26, 1831, reproduced in Morris A. Pierce, Documentary History of American Water-­works, http://www.waterworkshistory.us/MO /Saint_Louis/ (accessed April 14, 2021). 15. 1831 June 6 [St. Louis] BC 1504, Henry Douglas Bacon Papers, box 1, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. [St. Louis (Mo.)] Board of Aldermen. Resolutions [regarding] water works. Contemporary copy 3 p. fol. Signed by Joseph A. Wherry, city register. When the original contractors, Abraham Fox and John Wilson, went bankrupt, the city became the sole owner of the St. Louis Waterworks. 16. Board of Aldermen of the City of St. Louis, “Report of Water Works Committee, May 20, 1831,” St. Louis Beacon, May 26, 1831, reproduced in Pierce, Documentary History of American Water-­works, http://www.waterworkshistory.us/MO/Saint_Louis/. 17. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 92–93. 18. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 93, 308–12. 19. Andrew W. Richey to A. Borradaile, February 26, 1832, Missouri History Envelope, MHSA. 20. Timothy Flint, The History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley, 318. 21. Hoffman, A Winter in the Far West, 2:72–73. 22. John T. Flanagan, “A Look at Some Middle Western Gazetteers,” 300. 23. Alphonso Wetmore, Gazetteer of the State of Missouri . . . ., 191. 24. Martinko, Historic Real Estate, 111. 25. Washington Irving, The Western Journals of Washington Irving, 3:112. 26. Wetmore, Gazetteer of the State of Missouri, 194. 27. Hoffman, Winter in the Far West, 2:73.

368

Notes to Chapter Seven

28. Missouri Argus (Saint Louis, Mo.), October 11, 1837, 1; October 13, 1837, 2; October 28, 1837, 2; March 6, 1838, 2; June 27, 1838, 2. 29. Daily Commercial Bulletin (St. Louis, Missouri), March 16, 1837, 2. 30. Missouri Argus (Saint Louis, Mo.), October 11, 1837, 1; October 13, 1837, 2; October 28, 1837, 2; March 6, 1838, 2; June 27, 1838, 2. 31. Charles Augustus Murray, Travels in North America during the years 1834, 1835, & 1836, 1:235–36. 32. Murray, 1: 235–36. 33. Murray, 2:161. 34. Shirreff, A Tour Through North America, 264. 35. Flagg, The Far West, 1:124. 36. McCandless, A History of Missouri: Vol. II. 1820–1869, 164. 37. Flagg, Far West, 1:124. 38. Flagg, 1:124–25. 39. Flagg, 1:125. 40. Flagg, 1:126. 41. Flagg, 1:125. 42. Thomas Maitland Marshall, ed., “The Journal of Henry B. Miller,” Missouri Historical Society Collections 6, no. 3 (1931): 219–20. 43. Marshall, “Journal of Henry B. Miller,” 219–20. 44. Eliza R. Steele, A Summer Journey in the West, 191–92. 45. Flagg, Far West, 1:126. 46. Flagg, 1:134–35. 47. Flagg, 1:126. 48. Flagg, 1:127. 49. Hoffman, Winter in the Far West, 2:73. 50. Flagg, Far West, 1:128. 51. Martinko, Historic Real Estate, 54. 52. Flagg, Far West, 1:127. 53. Flagg, 1:127–28. 54. Steele, Summer Journey in the West, 197. 55. Nancy Moore Goslee, “Hemans’s ‘Red Indians’: Reading Stereotypes,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, 238–43. 56. Sandweiss, St. Louis, 51. 57. “An ACT amendatory of the act, entitled “An act to provide for laying and opening certain State roads in the county of St. Louis,” approved 11th of February, 1839, Missouri, General Assembly, 1840–1841, Missouri Session Laws, First Session, Missouri State Archives, https://cdm16795.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/molaws/ id/40422 (accessed May 26, 2021). 58. Map of St. Louis. Population 34,140. Engraved by Edw. and Jul. Hutawa for the Western Metropolis in 1846, Sublette Papers, Missouri Historical Society. 59. Wetmore, Gazetteer of the State of Missouri, 213. 60. Wetmore, Gazetteer of the State of Missouri, 186–87.

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61. Flagg, The Far West, 1:116. 62. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 65. 63. James S. Buckingham, The Eastern and Western States of America, 3:118. 64. William E. Foley and Charles David Rice, “‘Touch Not a Stone’: An 1841 Appeal to Save the Historic Chouteau Mansion,” 19. 65. Foley and Rice, “‘Touch Not a Stone,’” 15. 66. M. C. Field, “The Chouteau House,” The Valley of the Mississippi, Illustrated no. 2, August 1841, drawn and lithographed by J. C. Wild, edited by Lewis F. Thomas (St. Louis: Chambers & Knapp, Printers, 1841), 31-­32. 67. Martinko, Historic Real Estate, 53. 68. Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, “Sketch of the Early History of St. Louis” in Early Histories of St. Louis, ed. McDermott, 148; Foley and Rice, “‘Touch Not a Stone,’” 14–19. 69. Lee Ann Sandweiss, ed. Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City, 1670–2000, 87; Wilson Primm, Report of the Celebration of the Anniversary of the Founding of St. Louis: On the Fifteenth Day of February, A.D. 1847, 2. 70. Primm, 2. 71. Primm, 8. 72. Primm, 14. 73. Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 17. 74. Buckingham, Eastern and Western States of America, 3:143–44. 75. Caleb Atwater, Description of Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States, with a new introduction by Jeremy A. Sabloff (New York: AMS Press for Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1973), 176–77; reprinting of volume 1 of Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1820). Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-­Weimer Eisenach, claimed that a large mound had been used for building clay, and “bricks were burned which served for the construction of the state-­house.” Bernhard, Travels through North America, 2:137. 76. Bernhard, Travels through North America, 2:137. 77. Founded in 1810, Circleville had entirely lost its round form by 1856. John W. Reps, “Urban Redevelopment in the Nineteenth Century: The Squaring of Circleville,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 14, no. 4 (Dec. 1955): 23–26; “Circleville, Ohio,” Ohio History Central—­an Online Encyclopedia of Ohio History, http://www .ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=686&nm=Circleville-­Ohio (accessed December 14, 2017). See also “History Corner: The Squaring of Circleville, Ohio” Professional Surveyor Magazine (March 2008), http://archives.profsurv.com/magazine/article.aspx?i=2096 (accessed December 14, 2017). 78. Buckingham, Eastern and Western States of America, 3:143–44. 79. Sandweiss, St. Louis, 51. 80. Sandweiss, St. Louis, 55. 81. Smit, “Old Broadway, a Forgotten Street, and Its Park of Mounds.” 155; Smit quotes Daily Evening Gazette, December 2, 1843, issue no longer extant. 82. Smit, “Old Broadway,” 155. Smit quotes Daily Evening Gazette, December 2, 1843, issue no longer extant.

370

Notes to Chapter Eight

83. St. Louis Missouri Argus, March 18, 1840, 2. 84. St. Louis Missouri Argus, September 2, 1840, 2. 85. James Green, Green’s Saint Louis Directory (No. 1) for 1845, xix. 86. Smit, “Old Broadway,” 161. 87. St. Louis Weekly Reveille, July 28, 1845. 88. St. Louis Weekly Reveille, September 16, 1844, 2. 89. Green, Green’s Saint Louis Directory, xix. 90. Smit, “Old Broadway,” 155. Smit quoting St. Louis American January 4, 1845, an issue no longer extant. 91. Saint Louis American, January 4, 1845 (issue no longer extant), reprinted in Marshall, “The St. Louis Mound Group,” 57; Smit, “Old Broadway,” 154. 92. Charles R. Anderson v. William E. Green and Milton W. Hopkins, St. Louis Circuit Court, Mechanics Liens, 21 July 1845, box 6, folder 89, St. Louis Mechanics Liens records collection, St. Louis Circuit Court Records, Missouri State Archives St. Louis Circuit Court Records Project, https://cdm16795.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/ collection/stlmeclien/id/5929 (accessed May 25, 2021). 93. Archibald Carr and Louis Labaume v. William E. Ghun, June 6, 1845, St. Louis Mechanics Liens 608, St. Louis Mechanics Liens records collection, St. Louis Circuit Court Records, Missouri State Archives, https://cdm16795.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/stlmeclien/id/2927 (accessed May 25, 2021). 94. Arenson, Great Heart of the Republic, 8–11. 95. Arenson, 8–11, 21. 96. Arenson, 20. Arenson quotes Eliot on the fire from Eliot, “Slow St. Louis: Her Trial by Fire and Pestilence,” Daily Missouri Democrat, December 2, 1871, found in James S. Thomas Scrapbooks (SLML), Scrapbook 15. Arenson citing William Greenleaf Eliot Diary, May 23, 1849, William Greenleaf Eliot Papers, Washington University, 238n32. 97. Emmeline Stuart-­Wortley, Travels in the U.S., etc. during 1849 and 1850, 111–12. 98. “St. Louis in 1849: A Letter from a Traveler, Otis Adams to Thomas Curtis Biscoe,” Bulletin, Missouri Historical Society 6, no. 3 (1950): 368–69. 99. “St. Louis in 1849,” 370. 100. “St. Louis in 1849,” 370.

Chapter Eight “Little Hope of Its Standing Fast”

1. “Department of Commerce .  .  .  .” DeBow’s Review of the Southern and Western States. Devoted to Commerce, Agriculture, Manufactures (1850–1852), 445. 2. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. 3. Douglas Miln to William Beckett, in Rachel Cope and Robert D. Palmer III, “Diversity in Nineteenth-­Century St. Louis: A Scotsman’s Description,” 125. 4. See 1850 US Census, native born and country of origin. 5. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), February 21, 1854, 3. 6. St. Louis Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 2, 1855, 1. 7. The Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, SHSMO archives, from the 1850s detail the dramatic pace of growth.

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8. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 66; Mucher, Before American History, 5–6. 9. See, for example, descriptions in The Democratic Banner (Bowling Green, Missouri), November 18, 1850, 1. The Buffalo Daily Republic (Buffalo, New York), January 24, 1856, 3. 10. George Copway, The Life, Letters, and Speeches of Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh, or, G. Copway, Chief, Ojibway Nation,154–55. 11. Copway, 161–62. 12. Copway, 162, 169. 13. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 18, 1855, 2. 14. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 12, 1855, 2; see “To the American Public” and “(Circular.) The Ojibewa [spelling in original] Chief and the Civilization of the Indians,” The Washington Union (Washington, DC) May 20, 1849, 3. 15. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 13, 1855, 2. For an example of a Copway address and newspaper response to his appeals for funds to support his efforts and aid Indigenous peoples, see “To the American Public” and “(Circular.) The Ojibewa [spelling in the original] Chief and the Civilization of the Indians,” The Washington Union (Washington, DC) May 20, 1849, 3. 16. Alton Weekly Telegraph (Alton, Illinois), January 18, 1855, 6. 17. The Opelousas Patriot (Opelousas, Louisiana), July 28, 1855, 2. 18. The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), November 28, 1856, 4. 19. Deloria, Playing Indian, 63–65. 20. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), October 18, 1857, 2. 21. Deloria, Playing Indian, 65. 22. Detail from advertisement for “Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley!” Newark, NJ: Printed at the Mercury Office, ca. 1851, Western Americana Collection: (WA) E78.M75 M65e, Princeton Collections of North America, https://blogs.princeton.edu/westernamericana/2014/07/15/ looking-­at-­the-­west-­monumental-­grandeur-­of-­the-­mississippi-­valley/. 23. Detail from ad, “Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley!” 24. Detail from ad, “Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley!” 25. Mucher, Before American History, 7. 26. Courtenay, A Guide to Pomarede’s Original Panorama of the Mississippi River, 22. In The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated, American artist Henry Lewis opened with an image of St. Louis, noting its churches and chimneys and drawing attention to its monumental earthworks. Lewis spent time in St. Louis in the late 1840s; his work was published in Germany in the early 1850s. He pointed out that at the northern end of the city, one could see “the Old Indian mound, of which many are found in the immediate neighborhood of the city.” Lewis, The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated, 47–48. 27. Dolores A. Kilgo, Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype, 15. 28. Kilgo, 2. 29. Various stories circulated of an Indigenous leader buried in the colonial era atop Big Mound, including Walter Barlow Stevens, St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764–1911 (St. Louis-­Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1911), 1:285.

372

Notes to Chapter Eight

30. Kilgo, Likeness and Landscape, 201. 31. Julius Hutawa, Plan of the City of St. Louis, Mo (St. Louis: Julius Hutawa and Leopold Gast & Brother, 1850, c. 1842), St. Louis Public Library Map Collection, St. Louis https://cdm17210.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/maps_mo/id/7 (accessed June 1, 2021). 32. “Map of the City of St. Louis, Mo. And Vicinity,” J. H. Fisher, 1853, State Historical Society of Missouri Map Collection, https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages /MDH/MapofStLouis1853.pdf. 33. January 13, 1857, Board of Aldermen Minutes, C12793 St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes for 1853–1858, Missouri State Archives, page 13 of 1240. 34. January 13, 1857, Board of Aldermen Minutes. 35. January 13, 1857, p. 234 (as numbered on folio, [14 of 1240], Board of Aldermen Minutes, p. 240 of 1240). 36. Message of the mayor, John How, October 2, 1853, St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes, C12793 St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes for 1853–1858, Missouri State Archives, p. 240 of 1240; Karen R. Jones, “‘The Lungs of the City’: Green Space, Public Health, and Bodily Metaphor in the Landscape of Urban Park History,” 39–58. 37. Message of the mayor, John How, October 2, 1853, Board of Aldermen Minutes. 38. Message of the mayor, John How, October 2, 1853, Board of Aldermen Minutes. 39. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 13, 1853, St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes, C12793 St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes for 1853–1858, Missouri State Archives, p. 265 of 1240. 40. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 13, 1853, pp. 265–266 of 1240, c12793. pdf ) [punctuated thusly in original, first and last double quotation marks mine] [Francis McFaul]. 41. Louisville Daily Courier (Louisville, Kentucky), November 1, 1853, 2. 42. November 21, 1853, Board of Aldermen Minutes, St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes, C12793 St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes for 1853–1858, Missouri State Archives, p. 302 of 1240. 43. November 21, 1853, Board of Aldermen Minutes. 44. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 22, 1853, 3. 45. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 22, 1853, 3. 46. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 22, 1853, 3. 47. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 22, 1853, 3. 48. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 22, 1853, 3. 49. Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), May 10, 1856, 3; Anzeiger des Westens, October 1, 1856, 3. 50. November 21, 1853, Board of Aldermen Minutes. 51. November 21, 1853, Board of Aldermen Minutes. 52. Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), November 23, 1853, 3. 53. Louisville Daily Courier (Louisville, Kentucky), November 28, 1853, 2. 54. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 31, 1853, C12793 St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes for 1853–1858, Missouri State Archives, p. 278 of 1240. 55. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 31, 1853.

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56. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 31, 1853. 57. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 31, 1853. 58. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 31, 1853. 59. Board of Aldermen Minutes, October 31, 1853. 60. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 61. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 62. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 63. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 64. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 65. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 66. Mayor’s message to Board of Alderman, Mayor John How, October 15, 1856, C12793 St. Louis Board of Aldermen Minutes for 1853–1858, Missouri State Archives, p. 414 of 1240. 67. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 68. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 69. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 70. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 71. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 72. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 73. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 74. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 75. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 76. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 77. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 78. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), February 13, 1854, 2. 79. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 12, 1868, 3. 80. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 12, 1868, 3. 81. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 12, 1868, 3. 82. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 12, 1868, 3. 83. D. R. McAnally, “The Mound,” 144. McAnally was arrested and placed in a military prison in 1862 “for publishing treasonable matter” in the St. Louis Christian Advocate, which he edited. New York Times, April 23, 1862, 4. 84. McAnally, 144. 85. McAnally, 144. 86. McAnally, 144. 87. Anne Lucas Hunt, “Early Recollections,” in Seeking St. Louis, ed. Sandweiss, 273. 88. Thomas Jefferson White, Report in Relation to the Drainage of Chouteau’s Pond, 7. 89. Article III, Section 2, “Forty-­sixth—­To drain and keep drained Chouteau’s Pond, whenever they deem it best so to do for the general health.” Amended City Charter, Approved, March 3rd, 1851: An Act to Reduce the Law Incorporating the City of St. Louis, and the Several Acts Amendatory Thereof, into One Act, and to Amend the Same (St. Louis, 1851), 11. 90. McAnally, “The Mound,” 144. 91. McAnally, 144.

374

Notes to Chapter Eight

92. McAnally, 145. 93. Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. 94. Neuer Anzeiger des Westens, January 29, 1856, 1. 95. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), June 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 1857; Sylvester V. Papin and Theophile Papin were real estate brokers and auctioneers, located at 33 Chestnut Street, Robert V. Kennedy, St. Louis City Directory for the Year 1857 (Saint Louis: Printed by R. V. Kennedy, 1857), iii. 96. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), June 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 1857. 97. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), August 2, 9, 18, 27, 1857. 98. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 6, 7, 1859. 99. St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, May 18, 1856 (quotations to this issue); January 1, 1858; March 12, 1862. 100. Transcript of motion for a rehearing, Louis G. Picot, trustee of Ann Biddle, vs. Lewis V. Bogy, Louis A. Benoist and Daniel D. Page, October 1857 (handwritten), before Supreme Court of Missouri, held at St. Louis, October Term 1857, Hamilton Rowan Gamble Papers, box 9, folder 1, MHSA. William E. Ewing, Fort Wayne, to H. R. Gamble, St. Louis, March 25, 1837, Hamilton Rowan Gamble Collection, box 6, folder 4, MHSA. 101. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 10, 1859, 3. 102. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 10, 1859; September 27, 1859; October 5, 1859; November 17, 1863; June 12, 1864; October 4, 1865. 103. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), December 16, 1853, 3. 104. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 28, 1853, 3. 105. Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), September 16, 1851, 3; The Semi-­ Weekly Eagle (Brattleboro, Vermont), September 22, 1851, 2. 106. The St. Louis Directory, for the Years 1854–5, Containing a General Directory of the Citizens, and a Business Directory, with an Almanac, From July 1854, to January, 1856 (St. Louis: printed by Chambers & Knapp, 1854), 135. 107. The St. Louis Directory, for the Years 1854–5, 135; George Lewis, Impressions of America and the American Churches: From Journal of the Rev. G. Lewis, One of the Deputation of the Free Church of Scotland to the United States (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1845), 254; Edward Edwards, History of the Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis, Illustrated (St. Louis: Veteran Volunteer Firemen’s Historical Society, by Edward Edwards, 1906), 194. For Mound Hotel, see John Smith Jr. to Edward Bates, dated St. Louis, September 2, 1850, box 8, folder 7, Hamilton Rowan Gamble Collection, MHSA. 108. The Daily Missouri Republican carried numerous advertisements for Mound City brand hams in 1857, with over seventy published between January and August. 109. “The Big Mound in St. Louis,” Daily Missouri Republican, September 9, 1858. 110. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), June 13, 1854, 2. 111. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis), June 13, 1854, 2. 112. Johnson, Broken Heart of the Republic, 50–53. 113. L. U. Reavis, The Railway and River Systems of the City of St. Louis, 212. 114. Walter B. Stevens: St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764–1909, 1: 482. 115. Johnson, Broken Heart of America, 118.

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116. Arenson, Great Heart of the Republic, 67. 117. McCandless, A History of Missouri: Vol. II. 1820–1869, 147. 118. Andrew Hurley, “On the Waterfront: Railroads and Real Estate in Antebellum St. Louis,” 57. 119. Hurley, “On the Waterfront,” 62–63. 120. Hurley, “On the Waterfront,” 63–64. 121. Hurley, “On the Waterfront,” 56. 122. Johnson, Broken Heart of the Republic, 110. 123. Arrell Morgan Gibson, “Native Americans and the Civil War,” 396. 124. Elise Juzda, “Skulls, Science, and the Spoils of War: Craniological Studies at the United States Army Medical Museum, 1868–1900,” 156–67; Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead.

Chapter Nine The Destruction of the Big Mound

1. See Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 249–54; Rachel Sailor, “Thomas Easterly’s Big Mound Daguerreotypes: A Narrative of Community,” 141–57. 2. Nathaniel Holmes, “April 2, 1860 meeting proceedings,” 700. O’Brien notes that finding pottery shards in mound fill is not considered surprising today, as village debris could be scooped up in the process of mound construction, O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 51–52. 3. Holmes, “April 2, 1860 meeting proceedings,” 700–01. 4. Saint Louis Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 31, 1865, 4. 5. Saint Louis Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 31, 1865, 4. 6. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 9, 1868, 2. 7. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 9, 1868, 2. 8. Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 8, 1868, 4. 9. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 12, 1868, 3. 10. “Accident to a Laborer,” Daily Missouri Republican, November 8, 1868, 3. 11. “Accident at the Big Mound,” Daily Missouri Republican, December 16, 1868, 3. 12. Neuer Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), December 19, 1868, 3. 13. Big Mound during Destruction, the Last of the Big Mound, daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1869, identifier: N17088, MHS, https://mohistory.org/collections/ item/N17088. 14. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 15, 1868, 3. 15. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 8, 1869, 2. 16. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 8, 1869, 2; Darby made further comments at a meeting of the Historical Society, reported in the Missouri Republican of February 5, 1869, page 2, and then wrote a letter to the editor correcting some errors in the reporting of his remarks, Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 6, 1869, 2. 17. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 8, 1869, 2. 18. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), June 30, 1889, 3. 19. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 17, 1869, p. 1.

376

Notes to Chapter Nine

20. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 17, 1869, p. 1. 21. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 17, 1869, p. 1. 22. Coll Thrush, “Hauntings as Histories: Indigenous Ghosts and the Urban Past in Seattle,” in Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, eds. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, 75–76. 23. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 17, 1869, 1. 24. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, 228, 230–31. 25. Banner, 228–29, 235. 26. Banner, 236–37. 27. Banner, 237–39. 28. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 26, 1865, 2. 29. Big Mound during Destruction, daguerreotype by Easterly, 1869, identifier: N17080, MHS, https://mohistory.org/collections/item/N17080. 30. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 1, 2. 31. Kelly, “East St. Louis Yields a Satellite Settlement,” 36. 32. Aaron Sachs, Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition, 260–61. 33. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 12, 1869, 2. 34. Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), April 14, 1869, 4. 35. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1869, 3. 36. Neuer Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), April 18, 1869, 8. 37. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1869, 3; Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 32, 34. 38. Tom Arne Midtrød, “‘Calling for More than Human Vengeance’: Desecrating Native Graves in Early America,” 311. 39. Daniel G. Brinton, “Remarks on Certain Indian Skulls from Burial Mounds in Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin,” November 2, 1892, and “Additions to the Mütter Museum in 1892,” Transactions of the College of Physicians 3d ser., 14 (1892): 217–19, 240–41. 40. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 35. 41. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 36–37. 42. Fabian, The Skull Collectors. 43. Andrew T. Still, Autobiography of Andrew T. Still., 94. My thanks to Ken Winn for referring me to this source. 44. Still, 97. 45. Still, 94–95. 46. Midtrød, “‘Calling for More than Human Vengeance,’” 280; see also Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850. 47. Midtrød, 282–83; Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, or Má-­ka-­tai-­me-­she-­kiá-­ kiák, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 46, 68. 48. Midtrød, 281; Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 58–61.

Notes to Chapter Nine

377

49. James Loring, Letter to Daily Missouri Democrat, “The Big Mound. Its Excavation and Important Developments,” April 18, 1869. There is no extant copy of this day’s issue. The Loring article has been preserved in the James S. Thomas Scrapbooks, 1869 Scrapbook, St. Louis Mercantile Library. 50. Spencer Smith, “Origin of the Big Mound of St. Louis: A Paper Read Before the St. Louis Academy of Science,” 3–5, St. Louis Mercantile Library. 51. Loring, “The Big Mound,” Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), April 18, 1869. 52. Loring, “The Big Mound,” Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), April 18, 1869. 53. T. T. Richards, “Relics from the Great Mound,” American Naturalist 4, no. 1 (1870): 62–63. 54. Williams and Goggin, “The Long Nosed God Mask in Eastern United States,” 23; Savannah Reporter (Savannah, Missouri), June 10, 1881, 2; St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 26, 1881, 7; Bismark Tribune (Bismarck, North Dakota), June 3, 1881, 2. 55. Williams and Goggin, “Long Nosed God Mask,” 7–8. 56. Loring, “The Big Mound,” Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), April 18, 1869. 57. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 18, 1869, 3. 58. Alban Jasper Conant, “A Portrait Painter’s Reminiscences of Lincoln,” 512–13. 59. On Conant’s activities, see O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 40–41. 60. Alban Jasper Conant, Foot-­prints of Vanished Races in the Mississippi Valley. O’Brien questions whether Conant actually was on the scene. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 47–49, 48n10. 61. Switzler, Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, from 1541 to 1877, 41–42. 62. Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, 44–45. 63. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 48–51. The more detailed and evocative account of the ornaments appears in “Discoveries at the Big Mound. Graves, Skeletons and Relics. To Whom Did They Belong?” Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1869, 3. 64. Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, 43. 65. Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, 44. 66. Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, 44. 67. Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, 45. 68. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 28, 1869, 2. 69. Neuer Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), April 28, 1869, 3. 70. Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1869, 5; Belmont Chronicle (Saint Clairsville, Ohio), April 29, 1869, 1. 71. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 28, 1869, 2. 72. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 28, 1869, 2. 73. Smith, “Origin of the Big Mound of St. Louis: A Paper Read Before the St. Louis Academy of Science,” (1869), p. 1, St. Louis Mercantile Library. 74. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 26, 1869, 2.

378

Notes to Chapter Ten

75. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 9, 1869, 5. 76. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 9, 1869, 5. 77. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), June 16, 1869, 4. 78. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 21, 1869, 3. 79. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), August 10, 1869, 2. 80. Meeting of November 16, 1868, Academy of Science of Saint Louis: The Transactions of the Academy of Science of Saint Louis (1868/77), viii. 81. Meeting of April 19, 1869, Academy of Science of Saint Louis: The Transactions of the Academy of Science of Saint Louis (1868/77), xviii. 82. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 8, 1869, 3; Nathaniel Holmes, Meeting of April 2, 1860, Academy of Science of Saint Louis: The Transactions of the Academy of Science of Saint Louis I: 1856–1860, 700; Williams and Goggin, “Long Nosed God Mask,” 12. 83.Leonard W. Blake and James G. Houser, “The Whelpley Collection of Indian Artifacts,” Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis 32, no. 1 (1978): 4 (unpaginated); National Park Service, Department of the Interior, “Notice of Inventory Completion: Saint Louis Science Center, St. Louis, MO,” Federal Register: Notices 88, no. 8 (Thursday, January 12, 2023): 2124; Jane Henderson, “Bones of Contention,” St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), August 29, 2022, D1; phone conversation with Kristina Hampton, St. Louis Science Center, June 27, 2023; email from Kristina Hampton, St. Louis Science Center, July 17, 2023. 84. Meeting Minutes, Missouri Historical Society, January 17, 1880, MHSA. 85. St. Louis Evening Post (St. Louis, Missouri), February 21, 1878, 4. 86. Meeting Minutes, Missouri Historical Society, January 17, 1880, MHSA. 87. Thrush, “Hauntings as Histories,” in Phantom Past, eds. Boyd and Thrush, 57.

Chapter Ten Writing the Afterlife of the Mounds

1. Brain W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 124–30. 2. Stefan Aune, “Euthanasia Politics and the Indian Wars,” 789–811; Deloria, Playing Indian, 186–87. 3. Johnson, The Broken Heart of America, 163. 4. Johnson, Broken Heart of the Republic, 165. 5. Aune, “Euthanasia Politics,” 791. 6. Aune, 797–99. 7. C. Joseph Genetin-­Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War, 90–92. 8. Genetin-­Pilawa, 75. 9. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), December 31, 1874, 1; The St. Louis Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 1, 1875, 1. 10. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), December 31, 1874, 1; The St. Louis Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 1, 1875, 1. 11. Isaac T. Gibson to Enoch Hoag, No. 72, Annual Report of the Commissioner of

Notes to Chapter Ten

379

Indian Affairs (1870) 484–85, United States, Office of Indian Affairs, Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1870/71. 12. Board of Indian Commissioners, “Third Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners,” December 12, 1871, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 14. 13. See, for example, testimony provided by various Indigenous participants in treaty negotiations and agents’ summaries, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1870), 96, 98, 113–14, 485, 498, 548. United States. Office of Indian Affairs, Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1868. 14. Aune, “Euthanasia Politics,” 789. 15. Paul A. Hutton, “From Little Bighorn to Little Big Man: The Changing Image of a Western Hero in Popular Culture,” 26–28. 16. Johnson, Broken Heart of the Republic, 168. 17. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), December 30, 1890, 1. 18. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), December 31, 1890, 4. 19. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 1, 1891, 6. 20. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 6, 1891, 7. 21. Elihu H. Shepard, pre-­publication excerpt from The Early History of St. Louis and Missouri 71-­2, 74, printed in Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), November 21, 1869, 1. 22. Shepard, Early History of St. Louis and Missouri, 21. 23. Shepard, 21–22. 24. Shepard, 21. 25. Shepard, 74. 26. 1870 US Census, “Nativities of the Population of Principal Cities, Table VIII—­ Fifty Cities,” 1870 Census: Volume 1. The Statistics of the Population of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 380 https://www.cen sus.gov/library/publications/1872/dec/1870a.html. 27. James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980, 272–74. 28. L. U. Reavis, Saint Louis: The Future Great City of the World; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 275. 29. Johnson, Broken Heart of America, 169; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 274. 30. Reavis, Saint Louis, 33. 31. Reavis, Saint Louis: The Future Great City of the World, 3rd ed. (St. Louis: Published by the Order of the St. Louis County Court, 1871), 63, https://quod.lib.umich. edu/cgi/t/text/text-­idx?c=moa;cc=moa;rgn=main;view=text;idno=AFK4236.0001.001. 32. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 21, 171, 1; The author was likely bookkeeper Francis H. Southack, listed in the St. Louis City Directory for 1848 at the corner of Chestnut and Seventh St. St. Louis Directory for 1848, http://digital.wustl. edu/cgi/t/text/text-­idx?c=cty;cc=cty;rgn=div1;view=text;idno=cty1848.0001.010;node =cty1848.0001.010:13 (accessed March 25, 2021). 33. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 21, 1871, 1. 34. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 21, 1871, 1. 35. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), May 21, 1871, 1.

380

Notes to Chapter Ten

36. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 29, 1871, 3. 37. Daily Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 9, 1868, 2. 38. Joe Pryor, News Tribune, June 4, 2004, Miller County Museum & Historical Society (Tuscumbia, Missouri), http://www.millercountymuseum.org/archives/110411. html (accessed February 2, 2022). See also David Sneed, “The Historically Significant Gestring Wagon Co.,” Farm Collector, https://www.farmcollector.com/equipment/im plements/historically-­significant-­gestring-­wagons/ (accessed February 2, 2022). 39. Pryor, News Tribune, June 4, 2004, http://www.millercountymuseum.org/ar chives/110411.html (accessed February 2, 2022). 40. Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. Miller, Saint Louis in the Gilded Age (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1993), 5. 41. Corbett and Miller, 6. 42. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 25, 1870, 2. 43. “Railroad Opening,” Missouri Republican, June 23, 1871. 44. Ronald W. Johnson, “Historic Preservation in Missouri: A Recent View,” 224–25. 45. Johnson, “Historic Preservation in Missouri: A Recent View,” 224–25. 46. St. Louis Evening Post (St. Louis, Missouri), February 21, 1878, 4. 47. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), December 30, 1870, 1. 48. Carl E. Black, “Dr. John Francis Snyder, Archaeologist and Historian,” 14;. Moorehead, The Cahokia Mounds, 10. 49. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), December 30, 1870, 1. 50. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 19, 1871, 4. 51. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 19, 1871, 4. 52. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 19, 1871, 4. 53. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), February 19, 1871, 4. 54. Black, “Dr. John Francis Snyder,” 17; John Hallwas, “History and Self-­growth: ISHS Founder John Francis Snyder,” 15. 55. Moorehead, Cahokia Mounds, 10. 56. John E. Kelly, “The Archaeology of the East St. Louis Mound Center: Past and Present,” 1–57. 57. Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1870, 4, reprinted from the St. Louis Democrat, December 12, 1870. 58. Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1870, 4, reprinted from the St. Louis Democrat, December 12, 1870. 59. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), March 12, 1871, 4. 60. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), March 12, 1871, 4. 61. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 7, 1872, 1. 62. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 7, 1872, 1. 63. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 12, 1873, 2. 64. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Pas, 41. 65. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 39–41. 66. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), April 7, 1870, 3. 67. Cincinnati Gazette, “Relics of a Lost Race,” December 16, 1870, reprinted in the

Notes to Chapter Ten

381

Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), December 19, 1870, 3. 68. Cyrus Thomas, “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology,” Bureau of Ethnology, Annual Report 12 (1894): 183; Colavito, The Mound Builder Myth, 301–02. 69. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 40. 70. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 51–56. 71. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 5, 1873, 2. 72. Missouri Republican (St. Louis, Missouri), January 5, 1873, 2. 73. Switzler, Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, from 1541 to 1877, frontispiece. 74. Switzler, v–vi. 75. Conant, Foot-­prints of Vanished Races in the Mississippi Valley. An impression of footprints on limestone, located south of St. Louis, was noted by several visitors, removed and transported to New Harmony, Indiana, in 1818, where Henry Schoolcraft observed them in 1821. Henry R. Schoolcraft, letter to Benjamin Silliman, “Art. II. Remarks on the Prints of Human Feet, Observed in the Secondary Limestone of the Mississippi Valley,” The American Journal of Science and Arts 5, no. 2 (1822), 223–28. See Fred E. Coy Jr., “St. Louis/New Harmony Footprint Petroglyphs, in Limestone: History of the Removal and Comments on their Origin as Observed from an Anatomical Standpoint,” La Pintura 33, no. 3 (March 2007): 7–16. 76. Switzler, Switzler’s Illustrated History of Missouri, 26. 77. Switzler, 26. 78. Switzler, 26. 79. Switzler, 29–30. 80. Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, 1: 95. 81. Scharf, 1:95. 82. Scharf, 1:96. 83. Scharf, 1:102. 84. Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century, 130–31. 85. Moorehead, Cahokia Mounds, 3. 86. Moorehead, Cahokia Mounds, 5. 87. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 1, 1892, 5. 88. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 1, 1892, 5. 89. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 1, 1892, 5. Some have placed his burial site at Broadway and Walnut, the site of a parking garage, where a plaque commemorates him, https://www.stlmag.com/history/st-­louis-­sage/how-­and-­where-­did-­chief -­pontiac-­die/ (accessed February 2, 2022). Other serious scholarly accounts describe his murder by a nephew of a Peoria chief, Makatachinga, and cast doubt on reports of St. Ange having his body brought to St. Louis; Ekberg and Person persuasively argue that such an act would have been unlikely, as St. Ange had no wish to antagonize the Peorias. Ekberg and Person, St. Louis Rising, 86–88. 90. Conn, History’s Shadow. 91. Conn, History’s Shadow, 7.

382

Notes to Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven The Indigenous Past and Present as Local History

1. Deloria, Playing Indian, 104. 2. Guy Gibbon, The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003), 106. 3. Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman, 9. 4. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 95–96. 5. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 93, 485. 6. O’Brien, Paradigms of the Past, 103; Cyrus Thomas, “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology,” Bureau of Ethnology, Annual Report 12 (1894): 17–18. 7. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 86–88. 8. Conn, History’s Shadow, 133–34. 9. “Der heutige Stand der Mound forsrchung (The Current State of Mound Research),” Anzeiger des Westens (St. Louis, Missouri), March 25, 1894, 9. 10. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 328.; Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey, Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-­Busch Dynasty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); William Knoedelseder, Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-­Busch and America’s Kings of Beer (New York: HarperBusiness, 2012). 11. Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850–1900, 142–43. 12. Taft, 146. 13. According to Joe Mastroianni, son of my godparents Joe and Catherine Mastroianni, the print came from one of two cousins, Mary Boveri, “who owned a bar in Coello, Illinois,” or Gloria Boveri, who “owned a bar/restaurant at Union and Thekla that was torn down in 1959 for the construction of interstate 70.” The print has remained in the family. My thanks to Joe for sharing his recollections. Personal messages with the author, January 2022. 14. Chromolithograph entitled “Custer’s Last Fight,” National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_326129 (accessed March 16, 2022). 15. Hutton, “From Little Bighorn to Little Big Man,” 29–30; Taft, Artists and Illustrators, 129–30. 16. Linda Scarangella McNenly, “Foe, Friend, or Critic: Native Performers with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Discourses of Conquest,” 143. 17. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century America, 71. 18. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 101. 19. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 73, 76. 20. Paul Fees, “Wild West Shows: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Buffalo Bill Center of the West, https://centerofthewest.org/learn/western-­essays/wild-­west-­shows/; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 66–67. 21. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 79. 22. McNenly, “Foe, Friend, or Critic,” 145.

Notes to Chapter Eleven

383

23. “Louise Frederici & Buffalo Bill Cody,” Arnold Historical Society and Museum, https://arnoldhistorical.org/history/louise-­frederici-­buffalo-­bill-­cody/. 24. See, for example, Advertisement, Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 10, 1896, 7. 25. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 18, 1896, 8. 26. James Gaston Brown letter to grandson Guy Brown, May 18, 1896, MHSA, https://mohistory.org/museum/50-­moments/buffalo-­bills-­wild-­west-­show. 27. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 18, 1896, 8. 28. James Gaston Brown to Guy Brown, May 18, 1896, MHSA, https://mohistory. org/museum/50-­moments/buffalo-­bills-­wild-­west-­show. 29. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 18, 1896, 8. 30. James Gaston Brown to Guy Brown, May 18, 1896, MHSA, https://mohistory. org/museum/50-­moments/buffalo-­bills-­wild-­west-­show. 31. William Cody, entry for May 19, 1896, 1896 Route Diary, William F. Cody Archive: Documenting the Life and Times of Buffalo Bill, https://codyarchive.org/texts/ wfc.css00484.html. 32. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 19, 1896, 4. 33. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 22, 1896, 7. 34. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 24, 1896, 33. 35. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 24, 1896, 33. 36. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 24, 1896, 33. 37. White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 11, 27. 38. White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 29, 32, 35. 39. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 19, 1896, 6. 40. “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Historical Sketches and Programme,” 1896, Fless and Ridge Printing Company, identifier: A1624-­00004, https://mohistory.org/collections/ item/A1624-­00004. 41. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), February 6, 1898, 6; US Congress, H.R. 7745: “To authorize and encourage the holding of a Mississippi Valley international exposition at St. Louis, Mo., in the year 1903. Introduced by Mr. Bartholdt and referred to Committee on Ways and Means 1486,” Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the Fifty-­Fifth Congress, second session vol. 31 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898), 225. 42. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 6, 1901, 6. 43. St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), November 7, 1901, 7. 44. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1. 45. St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), November 11, 1901, 3. 46. St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), November 11, 1901, 3. 47. St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), November 11, 1901, 3. 48. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1. 49. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1. 50. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1. 51. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1. 52. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1.

384

Notes to Chapter Eleven

53. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 9, 1901, 1. 54. St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), September 10, 1902, 2. 55. St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), September 10, 1902, 2. 56. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), November 22, 1904, 3; St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 23, 1904, 9. 57. Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 393–95; phone conversation with Helen Robbins, Repatriation Director at the Field Museum, Chicago, July 10, 2023. 58. D. I. Bushnell, “The Cahokia and Surrounding Mound Groups,” 1–20. 59. Bushnell, 6. 60. Bushnell, 6. 61. Bushnell, 13. 62. Bushnell, 13. 63. Bushnell, 13. 64. Bushnell, 15. 65. Bushnell, unnumbered plate after page 20. Numerous online references to these mounds include other Bushnell photographs mistakenly interpreted as being part of the Forest Park group, which are in fact, mounds in Illinois; see Bushnell map of mound sites on p. 4 of “The Cahokia and Surrounding Mound Groups,” for the correct location of mound group F. “Mound F. in Forest Park, St. Louis,” Plate IV, Figure 2, from Bushnell, “The Cahokia and Surrounding Mound Groups.” 66. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56. 67. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56; Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History, 173–74. 68. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56. 69. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56. 70. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56. 71. Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 41. 72. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56. 73. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 17, 1904, 56. 74. Jay Gitlin, “From Private Stories to Public Memory: The Chouteau Descendants of St. Louis and the Production of History,” in Auguste Chouteau’s Journal, ed. Gregory P. Ames, 11. 75. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 30, 1904, 7. 76. He spoke on November 23, 1906. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 3. 77. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), March 20, 1904, 15. 78. Neal L. Trubowitz, “Timetable: Native American Collections at the Missouri Historical Society,” 13. 79. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), September 23, 1904, 3. 80. Tracey Jean Boisseau, “Condensed Loveliness,” in The Trans-­Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–1899: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Wendy Jean Katz, 243–44.

Notes to Chapter Twelve

385

81. Boisseau, 195, 197. 82. James R. Swensen, “Bound for the Fair: Chief Joseph, Quanah Parker, and Geronimo and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair,” 441. 83. Swensen, 443. 84. Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray, “Series Editors’ Introduction,” in Anthropology Goes to the Fair, eds. Parezo and Fowlers, xi; Parezo and Fowlers, 2–3. 85. Parezo and Fowlers, 10. 86. Parezo and Fowlers, 12–13. 87. See Appendix 2, Native Participants, Table 2.1 “American Indian Participants in the Indian Village,” in Parezo and Fowlers, 405–08. 88. Parezo and Fowlers, 26. 89. Parezo and Fowlers, 300. 90. Parezo and Fowlers, 52–55, 77, 86–90. 91. Parezo and Fowlers, 59. 92. Parezo and Fowlers, 100. 93. Parezo and Fowlers, 102–03. 94. Parezo and Fowlers, 106–08. 95. Swensen, “Bound for the Fair,” 440. 96. Swensen, 447. 97. Swensen, 450. 98. Swensen, 450–51. 99. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), April 28, 1904, 6. 100. Swensen, “Bound for the Fair,” 461–62. 101. Swensen, 439–70. 102. Parezo and Fowlers, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 112. 103. Swensen, “Bound for the Fair,” 452. 104. Swensen, 456, 462; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, 33. 105. Swensen, “Bound for the Fair,” 458. 106. Parezo and Fowlers, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 114. 107. Swensen, “Bound for the Fair,” 453; Donald Bright Oster, “Community Image in the History of Saint Louis and Kansas City,” 222. 108. Parezo and Fowlers, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 115. 109. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), February 7, 1904, 50.

Chapter Twelve Celebrating Mounds and their Builders in the Pageant and Masque

1. Ronald W. Johnson, “Historic Preservation in Missouri: Origins and Development through the Second World War,” 227. 2. Johnson, “Historic Preservation in Missouri: Origins and Development through the Second World War,” 229. 3. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting. 4. Deloria, Playing Indian. 5. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 31, 1909, 4. 6. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), September 28, 1909, 3.

386

Notes to Chapter Twelve

7. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), October 3, 1909, 4; St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), October 8, 1909, 4. 8. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century, 65–66, 160. 9. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), October 9, 1909, 1. 10. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), October 3, 1909, 26. 11. Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 64. 12. Glassberg, 64. 13. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920, 257. 14. Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 159–60; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 258. 15. Glassberg, 159–60. 16. Glassberg, 159. 17. Glassberg, 159. 18. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, Saint Louis Pageant and Masque Records (hereafter SLPMR), Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis, MHS. 19. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 20. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 258. 21. George Pierce Baker, “The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis,” 389. 22. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 23. Pageant and Masque: Promotional Postcards (folder 3), SLPMR. 24. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 25. Pageant and Masque: Promotional Postcards (folder 3), SLPMR. 26. Shilarna Stokes, “Playing the Crowd: Mass Pageantry in Europe and the United States, 1905–1935,” 136–37; Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure: A Book of Suggestions (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 63. 27. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 24, 1914, 8; Baker, “Pageant and Masque of St. Louis,” 391. 28. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 29. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 30. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 31. “Magnitude of Pageant and Masque Makes New Methods in Staging Necessary,” Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, Bulletin No. 2 (March 1914), 2. 32. Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), June 20, 1914, 39. 33. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 34. Pageant and Masque: Advertising and promotional materials, SLPMR. 35. “Magnitude of Pageant and Masque,” Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, Bulletin No. 2 (March 1914), 2. 36. Official Programme. The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, Forest Park, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 28th, 29th, 30th and 31st, 1914 (St. Louis: Pub. by authority of the Book Committee, Saint Louis Pageant Drama Association), 19–20, 43. 37. Stokes, “Playing the Crowd,” 141.

Notes to Chapter Twelve

387

38. Eugene William to William Hole-­in-­the-­Day, March 23, 1914, SLPMR, box 4, MHS. In 1907, he appeared on the US Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, as Chief Willie Hole-­in-­the-­Day, age 24. Hole-­in-­the-­Day ran away from the school in 1903; Edgar A. Allen, December 7, 1903, voucher for expenses for tickets, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 75, Entry 91, box 2418, 1903-­#79124, located through https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/. 39. The Irish Standard, for example, printed a notice about “the history of the Middle West, beginning with the arrival of De Sota [sic] and Marquette,” would be presented “in dramatic form” with more than 7,500 actors and actresses. The Irish Standard (Minneapolis, Minnesota), March 7, 1914, 3. 40. Matthew Bentley, “The Rise of Athletic Masculinity at the Carlisle Indian School, 1904–1913,” 1468; K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Jeffrey Ostler, “Reconsidering Richard Henry Pratt: Cultural Genoicide and Native Liberation in an Era of Racial Oppression,” 81–82. 41. See Appendix 1: American Indian Players, in Jeffrey Powers-­Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, 201. 42. Morning Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), August 15, 1903, 12; Morning Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), August 26, 1903, 5. 43. “About Former Pupils,” The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), April 18, 1913, 2; “Councils of War for the Cardinals,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, Texas), March 21, 1913, 9; The Buffalo News (Buffalo, New York), March 27, 1913, 18. 44. Eugene William to William Hole-­in-­the-­Day, March 23, 1914, SLPMR, box 4, MHS. 45. Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Indian Population in the United States and Alaska, 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1915). 46. Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 114. 47. Tomahawk (White Earth, Minnesota), January 17, 1918, 9. 48. Tomahawk (White Earth, Minnesota), June 5, 1919, 8. On June 12, 1919, the Tomahawk reported that he died on June 3, 1919, 8. 49. Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, 1914: Reports of the Chairmen of Committees (St. Louis: St. Louis Pageant Drama Association, 1916), 122–24. 50. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 7, 1914, 6. 51. Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, 1914: Reports of the Chairmen of Committees (St. Louis: St. Louis Pageant Drama Association, 1916), 124–25. 52. Newspaper clipping, May 1914, Louis J. Manar Collection, MHS. 53. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 17, 1902, 9. 54. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 7, 1914, 6. 55. Westliche Post (St. Louis, Missouri), May 8, 1914, 8. 56. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 23, 1914, 8. 57. St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), April 23, 1914, 5. 58. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 23, 1914, 8. 59. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 60. St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), April 23, 1914, 5.

388

Notes to Chapter Twelve

61. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 62. Dale T. Knobel, “To Be an American: Ethnicity, Fraternity, and the Improved Order of Red Men,” 62. 63. Deloria, Playing Indian; “Pageant and Masque: Costumes—­Mostly Mound Builder,” (folder 1) Gerhard Sisters, Box 714, F. 8921, SLPMR, MHS. 64. Deloria, Playing Indian, 64–65. 65. Deloria, 65–66. 66. Deloria, 90. 67. Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform, 21; Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 114, 178. 68. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 23, 1914, 8. 69. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 70. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 71. Virginia Tanner, “The Dances of American Pageantry: Realistic,” Bulletin of the American Pageant Association 64 (November 1, 1919): n.p. 72. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 29, 1914, 9. 73. Baker, “The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis,” 392; on Boy Scouts and Camp Fire, see Deloria, Playing Indian, 110–14, 135–36. 74. Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, 1914: Reports of the Chairmen of Committees (St. Louis: St. Louis Pageant Drama Association, 1916), 99. 75. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 76. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 77. The Modern View (St. Louis, Missouri), June 26, 1914, 3. 78. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 2, 1914, 2. 79. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), June 16, 1914, 2. 80. Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, 64. 81. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), June 2, 1914, 3. 82. “Sidelights on the Pageant,” St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 29, 1914, 5. 83. Wm. Anthony Aery to Luther Ely Smith, June 12, 1914, SLPMR. 84. Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, 1914: Reports of the Chairmen of Committees (St. Louis: St. Louis Pageant Drama Association, 1916), 124–25. 85. Louis J. Manar and Augustus Labadie to Whom it may concern, April 4, 1915, Louis J. Manar Collection, MHS; Manar later loaned the bell to the Missouri Historical Society, notes from archivist, February 19, 1929, and September 3, 1935, Louis J. Manar Collection, MHS. 86. Official Programme. The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, 28. 87. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 29, 1914, 9. 88. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 29, 1914, 15; St. Louis Post-­ Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), May 31, 1914, 38. 89. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 30, 1914, 5. 90. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 30, 1914, 5. 91. Official Programme. The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, 49.

Notes to Chapter Thirteen

389

92. Proceedings of the Conference of Cities, Held in Connection with the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, May 29–31, 1914 (St. Louis: St. Louis Pageant Drama Association, 1914), 53.

Chapter Thirteen Commemoration and Preservation

1. Missouri State Fair, Missouri Centennial Exposition and State Fair, Sedalia, August 8–20, 1921 (Jefferson City, MO: Hugh Stephens Print, 1921), 5, https://digital.shsmo. org/digital/collection/p17228coll11/id/90/rec/5 (accessed April 8, 2022). 2. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 1. 3. New Haven Leader (New Haven, Missouri), August 11, 1921, 8. 4. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), August 7, 1921, 5. 5. Moorehead, The Cahokia Mounds, 13. 6. American Antiquities Act of 1906, 16 USC 431-­433, approved June 8, 1906, https://permanent.fdlp.gov/lps15652/www.cr.nps.gov/local-­law/anti1906.htm (last accessed April 27, 2022); Appendix A in Ronald F. Lee, The Antiquities Act of 1906, 2001 electronic edition. 7. American Antiquities Act of 1906; Jesse Knowlden, “The Presidential Authority to Reserve and Modify National Monuments Under the Antiquities Act,” 593–94. 8. Moorehead, Cahokia Mounds, 13–14. 9. Moorehead, 16. 10. Moorehead, 22. 11. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), November 5, 1921, 4. 12. Moorehead, Cahokia Mounds, 42, quoting Warren K. Moorehead, East St. Louis Call, May 1924. 13. Brenda J. Child, “The Absence of Indigenous Histories in Ken Burns’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” 24–29; Mark Spence, “Dispossessing the Wilderness: Yosemite Indians and the National Park Ideal, 1864–1930,” 27–59; Curt Sholar, “Glacier National Park and the Blackfoot Nation’s Reserved Rights: Does a Valid Tribal Co-­Management Authority Exist?” 151–72; Jeanette Wolfley, “Reclaiming a Presence in Ancestral Lands: The Return of Native Peoples to the National Parks,” 55–80. 14. Johnson, “Historic Preservation in Missouri: Origins and Development through the Second World War,” 237; E. M. Shepard, “Historical Activities of the Springfield, Missouri University Club,” 509. 15. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), September 23, 1921, 30. 16. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), October 20, 1928, 6. 17. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri (St. Louis, 1932), 74. 18. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 74. 19. Minutes of the Council of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Minutes of the Twelfth Biennial Council, vols. 11–13 (Washington, DC, 1914), 50; Diane Curtis, A History of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America,

390

Notes to Chapter Thirteen

1891–2007 (Washington, DC: National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 2007), 15. 20. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 74. 21. Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien, Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit, 116. 22. Minutes of the Council of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Minutes of the Twelfth Biennial Council, vols. 11–13 (Washington, DC, 1914), 72. 23. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Historian’s Report 1929 (Washington DC: Gibson Brothers, Inc., 1929), 174. 24. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Historian’s Report 1929, 174. 25. Collection items, 1921-­033-­0010 Shell Disk Beads, 1993-­099-­0002, Marine shell beads, email from Beth Carter, Registrar, MHS, June 22, 2023; Strings of shell beads, 95-­21-­10/48934, Object 95-­21-­10/48935 and Object Number 70-­7-­10/2519, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Object 74-­5-­10/7580, Organic shell bead, tubular; Object 70-­7-­10/2519, String of perforated shell beads; Object 74-­5-­10/7579, Loose perforated shell disks; Object 79-­63-­ 10/19749, Shell bead, disk shaped; a Shell jar of beads and string of shell beads, Object 79-­63-­10/19750. 26. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 27. The 1920 US Federal Census shows the brothers living together, with Philip then single and listed without employment as a resident in his married brother Charles’s home. A former wagon builder for his father’s firm, Weber-­Damme Wagon Company, Philip spent his working life at the business, located at 1613 and 1615 North Broadway. Born in February 1858, he died in 1930 of heart failure. See Missouri, US, Death Certificates, 1910–1967 for Philip C. Weber (Ancestry.com) and St. Louis Up to Date: The Great Industrial Hive of the Mississippi Valley (St. Louis, Mo.: Consolidated Illustrating Co., ca. 1895). Charles was born in June 1861 and died in 1935. 28. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Historian’s Report 1929, 174. 29. St. Louis Globe Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), December 8, 1928, 3. 30. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 31. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 32. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 14, 1929, 8. 33. St. Louis Globe Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 14, 1929, 18. 34. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), May 17, 1929, 30; Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, held in St. Louis, Mo., May 18, 1929; including report of open meeting of committee, held May 17, 1929; issued under auspices of Committee on State Archaeological Surveys of Division of Anthropology and Psychology of National Research Council [proceedings, with lists of members] National Research Council Bulletin 74 (December 1, 1929), 4.

Notes to Chapter Thirteen

391

35. James B. Griffin, “The Formation of the Society for American Archaeology,” 262; Report of the Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 17. 36. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 3. 37. Henry S. Caulfield, “Address of Welcome,” Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 7. 38. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 7. 39. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 7–8. 40. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 8. 41. Barbara Alice Mann explores Native informational styles regarding sharing of sacred knowledge, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 108–10. 42. Mann, 112–13. 43. “Origins and Plans of the American Indian Association,” quoted in Chadwick Allen, “Introduction: Locating the Society of American Indians,” 3. 44. Allen, “Introduction: Locating the Society of American Indians,” 4–6, 18. 45. Allen, “Introduction: Locating the Society of American Indians,” 18–19; Marti L. Chaatsmith, “Singing at a Center of the Indian World: The SAI and Ohio Earthworks,” 183–84, 190; Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 99– 103, 306, 310. 46. Marti L. Chaatsmith, “Singing at a Center of the Indian World,” 188–90. 47. “The Second Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 1, no. 1 (April 15, 1913): 65. 48. “Our Emblem, the Copper Eagle,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 1, no. 3 (July–September 1913): 304–05. 49. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 8. 50. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 8–9. 51. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 107–08. 52. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 107–08. 53. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 102. 54. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 89. 55. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 92. 56. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 92. 57. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 108. 58. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 108. 59. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 111. 60. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 103. 61. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 49. 62. Fay-­Cooper Cole, “The Conservation of Public Sites,” Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 11. 63. Report of Conference on Midwestern Archaeology, 50. 64. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 65. St. Louis Globe Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 19, 1929, 3. 66. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 67. St. Louis Globe Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), May 19, 1929, 3.

392

Notes to Chapter Fourteen

68. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 69. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 76. 70. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 77. 71. Blee and O’Brien, Monumental Mobility, 10; Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, 6. 72. Register of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Missouri, 75. 73. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 169–238.

Chapter Fourteen Layers of Indigenous Histories

1. Frederick Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, viii–ix. 2. “Haskell at St. Louis,” The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), November 10, 1911, 6. 3. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), December 5, 1902, 1, 3. 4. 1940–41 Haskell Student Handbook excerpt, quoted The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 44, no. 2 (October 11, 1940), 12. 5. “School History,” Haskell Indian Nations University https://www.haskell.edu/about /history/ (last accessed October 13, 2022). 6. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), April 24, 1942, 38. 7. Congressional Record, Containing the Proceedings and Debates of the Sixtieth Congress, First Session, volume XLII-­House February 12, 1908 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 1916; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 43, no. 1 (September 8, 1939): 2; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 43, no. 14 (April 12, 1940): 10. 8. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 45, no. 2 (October 10, 1941): 5. 9. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 46, no. 2 (October 9, 1942): 8. 10. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) (April 24, 1942): 6. 11. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 45, no. 2 (October 10, 1941): 2; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), 44, no. 1 (September 27, 1940): 2. 12. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 46, no. 7 (December 25, 1942): 4. 13. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 45, no. 2 (October 10, 1941): 2; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), 45, no. 10 (February 27, 1942): 2. 14. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 44, no. 3 (October 24, 1940): 3; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 44, no. 12 (March 14, 1941): 3. 15. Featured Document Display: Honoring Native American Soldiers’ World War I Service, National Archives Museum, https://museum.archives.gov/featured-­document-­ display-­honoring-­native-­american-­soldiers-­world-­war-­i-­service (last accessed February 13, 2023). 16. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 45, no. 9 (February 13, 1942): 1.

Notes to Chapter Fourteen

393

17. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 45, no. 6 (December 12, 1941): 2; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 46, no.8 (January 8, 1943): 2. 18. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 43, no. 15 (April 26, 1940): 8; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 43, no. 17 (May 24, 1940): 29. 19. The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas) 46, no. 12 (March 12, 1943): 2; The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas): 46, no. 13 (March 26, 1943) 3. 20. See, for example, The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), January 19, 1945, 18; The St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 20, 1945, 6. 21. “Indians on the Hardwood,” St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), March 30, 1941, 37. 22. “Indians on the Hardwood,” 37. 23. “Indians on the Hardwood,” 37. 24. “Indians on the Hardwood,” 37. 25. “Down Memory Lane with Thorpe,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 25, 1950, 26; “A.P. Sports Editor Starts Endless Argument,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 8, 1950, 49. 26. “Down Memory Lane with Thorpe,” 26. 27. “Jim Thorpe After Tribal Claim to 456 Million Here,” St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), January 13, 1950, 7. 28. “Indian Jim Thorpe Claims U.S. Owes Tribe 456 Million,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 13, 1950, 3. 29. “Indian Affairs Bureau Opens Its First Office Here,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 31, 1956, 5. 30. “Indians to Be Resettled Here, First to Arrive Next Month,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), August 5, 1956, 14. 31. “Indians to Be Resettled Here,” 14. 32. “2 Indian Families Begin Lives Anew in St. Louis,” St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), October 9, 1956, 3. 33. Clifton Tongkeamah served in the Army from March 12, 1953, until his discharge on February 5, 1955. US Department of Veterans Affairs, BIRLS Death File, 1850-­201, ancestry.com. At some point, he returned to Oklahoma and died there in 1993; “Deaths,” The Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma), May 6, 1993, 17. 34. “Two More Indian Families Move Here for Relocation,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), October 14, 1956, 26. 35. “Indians to Be Resettled Here,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), August 5, 1956, 14. 36. “Indians to Be Resettled Here,” 14. 37. “Two More Indian Families Move Here for Relocation,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), October 14, 1956, 26. 38. “St. Louis New Home for Indians,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 14, 1957, 118. 39. “St. Louis New Home for Indians,” 118. 40. “St. Louis New Home for Indians,” 118. 41. “St. Louis New Home for Indians,” 118.

394

Notes to Chapter Fourteen

42. “St. Louis New Home for Indians,” 118. 43. “Indians to Be Resettled Here, First to Arrive Next Month,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), August 5, 1956, 14. 44. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), February 28, 1958, 43. 45. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” 43. 46. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” 43. 47. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” 43. 48. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” 43. 49. “St. Louis to Have Indian Field Office,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 17, 1958, 22. 50. “Quota Club to Celebrate Anniversary Project,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), February 18, 1958, 28. 51. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), February 28, 1958, 43; “Ralph J. Koeppe Named Kingdom House Director,” St. Louis-­Post Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), September 18, 1955, 131. 52. “Integrating the Indian into Big City Life,” 43. 53. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. 54. Nicolas G. Rosenthal, ed., Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-­Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 152. 55. Brenda Underwood and Mary Goodvoice interviews, “Listening to Indians,” September 10, 1975, St. Louis Community College, https://guides.stlcc.edu/ listeningtoindians/transcripts. 56. Underwood and Goodvoice interviews, “Listening to Indians,” September 10, 1975. 57. Underwood and Goodvoice interviews, “Listening to Indians,” September 10, 1975. 58. Kansas City Times (Kansas City, Missouri), August 16, 1973, 80. 59. Kansas City Times (Kansas City, Missouri), January 18, 1975, 47 60. John T. Furlong, “Preserving and Promoting the lives of Native Americans through Oral Histories,” paper presented at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions in Lyon, France, August 2014, 1–2, https://library.ifla. org/id/eprint/935/1/118-­furlong-­en.pdf. 61. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 239. 62. H.R.5237 -­Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act101st Congress (1989-­1990), https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-­congress/house-­bill/5237 (last accessed May 5, 2022). 63. Julia A. Cryne, “NAGPRA Revisited: A Twenty-­Year Review of Repatriation Efforts,” American Indian Law Review 34, no. 1 (2009): 99–122; James Riding In, Cal Seciwa, Suzan Shown Harjo, and Walter Echo-­Hawk, “Protecting Native American Human Remains, Burial Grounds, and Sacred Places: Panel Discussion,” 169–83. 64. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 301–05. 65. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 303–04.

Notes to Chapter Fourteen

395

66. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 306–07. 67. Association on American Indian Affairs, “Annual Repatriation Conference,” https://www.indian-­affairs.org/repatriation_conference.html (last accessed July 3, 2023). 68. “Annual Repatriation Conference,” https://www.indian-­affairs.org/repatriation _conference.html (last accessed July 3, 2023). 69. Joy Beasley, “Native American Graves Protection—­The Long Journey Home: Advancing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act’s Promise after 30 Years of Practice,” statement before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, February 2, 2022, https://www.doi.gov/ocl/native-­american-­graves-­protection (last accessed July 17, 2023). 70. Shannon O’Loughlin to members of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, “Re: Comments regarding Oversight Hearing on ‘The Long Journey Home: Advancing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act’s Promise after 30 Years of Practice,’” February 16, 2022, https://www.indian-­affairs.org /uploads/8/7/3/8/87380358/2022-­02-­16_scia_nagpra_hearing_comments_from_ aaia.pdf (last accessed July 17, 2023). 71. Trisha Ahmed and Charlie Neibergall, “Native American Leaders Visit Site of Archeological Dig to Find Remains of Boarding School Students,” https://apnews.com/ article/native-­american-­boarding-­school-­cemetery-­nebraska-­630b3a0e4546caad16803 4a700ea31b4 AP NEWS (last accessed July 17, 2023). 72. Mississippian Oval Hoe Blade from the “Big Mound” at Second and Mound Streets, St. Louis, Missouri, identifier: 1993-­099-­0001, MHS. 73. Perforated shell beads, Object 95-­21-­10/48934; Object Number 70-­7-­10/2519; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 74. https://www.si.edu/object/shell-­disk-­beads:nmnhanthropology_8017741, https:// www.si.edu/object/shell-­disk-­beads:nmnhanthropology_8017657, https://www.si.edu/ object/shell-­bead:nmnhanthropology_8043305, museum ledger book catalog, https:// www.si.edu/object/discoidal-­shell-­beads:nmnhanthropology_8121509, National Museum of Natural History-­Anthropology Department, Smithsonian (last accessed July 14, 2023). 75. Krystiana Krupa, phone conversation July 18, 2023; University of Illinois received $86,996, FY NAGPRA Consultation/Document Grant Recipients, https:// www.nps.gov/orgs/1207/nagpra-­grants-­2021.htm (last accessed July 18, 2023). 76. University of Illinois, Champaign-­Urbana, “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Office,” https://nagpra.illinois.edu/ (last accessed July 18, 2023). peabody, 77. “NAGPRA at the Peabody,” https://peabody.harvard.edu/nagpra-­ “Message from the Peabody Museum Director,” https://peabody.harvard.edu/news/ message-­peabody-­museum-­director (last accessed July 18, 2023). 78. Beth Carter, email with the author, June 16, 2023. 79. Andrew B. Weil and Andrea A. Hunter, “Saving Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis,” CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 7, no. 1 (Winter 2010), https://permanent. fdlp.gov/lps70980/lps70980/www.nps.gov/CRMJournal/Winter2010/research3.html. 80. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), March 30, 1932, 1.

396

Notes to Chapter Fourteen

81. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), March 30, 1932, 1. 82. St. Louis Globe-­Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri), March 30, 1932, 1. 83. The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), April 23, 1932, 9. 84. Robert P. Weigers, “Archaeological Photograph Collections: The Sugar Loaf Mound Example,” 17; St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), October 13, 1940, 3. 85. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), March 1, 1942, 24. 86. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), October 13, 1940, 3. 87. “History,” Missouri Archaeological Society, https://www.missouriarchaeologica lsociety.org/mas-­organization/history/ (last accessed May 9, 2022). 88. “History,” Missouri Archaeological Society, https://www.missouriarchaeological society.org/mas-­organization/history/ (last accessed May 9, 2022). 89. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 9, 2000, A6. 90. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 9, 2000, A6. 91. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 9, 2000, A7. 92. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), January 9, 2000, A7. 93. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), June 15, 2009, A010; “23SL9 -­Sugar Loaf Mound,” August 14, 2009, http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/sugarloaf.html (last accessed May 6, 2022). 94. Weil and Hunter, “Saving Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis.”. 95. Weil and Hunter, “Saving Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis.” 96. Shannon Shaw Duty, “Chief Purchases Sugarloaf Mound,” Osage News August 14, 2009, https://osagenews.org/chief-­purchases-­sugarloaf-­mound/ (last accessed May 6, 2022). 97. Shannon Shaw Duty, “Natl. NAGPRA Review Committee Confirms Osages Were Part of Mound Culture,” Osage News, December 4, 2015, https://osagenews.org/ natl-­nagpra-­review-­committee-­confirms-­osages-­were-­part-­of-­mound-­culture/ (last accessed May 6, 2022). 98. Duty, “Natl. NAGPRA Review Committee Confirms Osages Were Part of Mound Culture.”. 99. Sonia Atalay, “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice,” 280–81. 100. “Curious Louis: City’s Last Surviving Mississippian Mound, Sugar Loaf, to Be Preserved This Summer,” St. Louis Public Radio, STL-­NPR, February 11, 2016, https:// news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-­louis-­on-­the-­air/2016-­02-­11/curious-­louis-­citys-­last-­ surviving-­mississippian-­mound-­sugar-­loaf-­to-­be-­preserved-­this-­summer?fbclid=IwAR 20yXUXCkxbkr35i4aTf_EsvhTm-­XcARbnzhXc0RzMrDbAFOSSYAG5JKro. 101. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 19, 2017, A3; July 23, 2017, H5. 102. Jeremy D. Goodwin, “Huge Counterpublic Exhibition Puts Socially Conscious Art in the Streets of St. Louis,” St. Louis Public Radio, June 28, 2023, https:// news.stlpublicradio.org/arts/2023-­06-­28/huge-­counterpublic-­exhibition-­puts-­socially-­ conscious-­art-­in-­the-­streets-­of-­st-­louis (last accessed July 5, 2023). 103. “Land Acknowledgment,” 6; Jennifer Colten and Jesse Vogler, “Commingling, or the Mound Called Sugarloaf,” and New Red Order, “Give it Back: Stage Theory,”

Notes to Chapter Fourteen

397

both in Counterpublic 2023, ed. James McAnally, (St. Louis: Temporary Art Review, 2023), 66-­86, 86–90.? 104. “Curious Louis,” https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-­louis-­on-­the-­air/2016-­ 02-­1 1/curious-­l ouis-­c itys-­l ast-­s urviving-­m ississippian-­m ound-­s ugar-­l oaf-­t o-­b e -­preserved-­this-­summer?fbclid=IwAR20yXUXCkxbkr35i4aTf_EsvhTm-­XcARbnzh Xc0RzMrDbAFOSSYAG5JKro. 105. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 49–50. 106. Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, 239–44. 107. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), July 22, 2008, B1. 108. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), February 26, 2010, A8. 109. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 13, 2014, B5. 110. UNESCO, World Heritage List, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/ (last accessed May 5, 2022). 111. UNESCO, World Heritage List, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/ (last accessed May 5, 2022). 112. “Cahokia Mounds Welcomes 10 Millionth Visitor Since It Became a World Heritage Site,” UNESCO, August 19, 2013 https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/1065 (last accessed May 5, 2022). 113. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 13, 2014, B5. 114. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 13, 2014, B5. 115. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), April 13, 2014, B5. 116. “Bost Introduces Bill to Make Cahokia Mounds a National Park,” press release, April 19, 2021, https://bost.house.gov/2021/4/bost-­introduces-­bill-­make-­cahokia-­ mounds-­national-­park-­1 (last accessed May 5, 2022); Eric Schmid, “Bost, Durbin Renew Push to Make Cahokia Mounds a National Park,” St. Louis Public Radio, April 28, 2021, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/government-­politics-­issues/2021-­04-­28/ bost-­durbin-­renew-­push-­to-­make-­cahokia-­mounds-­a-­national-­park (last accessed May 5, 2022); 117th Congress (2021–2022), S. 1211-­Cahokia Mounds Mississippian Culture National Historical Park Act https://www.doi.gov/ocl/s-­1211-­0 (last accessed May 6, 2022). 117. 116th Congress (2019–2020), H.R. 3824-­Cahokia Mounds Mississippian Culture National Historical Park Act, https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-­congress /house-­bill/3824?s=1&r=14, and Cahokia Mounds Mississippian Culture National Historical Park Act, 117th Congress (2021-­2022), https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details /BILLS-­117hr2642ih (last accessed May 6, 2022). 118. US Department of the Interior, S. 2340, Cahokia Mounds Mississippian Culture National Historical Park Act, https://www.doi.gov/ocl/s-­2340 (last accessed September 18, 2023). 119. “Native American Heritage Challenge,” 2021, Missouri Humanities, https:// missouri2021.org/wp-­content/uploads/2021/03/Native_American_Heritage_FINAL. pdf (last accessed September 9, 2022). 120. “Native American Heritage Challenge,” https://missouri2021.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2021/03/Native_American_Heritage_FINAL.pdf (last accessed September 9, 2022).

398

Notes to Afterword

121. Steve Belko, “The American Rescue Plan Act Funds 22 New Missouri Humanities Grants,” MO Humanities (Fall/Winter 2021): 48, 50, 51. 122. Steven Conn, Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, 1.

Afterword

1. “Osage Lands Acknowledgment.” The Osage Nation. June 2019. https://www .osageculture.com/culture/historic-­preservation-­office/osage-­lands-­acknowledgement.

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Index

Abenakis, 94 Academy of Science of St. Louis, 204, 208, 215, 217–18, 221–23, 237–38, 244, 329, 332 activists, 277, 315–16, 324–26 Adams, Cassily, 253 Adams, Otis, 173 Adena, 22 advertisements, 16, 180, 326, 374n108; of Anheuser-­Busch, 229, 247, 255; and mounds, 116, 149, 170–71, 197; and “Mound City,” 198, 246–47; for Pageant and Masque, 279; and Wild West shows, 255–56, 258; and World’s Fair, 266–67, 270, 272; and Got Land? billboard, 335 Aery, William Anthony, 293 agriculture, 30, 36, 41, 59–60, 100, 128, 243 AIM (American Indian Movement), 325–26 Alabama, 30, 42 Alaskans, Native, 328, 330 Alcatraz Island, occupation, 325 Aldermen, Board of, 152, 154, 175, 177, 187–90, 194 All-­American Indian Club (St. Louis), 323 Alqonquians, 54, 56 allotment, 229, 250, 264 Alt, Susan M. (author), 28 Alton (IL), 180, 193 American Bottom, 59 American expansion, 6–7, 9, 23, 83, 94, 96, 102, 111, 124, 150, 160, 210, 213, 229, 306 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 326–27

American Revolutionary War: 82–83, 133, 180; attack on St. Louis, 91–92; and Native refugees, 91 American Philosophical Society, 101 Americanization, 250, 288, 324 Anderson, Charles R., 160–61 Angélique, 71, 87, 356n36 Anheuser-­Busch Brewing Association, 228, 249, 253–55, 332 Anishinaabes, 178 anthropology, 103, 268, 311, 324; Anthropology Village (St. Louis World’s Fair), 268–70 antiquities, European, 100–101, 244; American, 100–101, 103, 105, 107–8, 110, 112, 117, 134, 139, 150, 161, 166, 181, 183, 223, 238–39; Egyptian, 112, 117; Greek, 117, 341 Antiquities Act (1906), 299 Apaches, 270–71, 285, 321 appropriation: of Indigenous history, 11, 108, 315, 344; of Indigenous lands, 128, 178; of mounds, 8, 10, 96, 122, 155, 258; of Native artifacts, 129; of Native symbols, 13–14, 276, 292–93. See also American expansion; history, nation-­building narratives; Pageant and Masque of St. Louis Arapahos, 269 archaeology, 102–3, 218, 220–21, 241–43, 251, 292, 339; and archaeologists, 23, 33, 52, 224, 238–40, 261, 300, 327, 335; and Conference on Midwestern Archaeology (St. Louis, 1929), 305, 307; and terminology, 6, 22, 25–26, 37–38,

425

426 Index archaeology (continued) 54; and State Archaeological Society of Missouri, 333 Arenson, Adam (author), 166 Arkansas, 11, 42, 50, 52, 55, 125–26; excavation in, 104; population of valley, 53; river, 53, 56, 80, 90, 124 artifacts. See collecting, and museums; curiosities; pottery artists. See specific artists Ashley, William, 152–53, 155, 157, 161, 190, 312 assimilation, 46, 128, 227, 270, 315–16, 250, 270, 284–85, 294, 316, 324 Association on American Indian Affairs, 328–29 astronomy, 23–24, 28, 35 Atahualpa, 49 Athens (Greece), 103 Athens (OH), 240 Aztec (empire), 49 B Baker, George, 291 Baldwin, Daryl, 58 Baldwin, John Dr., 239 Barbour, James, 128 Barnhart, Terry (author), 103, 105 Barns, Chancy R., 242 Barracks. See Jefferson Barracks Barrett, Samuel A., 310 Bartholdt, Richard, 258 Barton, Benjamin Smith, 111 Barton, Josiah, 121 baseball, 284–85, 294, 316–17, 319 basketball, 284, 316–19 baskets, 19, 25, 33, 74–75, 78, 177, 203, 221, 282 Battle of Greasy Grass (Battle of the Little Bighorn/Custer’s Last Stand), 228–29, 255, 268 beads, 34, 43, 64, 93, 139, 169, 203, 206, 213, 216–19, 221, 223–24, 238, 303, 329–30, 390n25, 395nn73–74 Beasley, Joy, 328–29 Beaver Wars, 52

Becker, Henry, 233 Becker, F. Otto, 253–54 beer, 253–55 Belknap, Jeremy, 194 Bellefontaine Cemetery, 173, 191 Bender, Charles (White Earth, Chippewa), 284 Benoist, Louis Auguste, 190, 194, 205 Benton, Thomas Hart, 199 Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-­Weimar-­Eisenach, 133, 141 Berry, J. Brewton, 333 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), 226–27, 317, 321–24, 326 Big Mound, 3–4, 10, 33, 82, 118, 154, 161, 168, 175, 183–98, 207, 212, 220, 241–45, 303–4, 329–30, 333; marker 4-­6, 297, 312, 340; theories about, 204, 208, 215–16 Big Osages, 61, 71, 70, 73, 77, 90, 92 Bird Man. See also Red Horn, 43–45 Bingham, Henry Vest, 131 bison, 41, 54 Blackfeet, 294 Blackhawk, Ned (author), 49 Black Hawk, 141–42, 144–46, 214–15 Black Hawk War, 141–42 Blacks, 6, 85, 176, 182, 200–201, 226, 257, 278, 287–88, 293 Blee, Lisa (author), 302 Blowsnake, Sam (HoChunk), 45 boarding schools, 227, 250, 284–85, 316–19, 329 Bodmer, Karl, 141, 147–48 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 96 boosterism, 151, 225, 253, 275, 278, 306, 313 Bost, Mike, 341 bowling, 171 Boy Scouts. See Scouts Brackenridge, Henry Marie, 108–113 Brazeau, Joseph, 197 bricks, 6, 192, 205, 245, 247, 369n75 Briggs, C. E. (Charles Edward), 223 British, 68, 71, 74, 85, 88, 90–92, 94, 103, 129, 294; and land claims, 64–66, 70; tourists and writers, 154, 164–65

Index 427 British Museum, 103 Brown, Michael, 6 Brown, James (author), 24 Brown, James Gaston, 256–57 Bruce, Thomas, Lord Elgin, 103 Buckingham, James, 164, 166–67 Buckley, Jay (author), 126 Buder Center for American Indian Studies, 342 Bunker Hill, 192 Bush, Cori, 341 Bush, George H. W., 13 Bushnell, D. I. (David Ives), 259–62, 272, 384n65 Bushnell, David Ives, Sr., 303 Butler, Juanita, 317 Butler, Richard, 100 C calumets, 62, 117, 131, 143, 283, 292 Cahokia: 19-­39, 40, 66, 81, 282; immigrants, 23; mounds, 20–24, 28, 84, 109, 112, 269, 272, 333; and big bang theory, 24, 27; expansionism, 26, 29; influence, 42; labor, involved in plaza construction, 347n25; state park, 3, 74, 272, 299–300, 341 Cahokia Mounds Association, 300 canoes, 56–57, 76, 123, 147, 208, 225 Cardinals, St. Louis (baseball team), 285, 293 Carlisle Indian Boarding School (Carlisle, PA), 284, 319 Carondelet, Francisco Luis Héctor de, 95 Carondelet (village/neighborhood), 58, 197, 332 Carr, Archibald, 171 Carr, William, 149 Carshall, Cornelius/Meintachubee (Choctaw), 319 Carter, Beth, 339 Casqui, 51–52 Catlin, George, 30, 126–27, 134–35, 137, 141, 143–46 Caulfield, Henry, 305, 307–8 cavalry. See military

cemeteries/graves: 191; Indigenous, 102, 103, 106, 108, 116–18, 133, 158, 201, 209, 212–14, 218–19, 238, 244, 330–31, 333; white, 120, 222, 238 Centennial Week, St. Louis (1909), 275–77, 281, 285 Centennial Exposition and State Fair, 297–98 ceramics. See pottery Chaco Canyon, 23, 38 Chambers, A.B. (Adam B.), 191–94 Charles III (king of Spain), 64 Charless, Joseph, 117 chert, Mill Creek, 29, 34 Cherokees, 22–23, 25, 321, 323, 325 Cheyennes, 211, 269 Chick, Clarence/Charging Bear (Stockbridge), 319 Chicago, 236, 261, 268, 278, 284, 319, 321; population, 231, 258. See also World’s Fair (Chicago) Chicago Academy of Sciences, 212 Chichén-­Itzá, 282 Chickasaws, 84 Chief Joseph/Hin-­mah-­too-­yah-­lat-­kekt (Nez Perce), 270 Chief White Hair. See Pawhuska/Payouska Chiefdoms, 42, 50–52, 60; Coosa, 50; power of, 30; chiefs, 33, Children. See also slavery; slaves; enslaved, 87; mixed or inter-­racial, 58, 356n36; at Big Mound, 189, 203, 219, 221, 223, 303; at Wild West shows, 257; in Centennial, 277; and urban relocation, 321–24; and boarding school deaths, 329 Chillicothe (OH), 121 Chippewas, 89, 269, 284–85, 323 Chivington, John, 211 Choctaws, 321 Cholera, 151, 173, 176 Choneau, William (White Earth, Chippewa), 284 Chouteau, Auguste, 129, 133–34, 162, 164; and Indigenous family, 88; narrative of founding, 69–70, 72–78, 354n24; and Osage, 95 Chouteau, A.P. (Auguste Pierre), 197

428 Index Chouteau, Cyprin, 264 Chouteau, Edward, and Osage family of, 261 Chouteau, Pierre, 82, 129, 162, 165–66, 197; Indigenous family, 88; and Osage, 95 Chouteau, Pierre, Col., 264 Chouteau, Thérèse Cerré, 164 Chouteau (Osage), Sofia. See Little Bear, Sofia Chouteau Chouteau’s Pond, 151, 173, 194–95, 233–34 chunkey, 26–27, 30 Church of the Holy Family (Cahokia), 58 Cincinnati (OH), 100, 112, 167, 177, 180, 240, 321 Circleville (OH), 11, 121, 152, 167 citizenship, 309, ideals of, 8; exclusion of Blacks from, 200; of Native peoples, 307, 318; promotion of, 277–28 civic identity. See identity, civic Civil War, 200–201, 210 civilization, characterizations of Indigenous, 249, 265; characterizations of white, 249, 265 claims, European territorial, 47, 58, 64, 66, 70, 96; of Native peoples, 104–5, 148, 258; to land in St. Louis, 83, 116, 161 Clamorgan, Jacques, 114 Clark, George Rogers, 82–84, 91–92, 102, 355n10 Clark, William, 108, 124, 126–28, 153, 183, 225, 230, 361n39; “Indian museum,” 129–40, 144, 363n21 climate, 30, 36, 39, 54 Cole, Fay-­Cooper, 211 Cole, Nathan, 217 Colonial Dames of America (Missouri branch), 298, 301, 304–6, 312–13, 340 Cody, William “Buffalo Bill,” 228, 249, 255 Coffee, Charles, 323 Courtemarche, Angelique (Iowa), 87–88 collecting, and museums, 129, 131, 140, 142, 183, 201, 223, 236, 238, 261, 310, 238, 330 Columbus (Ohio), 167, 239, 307 Columbus Day, 307 Comanches, 87, 321, 323, 325

commemoration: of local history, 247, 273, 298, 301; of Native peoples in, 266, 287; representations of Indigenous peoples in, 165–66, 276–77, 299. See also Centennial Week, Pageant and Masque of St. Louis Compton, Richard J., 232–34 Conant, Alban Jasper, 217–18, 241–43 Cooper, William John, 311 confluence (of Mississippi and Missouri Rivers), 35, 53, 69, 133 Conn, Steven (author), 342 Cook, Ceila, 317 Copway, George/Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh (Mississauga), 176, 178–81, 371n15 Corbett, Katharine (author), 233–34 Corps of Discovery. See Lewis and Clark Expedition Counterpublic, 335, 337 Cowan, Ira L., 317 cowboys, 255–58 Creeks, 318 Cruzat, Francisco, 90, 92–94 CSULB, NAGPRA at, 13 Cuellar, Clifford, 318 curiosities, 116, 121, 131, 133, 140, 142, 181, 192, 203, 215, 221, 232, 235 Cusick, Chief David, 28 Custer, George Armstrong, 228, 254 Custer’s Last Fight, 253–55, 382n13 Custer’s Last Stand. See Battle of the Greasy Grass D D’Abbadie, Jean-­Jacques Blaise, 68 Dahl, Curtis, 104 Darby, John F., 208, 375n16 Daughters of the American Colonists, 301 Daughters of the American Revolution: Kansas City branch, 275–76; St. Louis branch, 301 Davis, Edwin Hamilton, 25, 204 Dawes, Rufus, 309 Dawes Severalty Act (General Allotment Act), 229 DeCora, Eugene, 318 deer, 60, 138

Index 429 deFiniels, Nicolas, 82 Delassus, Charles DeHault, 197 Delawares, 66, 94, 148, 178, 180, 342 delegations, Native, 71, 85, 88–90, 92, 96, 123, 129, 133, 136, 148, 176, 230 Deloria, Philip J. (author, Standing Rock Sioux), 13, 49, 107, 180, 289 Deloria, Vine, Jr. (author, Standing Rock Sioux), 324 DeLucia, Christine (author), 7 De Soto, Hernando, 49–51, 53, 55, 283 Deshêtres, Louis, 89 Detroit, 92 destruction (of mounds), 327. See also Big Mound; Jefferson, Thomas development, 4, 149, 152, 154, 160–61, 164, 168, 177, 190, 233, 245, 298, 331, 333; by private individuals, 150–51, 167, 173, 188–89, 194–96, 200, 205 Dhegiha (or Dehiga) Sioux, 37, 53, 55 Dickens, Charles, 163–64 Dickeson, M. W., 181–83 discovery, doctrine of, 100 dispossession, 8–10, 46, 129, 150, 345 Dry, Camille N., 232–34 Duckworth, Tammy, 341 Ducoigne, Jean Baptiste (Kaskaskia), 83–85, 102, 108, 355n15 Dufossat, Guy, 81, 355n3 Dunbar-­Ortiz, Roxanne (author), 49 Durbin, Dick (Richard), 341 DuVal, Kathleen (author), 49, 51, 76, 80 E Eads Bridge, 233–34 eagle, symbol, 307–8 East St. Louis (IL), 21, 32, 211–12, 333, 339, 341 Easterly, Thomas, 143, 185, 195–96, 203, 211, 220, 333 education, emphases on US expansion, 7, 13, 131; and Missouri history, 297; perspectives, 47–49; place of Indigenous history in, 310–11, 344; textbooks, 46–49, 65, 310–11 Egan, John J., 181–82, 335–36

Egypt, 3, 24, 100, 117, 192, 220, 272, 341, 362n70; and Egyptomania, 103, 139 Ekberg, Carl J. (author), 69, 72, 381n89 Eliot, William Greenleaf, 173 Emerald Mound National Historical Landmark (MS), 42–43 empire, American, 6 Englemann, George, 214, 329 Esther, 82 environment: 59-­60, climate change, 30, 36; physical setting of St. Louis, 14, 69; modification of, 26, 35 epidemics, 50, 52–54, 329 erasure, 4, 7–8, 46, 107, 177–78, 284, 315, 331, 343 Etowah (Georgia), 11, 42–43 excavations, 118, 182, 215–17, 219, 240, 244, 258–59, 272, 299–300, 333, 339 expansion. See American expansion F Fabian, Ann (author), 214 Falling Garden, 32–33, 110, 112–13, 121, 155, 168 farmers, 21, 30 Ferguson (MO), 6, 255 Ferrall, Simon Ansley, 137 Field, Matthew C., 164 Field Museum (Chicago), 261 Fields, Anita (Osage), 335 Fields, Nokosee (Osage), 335 Flint, Timothy, 152–53 Fillmore, Millard, 198–99 fires: at the Academy of Science (St. Louis), 222–23, 329; Mound Pavilion (1848), 171–72; prairie, 231; St. Louis (Great Fire of 1849), 151, 172–73, 199 Fisher, J. H., 187 Flagg, Edmund, 154–55, 157–60 food, 31, 36, 54, 309 football, 284–85, 315–17, 319–20; stadium proposal and protests, 315, 336 footprints, 208, 218, 243, 381n75 Forest Park, 233, 243, 258–62, 279, 295, 305, 384n65 Fort Ancient (OH), 244

430 Index Fort de Chartres (IL), 58, 61, 66–71, 74, 77 fossils, 132, 236 Foxes, 55, 89–90, 126, 142, 147–48, 178, 320, 323 France, 62–64, 93; and claims to Indigenous lands, 52, 57, 70, 96; and colonists 3, 33, 46–47, 53, 59, 60, 66, 71–74, 77–78, 81–87; historic preservation in, 151; and missionaries, 25, 51, 55–59; and traders, 68–70, 76, 83, 88 French and Indian War, 47, 64–66 frontier, 138, 176, 244; and frontiersmen, 106, 255; and frontier thesis, 250–51, 257 funerary goods, 34, 104, 203, 213, 216, 218–19, 231 G Gabrieleño, 13 gambling, 26 gardens, 159; public, 120, 160, 194, 243 Gartside, Joseph, 205 Gasconade River, 199 Gateway arch, 7, 9, 32, 173 Genoa Indian Industrial School (Genoa, NE), 329, 331 genocide, 7, 9, 15, 209–10, 226 geologists, 117, 132, 221–22, 231 Georgia, 30; Coosa chiefdom, 50; Etowah, 11, 42–43 George III (king of Great Britain and Ireland), 65 Germans, 96, 176, 201, 233, 257, 322 Germany, 176 Geronimo/Goyathlay (Apache), 270–72, 288 Gestring, Caspar, 205, 233; factory, 339 Ghost Dance, 229 gifts. See presents Gill, McCune, 331–32 Gitlin, Jay (author), 69 Glassberg, David, 277 Glennon, John Joseph (Archbishop), 261 Grant, Ulysses S., 226, 326 graverobbing, 13, 118, 120, 183, 213–14, 221, 240, 303, 327 graves. See cemeteries Gravier, Jacques, 58

Gray, James, 120 Gray, Jim (Osage), 334 Great lakes, 34, 43, 55, 65 Greece, 103, 117, 193, 341 Green, William, 169–71 Gruber, Willlie (Navajo), 322 H Haas, Wills de, 239 Hager, Albert B., 222 Hämäläinen, Pekka (author), 49 Hare, Townsley, 317 Harjo, Chitto (Muscogee), 266 Harvard University. See Peabody Museum Harrison, Cornelius (Oneida), 326 Harrison, William Henry, 141–42 Haskell Institute/Haskell Indian Nations University (Lawrence, KS), 266, 316–19 Haudenosaunee, 52 Hausdoerffer, John (author), 146 Hawaiians, Native, 328, 330 HeartLands Conservancy, 341 Hencock, Alfred, 188–89 Henry, Walter (Kiowa), 322 heritage societies, 275, 277, 298, 301 Hiawatha (Ojibwe), 181 history: and forgetting, 9, 16; and historians, 7–8, 17, 23, 49; and nation-­building narratives, 9, 49, 100–103, 106, 117, 121–22, 137–38, 150, 166, 177, 198–99, 209, 246, 298–99, 302, 306, 309–10, 322; and historical markers, 4-­6, 193, 275–76, 297, 301–5, 312–13, 315, 339–40 Hobsbawn, Eric (author), 297 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 140, 153, 158 Hole-­in-­the-­Day, William (White Earth Chippewa), 284–85, 316, 386–87n38, 387n48 Holmes, Ida, 317 Holmes, Nathaniel, 204 Holmes, Ruth, 317 Holmes, William H., 269 Hopewell, 22 Hopkins, William, 169–71 Hopi, 38

Index 431 horses, 49, 84, 128, 139, 165, 228, 256 hostilities, Iroquois, 88; Osage, 96; with Americans, 94, 256 How, John, 188, 192, 198 Hoxie, Frederick (author), 316 human remains: Indigenous, 13, 103, 118, 158, 182, 235, 238–40, 327–28, 336–37; from Big Mound, 168–69, 203, 206–7, 211–19, 221, 223–24, 235, 329, 331; from Forest Park, 259, 262; white, 222, 238 Hunt, Theodore, 116 Hunter, Andrea, (Osage, author), 37, 334–36 hunting, 30, 41, 46, 54, 60, 63, 77, 89–90, 124, 128–129, 138, 142, 177, 251, 264 Hurley, Andrew (author), 200 Huron, 52, 55 Hutawa, Edward and Julius, maps, 161, 163, 185 I identity, civic, 8, 176, 245–47, 273, 277, 279. See also Pageant and Masque of St. Louis Illinois/Illiniwek, 13, 56, 59, 66, 83, 342 Illinois Country, 52, 58, 65–66, 68 Illinois State Historical Society, 238, 299 immigration, European, 173, 175–77, 277, 322 imprisonment (of Indigenous men), 141–42, 144–46, 270 Indian Mounds Regional Park (St. Paul, MN), 212 Indian Reserve, 65 Indian Self-­Determination and Education Assistance Act, 325 Indian Termination Act, 320 Indian Territory, 264–66 Indian Warehouse (St. Louis), 317–19 Indians. See Indigenous peoples, individual tribes, removal policies, terminology indigeneity, urban, 13–14 Indigenous knowledge. See knowledge, Indigenous influenza, 285 informants, Native, 26, 58, 79, 102, 326 infrastructure, 150, 152, 167, 177, 191

Inman, Henry, 244–45 interpreters, 68, 89 IORM (Improved Order of Red Men), 176, 180–81, 275, 289–90, 302 Ioway, 87–88, 90, 126, 128, 136, 142, 320, 342 Ireland, 176 Irish, 132, 136, 189, 309, 322 Iroquois, 22–23, 66; Confederacy/League (Five Nations), 52 Irving, Washington, 153 Iseminger, William (author), 74 Israelites, 104–5 Italians, 292 J Jackson, Andrew, 137–38 James, Edwin, 117 Jefferson Barracks, 124, 144, 201, 294, 318 Jefferson, Lester, 318 Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 83, 110–12, 130, 355n16; and mound destruction, 101–2 Jesuits, 56–59, 66 Joliet, Louis, 56–57 Johnson, Ike/Big Elk (Sioux), 319 Johnson, Lyndon, 324 Johnson, Walter (author), 6–7, 14, 226 Junaw-­che-­Wome/Stream of the Rock (Potawatomi), 138 K Kansas (or Kaw), 37, 53, 148, 356n56 Kansas, people, 90–91, 148; land, 210, 228 Kansas City, 318; Commission on Human Relations, 326;heritage organization, 275 Kaskaskia: village, 66, 69; people, 55, 58–59, 79 Kayser, Henry, 190 Kelly, John E. (author), 15, 24, 333, 335 Kennedy, Michael, 206 Kentucky, 37, 113 Keokuk/Watchful Fox (Sauk), 142–43 Kickapoos, 55, 65, 95, 123, 140, 142, 148, 269, 301, 320, 342 King, John, 323 Kingdom House (St. Louis), 323–24

432 Index Kiowas, 321–22 knowledge (Indigenous): 7–8, 17, 25–26, 82–85, 102, 195, 250, 253, 301, 306, 309; and beliefs, 43; and oral traditions, 22–23, 37, 43–46, 53, 55; and oral history project, 326; and scholars, 16, 306. See also scholars Koch, Albert, 204 Krupa, Krystiana, 330 L L’Arrivée, Jacques, 87 Labaume, Louis, 171 labor, involved in construction at Cahokia, 20, 24–26, 28–29, 36, 112, 140, 347n25; enslaved, 85–87; involved in St. Louis mound group, 32–33; involved in construction of trading post in St. Louis, 74, 78; involved in destruction of Big Mound, 189, 205-­6, 218, 221; involved in destruction of Forest Park mound, 259 Laclède de Liguest, Pierre: 62, 69–70, 73, 87 lacrosse, 30 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de, 83, 133 La Joie, 72, 81, 312 Lakotas, 228–29; Miniconjou, 229 Lamanites, 105 land acknowledgment (Osage), 344 Langlade, Charles de (Ottawa-­French), 92 Largillier, Jacque, 56 La Salle, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, 57 Le Claire, Art/Little Thunder (Sioux), 319 Lee, Robert E., 161–62 Lenâpé, 22 LeQuesne, Fernand, 62–63 Levasseur, Auguste, 133 Lewis and Clark Expedition, 30, 108, 124, 130-­132 Lewis, Everett, 292 Lewis, Henry, 169–71, 371n26 Lewis, Meriwether, 7, 125 Leyba, Fernando de, 91 Leyendecker, Joseph, 280 Lightholder, William P., 292 Lindell, Peter, 190 linguistics, 14, 37, 42, 55 Lipsitz, George (author), 16

Lisa, Manuel, 129 literature, 137, 151, 181 litigation, by Native peoples against government, 228–29, 265–66, 320, 325 Little Bear, Sofia Chouteau (Osage), 249, 262–65 Loise, Paul (Osage), 88 London (England), 21, 103, 272 Long, William, 116, 118, 139 Lizette (Native woman), 71, 87, 356n36 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 181 Loring, James M., 215–17 Louis IX (king of France), 62 Louis XV (king of France), 62, 64, 70 Louisiana, 30, 68, 94, 96, 108–9, 116; mounds and artifacts, 266, 269 Louisiana Purchase, 7, 275; Treaty of 1803, 96 Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. See World’s Fair, St. Louis Loup, 92 Lucas, James H., 188, 217 M Mabila (town), 43; Battle of, 50 MacKaye, Percy, 278, 282, 295 Madison, James (Bishop), 111 Madison, James (President), 126 Madison, John F., 329 Mahoney, Thomas, 189 maize, 30, 36, 54, 77, 90 makeup. See Pageant and Masque of St. Louis Manar, Louis Joseph (Menominee), 275, 277, 285–89, 293–94, 388n85 Mandans, 30 Manifest Destiny, 103, 268 Mann, Barbara Alice (Ohio Bear Clan Seneca, author), 23, 253, 313, 327 maps, 183; representations of Native peoples, 46–49 Marest, Gabriel, 58, 76 Marietta (OH), 150–51 Marquette, Jacques, 56–57 marriage, inter-­cultural/inter-­racial, 58–59. See also children, sex; slavery; slaves; women Martin, Olga, 317 Martine, Joseph K. (Navajo), 321–22

Index 433 Martingny, Jean-­Baptiste, 72 Martinko, Whitney (author), 164–65 Mascoutens, 55, 90, 95 Maskettes, 34, 217–18 massacres, 214; Sand Creek, 211, 228; Wounded Knee, 229–30, 250 Massasoit (Wampanoag), 302 Massika (Sauk), 148 mastodon, 101 Matchekwis (Ojibway), 92 Maxent, Laclède, and Company, 68 Maximilian, Prince of Wied-­Neuwied, 141–44, 147 McAdams, Clark, 301 McAnally, David Rice R., 194–95, 373n83 McClellan, Waunetta, 317 McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, 322 McGee, W. J. (William John), 268–69, 272 McGowan’s Indian School, 270 McNair, Alexander, 116 medals, 89, 91, 95–96, 132 Medieval Warm Period, 30 memento mori, 211 Menominees, 178, 275, 286–88, 323 Mercantile Library (St. Louis), 180, 222, 231 Mesoamerica, 282 Methodists, 178, 180, 194, 323. See Mound Methodist Episcopal Church Mexico, 24, 49, 140, 269; theories and links to mounds, 104, 241, 282 Meyers, Samuel L., 326 Miamis/Myaamias, 55–6, 58, 65, 94–95, 285 Mid-­American Cultural Center (St. Louis), 325 Michigameas, 55 Michigan, 55–56, 241 Michilimackinac, 92 migration, Indigenous, 37–38, 52–55, 60; of refugees, 91, 94, 124, 128–29 Miles, Nelson Appleton, 229 military: aggression, 46, 201, 211, 228; expedition, 117; skull collecting, 214; US Army Department of the Missouri, 226; cavalry, 256, US Army 7th Cavalry Regiment, 228–29, 253 militiamen, 91, 142 Miller, Henry, 148, 155

Miller, Howard (author), 233–34 Miller, Sullivan, 317 Milwaukee Public Museum, 310 Minnehaha (Dakota), 181 Minnesota, 30, 212, 266, 284 Mississaugas, 178 Mississippi River: 3, 16, 19, 32, 35, 51, 53, 57–59, 65–66, 72, 80, 85, 108, 126, 128, 183, 194, 208, 335–36; valley, 20–21, 30, 37, 55–56, 63, 79, 91, 167 Mississippians, 26, 29, 60, 334–35; terminology, 6, 20, 38; and National Historic Park, 341; map of sites, 12; towns, 22, “shatter zone,” 54, 60 Missouri: Indigenous land cessions in, 124–26, 141–42, 148, 320; settlements in, 37; statehood, 124,; territorial days, 124; and Indigenous peoples’ historic ties to, 342; See also under mounds Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis), 208, 217, 224, 230–31, 233, 235, 259, 261, 266, 285, 303, 312, 329–30, 332 Missouri Humanities, 341–42 Missourias, 13, 59, 61, 63, 66, 71–79, 89–90, 92, 176, 285, 342 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 214 modernity, 107 Monticello (house), 302 Mooney, James, 25–26 Moorehead, Warren K., 300–301 Moosmuller, Oswald, 330 Morrissey, Robert Michael (author), 66 Morton, Samuel, 213–14 Morton, Stratford Lee, 332 Mound builders: 5, 213, 312; Moundbuilders Country Club (OH), 307, 328; theories about, 104–6, 153, 157, 204, 240–41, 251, 253, 301; in Pageant and Masque, see Pageant and Masque of St. Louis Mound City, 168, 173; businesses, 3, 168, 198, 246, 374n108; nickname, 9, 16, 173–74, 183, 191, 198, 222, 232, 243–44, 280, 305, 331; states with a Mound City, 11 Mound Methodist Episcopal Church, 168, 198 Mound Pavilion, 149, 168–71, 185

434 Index mounds: absence in histories, 8; Big Mound, 81, 115, 121, 151, 155, 161, 186, 192–93, 195, 232–34, 306; burial on Big Mound, 157, 168–69, 171, 203, 230; Cemetery Mound (IL), 238; distribution (map), 252; Falling Garden (St. Louis), 32–33, 110, 112–13, 121, 155, 168; construction and labor, 19–20, 24–26, 28; Etowah (GA), 11; Flint Ridge (OH), 152; Grave Creek Mound (WV), 100; in Forest Park (St. Louis), 259–62; Little Mound (St. Louis), 187, 190–91; Miamisburg Mound (OH), 94; Monks Mound (IL), 25, 35, 43, 109, 241, 299, 300; numbers of in Missouri, 11; Newark Earthworks (OH), 307; at Parkin Archaeological State Park (AR), 51; sepulchral, 19, 33–34; Serpent Mound (OH), 22; St. Louis mound group, 32–32, 338; Sugarloaf, 15, 32, 299, 305, 331–36, 341, 344; types of, 19, 25. See also Big Mound, Circleville, Sugarloaf Moundville Archaeological Park (AL), 42–43 mourning, 101 Mucha, Alphonse, 266–68 Mucher, Christen (author), 7 Mullanphy, John, 116 Murray, Charles Augustus, 154 Muscogee, 43, 266 museums. See collecting; Clark, William, and “Indian Museum”; individual museums Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), 214, 329 myths, and misrepresentations of Native peoples, 255, 266–68, 291 N NAGPRA, 13, 327–31, 334–35, 337 naming practices, 168, 177; criticism of, 236 Natchez (village), 43 nation. See history, and nation-­building narratives Native Americans. See Indian; informants, Native; knowledge, Indigenous; individual tribes; mound builders; mounds; “Vanishing Indian” Native American Alliance of Ohio, 328 nativisits, 176 naturalists, 111, 115, 216, 223

nature, 257; and whites’ perceptions of Native peoples’ connections to, 107, 146, 149, 209, 283, 309 Navajos, 269, 321–23 Neopope (Sac/Sauk), 144–45 Nephites, 105 Nevitt, Garland, 285, 315 New Red Order, 335–37 New Orleans, 68–69, 70, 72, 89, 91, 95–96 Newark Earthworks (OH), 307 Newspapers, coverage of mounds, 117, 121, 220, 239–40, 253; coverage of Indigenous peoples/US-­Indian Wars, 225, 229–30, 244, 249, 256 Ney, Eugène, 132 Neyon de Villers, Pierre-­Joseph, 70 Nichenmanee (Walking Rain, Osage), 124 Nicollet, Joseph Nicolas, 165 “Noble Savage,” 135 North American Indian Memorial Park (OH), 152 North Missouri Railroad, 197, 199–200, 205–6, 208, 222 Nostalgia, 163, 166, 192, 247, 304 novels, 135 O Oakland (CA), 321 O’Brien, Jean (White Earth Band, Ojibwe, author), 13, 106, 198, 302 O’Brien, Michael (author), 218 Octagon Earthworks (OH), 307, 328 O’Fallon, John, 158, 244 O’Jibway, Beatrice, 317 Ogaxapa, 53 Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, 212 Ohio Country, 65 Ohio Historical Society, 327–28 Ohio River Valley, 20, 93 Ojibwa/Ojibwe, 65, 176, 178 Oklahoma (state), 30, 42, 58, 264, 266, 270, 298, 317–19, 321, 344 Oklahoma Territory, 266 O’Loughlin, Shannon (Choctaw), 328–29 Omahas, 37, 53, 176, 259, 358n56 Oneidas, 323 Onondagas, 52

Index 435 Osages, 6, 13, 37, 53, 66, 94–95, 97, 124–26, 139, 148, 210, 224, 228, 264–66, 298–99, 301, 315, 335–36, 342–43; Big Osages, 61, 71, 73, 77, 90, 92; in World’s Fair, 266; Little Osages, 90, 92, 95, 3578n56, 359n76; oil wealth of, 264–65 osteopathy, 214 Ostrander, John, 185 Otoes, 92, 176 Ottawas, 55, 65, 89–90, 92, 245 Ozarks, 303, 308 P Pacahas, 50–51 Pacific Railroad, 199–200 Paducas, 87 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, 275–83, 285–87, 289, 291, 293–95, 297–98, 302, 387n39; , 302, 315; IORM in, 275, 289–92; makeup, 275, 291; “Native-­Born Week,” 286–87; representation of Mound Builders in, 280–83; roles of Blacks, 278; roles of Native peoples, 278, 283, 288; whites in, 281, 289; Blackfeet, 294 pageants, 276–78, 285, 288, 290, 297 palisades, 20, 28, 36–37, 41, 43, 51, 111 Panis, 358n56 panoramas, 181–83 Papin, Sylvester V., 196, 374n95 Papin, and Theophile, 196, 374n95 Parker, Arthur C. (Seneca), 306–7 Parker, Ely S./Hasanoanda (Seneca), 226–27 Parker, George Turner, 312 Parker, Quanah (Comanche), 270 Parkin Archaeological State Park (AR), 42, 51 parks/public squares, 42, 177, 194–95; need for 158–59, 174–75, 187–89, 232, 300–301, 308 Parthenon (Greece), 103, 341 paternalism, 128, 132 patriotism, 180–81, 298, 301 Pavilion. See Mound Pavilion Pauketat, Timothy R. (author), 20, 24, 28, 38 Pawhuska/Payouska/Cheveux Blancs (Osage), 95–97, 124 Pawhuska (Indian Territory/OK), 264, 344 Pawnees, 87, 90, 176–77, 356n35

Peabody Museum (Harvard University), 217, 224, 261, 272, 329–30, 390n25, 395n35 Peale, Charles Willson, 101, 130, 337 Peale, Titian Ramsay, 115, 117–18, 139; mound map of, 119; 348n43 Peale’s Museum, 101, 130 Pekitanoui (river), 56–57, 76 Peoria (IL), mound in, 307–8 Peorias, 55, 57, 84, 89–90, 342; village of, 81 Person, Sharon (author), 69, 72, 381n89 Peru, 49, 239, 241 Peters, Ed, 317 Peters, Ed/Negonegesh (Chippewa), 319 Peters, Tocoa Baker, 317 Peterson, Charles, 261 petroglyphs, 23, Petun, 55, philanthropy, 137 Phul, Anna Maria von, 113–15 physicians, 182, 214, 218, 223, 239 Piankashaws, 84, 342 Piernas, Pedro, 90–91 Pinet, Pierre-­François, 58 Pizarro, Francisco, 49 “Playing Indian,” 14, 276, 289, 292; at Boston Tea Party, 180–81, 289; scouting, 14; in Pageant and Masque, 289–90; in Hollywood, 319 police, 6, 217, 219, 257, 294 Pomarede, Leon D., 183 Pompeii, 173 Poncas, 37, 53 Pond. See Chouteau’s Pond Pontiac/Obwandiyag (Ottawa), 65, 244–45, 381n89 Pontiac’s Rebellion/War, 65, population: of ancient Cahokia region, 21, 28–31, 36, 54; of colonial St. Louis, 85–87, 88, 90, 92, 96; of Coosa chiefdom, 50; decline, 6, 42, 53; dispersal, 26, 36–39, 53–55, 57; of nineteenth-­century St. Louis, 154, 173, 175, 231; of twentieth-­century St. Louis, 278, 321, 325; 1890 Census, 250, 258; 1910 Census, 285 potatoes, 309 Potawatomis, 55, 65, 71, 139; leaders, Chief Junaw-­che-­Wome/Stream of the Rock, 138

436 Index Potter, W. B., 329 pottery, 43, 104, 123, 140–41, 155, 204, 223, 240, 259, 375n2 poverty, 176, 250, 324–25 Prairie Peninsula, 55 Pratt, Richard Henry, 284 presents (gift-­giving): 68, 73, 88–89, 94, 117, 131; alcohol, 359n76 preservation: 301, 307–8, 310, 332–33, and Cahokia mounds, 295, 298, 300; and Native preservationists, 9, 299, 315, 331, 334, 336, 341; failure of efforts, 175, 191, 194; lack of, 112, 158–60, 168 Priest, Josiah, 105–6 Primm, Wilson, 165–66 protests, and Indigenous peoples, 83–84, 93, 177–79, 315–16, 324–28 protohistory, 52 Pueblo, 38 Puvungna (CA), 13 pyramids, 3, 20, 24–25, 28, 32, 37, 100, 111–12, 192, 220, 272, 282, 341 Q Quapaws, 37, 53 quarries, 29, 332, 335 Quebec, 56 R race. See moundbuilders, theories; Pageant and Masque of St. Louis; racism; settler colonialism; “Vanishing Indian” racism, 17, 100, 102–3, 112, 128, 201, 209–10, 213, 215, 219, 226, 253, 264, 283, 287–88; and social evolutionary theories, 265, 268; commodity, 271; and urban relocation, 322–24 railroads, 3–4, 175, 200, 205–6, 209–10, 212, 235, 246–47, 294, 299–300, 305; transcontinental, 199, 210, 221–22 Rau, Charles, 330 real estate, auctions, 198; auctioneers Sylvester V. and Theophile Papin, 196, 374n95 Reardon, Patrick, 206

Reavis, Logan U., 231–32, 236 reburial, 327, 329 Rector, Elias, 116, 120 Rector, Thomas, 121 Red Horn, 43–45 Red Power Movement, 316, 235 Reed, Eudora, 321, 323 Reese, William, 257 religion, 56–59 relocation: of Indigenous peoples, 38, 55, 58, 72, 76, 90, 94, 148, 210; urban, 316, 321–24; and urban poverty, 326 remains. See human remains rematriation/repatriation, 224, 327–31, 334–35, 337 removal, 9–10, 15–16, 64, 94, 124, 126, 128, 135, 137, 148, 177, 209–11, 224, 227, 300, 307, 315; Indian Removal Act, 137. See also American expansion reservations, 210, 226–29, 250, 298, 315, 321–24, 326 reservoirs, on mounds, 152–54, 161, 186–87, 190, 197, 231 resistance, 66, 146, 210, 226, 269, 315 restaurant. See Mound Pavilion Richards, Thomas Tillot, 216–17 Richey, Andrew, 152 Richter, Daniel (author), 49 Rigauche, Marie, 293–94 Rindisbacher, Peter, 135, 141 rituals, 37, at mound centers, 21, 28–29, 33; of IORM, 181, 289; in pageants, 291 Ríu, Francisco, 89 riverfront, 15, 199–200, 230, 298, 333 Roberts, James (Creek), 318 Romanticism, 107, 160, 191 Rome, 100, 193, 232 Rouensa, Chief, 58 Round, Phillip H. (author), 45 Peyton, John Rowzée, 103–4 Roy, André, 87–88 S sachems, members of IORM playing, 181, 292

Index 437 sacrilege, 237, 272 Sacs/Sauks, 55, 89, 126, 136, 141–44, 147–48, 215, 284, 319–20, 342 Saint Louis Science Center, 223–24 Salé, Jean, 87 sand, 25, 204–5 Sand Creek Massacre, 211, 228 Santa Fe Trail, 276 Sarchet, C. M. 262, 264–65 Sauks/Sacs, 55, 126, 136, 141–142, 147–148, 320, 323 Say, Thomas, 115, 118, 139 Scharf, J. Thomas, 243–44 scholars, and discounting Indigenous knowledge, 25-­26, 38, 46, 49, 55–56, 58, 85, 134, 253, 301, 313 schoolboys. See children Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 84–85, 132, 204 science, 219–24, 237, 239–40, 268, 272, 335 Scott, Dred, 176; Dred Scott case, 200 Scott, Harriet, 176 Scott, James (author), 36 Scouts, Boy, 291, 309, 311; Camp Fire, 311 serpent, 118; effigy, 22; figurehead, 117 Serpent Mound (OH), 22 settlements, US, built on Indigenous sites, 46, 79-­80, 82, 94, 106, 111, 116, 150, 152, 176–78. See also settler colonialism, settlers settler colonialism, 107–8, 330; “settler republic,” 226 settlers, white, 99, 102, 118, 127–128, 210– 11, 226–29, 280–83, 126–28, 136–37, 142, 166, 176–77, 210–11, 227–29, 250, 276, 315, 343 Seven Years War. See French and Indian War sex/sexuality: interracial sex, 353n19; with enslaved women, 71. See also Chouteau, Auguste; Chouteau, Pierre; St. Ange de Bellerive, Louis Shaw, Henry, 237 Shawnees, 22–23, 57, 66, 71, 92, 94, 100, 178, 264, 342 shells, in trade, 29; and funerary goods, 34, 104, 203, 213, 216, 218–19, 231

Shepard, Elihu H., 230–31 Shirreff, Patrick, 139 sinkholes, 35, 151 Sioux, 44, 90–91, 178, 285, 319, 321–22, 325, 342, 356n37; wars, 228; Dhegiha, 53; Angèlique, 87 Sitting Bull (Lakota), 258 skulls, 34; collecting, 102, 118, 201, 203, 213–16, 218–19, 221, 238–39 slavery: of Africans, 85–86; of Native peoples, 54, 86, 356n37, 357n38; prohibition of slave trade, 85–86 smallpox, 96 Smith, Joseph, 104, and Book of Mormon, 103–4 Smith, Luther Ely, 293–94 Smith, Spencer, 215–16, 221–22, 244 Smithsonian, 25, 118–19, 204, 224, 297, 329; Bureau of Ethnology, 25, 251, 305, 310; “Report on the mound explorations” (1894), 251–53, 276 Snyder, J. F. (John Francis), 236–38 Society of American Indians, 306–7 soldiers, 71, 79, 201, 211, 214, 228–30, 256, 294, 315 Soulard, Antoine, 197 Southack, F. W., 232, 379n32 South Dakota, 30 souvenirs, 269, 272, 277 sovereignty, 16, 65, 91, 99, 210, 226 Spain, colonial claims and invasions, 46, 49–51, 57, 64, 283; and colonial administration, 89–96, 197; and fur trade, 59, 132; and slave trade, 86 Spaniards, and intermarriage, 87 Spiro Mounds (OK), 42 sports. See baseball, basketball, football, track Springfield and Illinois Southeastern Railroad, 235 Squier, Ephraim George, 25, 204 St. Ange de Bellerive, Louis St. Ange, 71–72, 77, 245, 381n39; family life and interracial sex, 71 , 87, 356n36 St. Clair, Martha, 317

438 Index St. Louis: anniversary of founding celebration (1847), 165–66; Battle of (1780), 91–92; Centennial, see Centennial Week (1909); Centennial Exposition and State Fair (1921), 297; founding, 61–63; Pageant and Masque of, see Pageant and Masque of St. Louis St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, 199–200 St. Louis College/University, 230, 276, 316 St. Louis Municipal Outdoor Theatre (Muny), 276 St. Louis Public Museum, 261 St. Maxent, Gilbert, Antoine de, 68 stadium, 315, 336 Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, 313, 337, 339–40 steamboats, 148, 173, 175, 199; Warrior, 144; Western Engineer, 117; White Cloud, 172 Ste. Genevieve, 69, 92 Steele, Eliza, 157, 160 Stevens, Thomas Wood, 290 Still, Andrew T., 214 Stirling, Matthew Williams, 305, 310–11 Stoddard, Amos, 108 Stonehenge (England), 28 streets, 149; grading, 151, 155, 161, 169, 186, 189, 204–5 Stuart, James, 139–140 students, 15, 32, 277, 299, 305, 311, 315–18, 331–36, 341, 344, 48–49. See also boarding schools, Centennial Week, World’s Fair model Indian School; boarding schools; in Centennial Week, 277; in World’s Fair model Indian School, 270 Sugarloaf (mound), 15, 32, 186, 197, 299, 305, 315, 331–36, 341; fund, 335, 344 Summers, George, 319 Summers, Robert/Charging Bull (Oneida), 317 Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 176 supernovas, 23

surveys, and surveyors, 100, 117, 139, 149, 154–55, 161, 176–77, 183, 197, 216, 333, 337, 339 survivance, 44, 59 Sutton, Robert D., 208–9 Swallow, G. C. (George Clinton), 231–32 Switzler, W. F. (William Franklin), 218, 241–43 T Tahchawwickah, Allen 323 Tamaroas, 55, 81 Tanner, Virginia, 290–91 Tascalusa, 50 Tenochtitlan, 3, 49 Teotihuacan, 3 termination, 320, 324–25 textbooks. See education theories: of archaeologists, 27, 33; of “lost race,” 253; of Noah Webster, 82–83; regarding mounds and moundbuilders, 102–5, 111, 133–34, 155, 203, 213, 215–16, 239, 301; social evolutionary, 265; of “Vanishing Indian,” 226 Thomas, Cyrus, 240, 251–53 Thoreau, Henry David, 177, 191 Thorne, Tanis C. (author), 88 Thorpe, Jim (Sac/Sauk and Fox), 284, 319–20 Throop, George R., 309, 311 Thrush, Coll (author), 13, 209 tomatoes, 309 tombs. See cemeteries Tongkeamah, Clifton (Kiowa), 321–22, 393n33 Tongva, 13 tourists, 123–24, 139–42, 148, 154–55, 160, 182, 256, 308; and tourist attractions, 129, 131–32, 135–37 track and field, 318–19 trade, with Europeans, 51–52; slave trade, 54; fur trade, 59, 63–64, 66, 74, 79, 89, 129, 138, 358n56; Maxent, Laclède, and Company, 68; steamboat, 175. See also Cahokia Trappist, monks, 25

Index 439 treaties: 176, 226–27, 229, 320, 379n13; negotiated by Clark, 124–27; Trail of Broken Treaties, 325 Treaty of Fontainebleau, 64 Treaty of Fort Clark/Osage Treaty, 124 Treaty of Paris, 64 Treaty of San Ildefonso, 96 Treaty of St. Louis, 141 Trudeau, Zenon, 95, 359n76 tuberculosis, 329 tumuli, 101, 118, 139, 155, 198 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 250–51, 253, 257 typhoid, 329 U Underwood, Brenda (Comanche-­Cherokee), 325–26 UNESCO, 3, 340–41 US Army. See military US Supreme Court: Dred Scott Case, 200; Sioux, 228–29; Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 320 V “Vacant Quarter,” 37 vandalism, 5-­6, 183, 194, 237, 240, 299, 313, 340; Native protests of, 120 “Vanishing Indian,” 8, 106–7, 124, 135–38, 141, 160, 180, 183, 208–9, 213, 225–26, 230, 266–68, 306, 315 vermilion, 64, 75, 138, 143 veterans, Indigenous, 317-­18, 321–22, 394n33. See also Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge Villalpando, Maria Rosa, 87 Vincennes (IL), 59, 92, 355–56n16 violence, 6, 54, 77, 83, 88, 91, 94–95, 129, 176, 210, 224, 226, 302 Virginia, 83; militiamen, 92; mounds in, 101 Vizenor, Gerald (author), 59 W Wabash, 83 Wabasha (Dakota), 92 Walker, Clifford (Omaha), 318

wampum, 144, 256 Warrior (steamboat), 144 warriors, Indigenous, 29, 77, 90, 138, 144–45, 226, 256; mythical, 43–44; at World’s Fair, 270 Washington, George, 83, 100 Washington University (St. Louis), 15, 309, 316, 325, 333, 342 waterworks, 152–54, 367n15 Wattingham, William, 205 wealth, Spanish search for, 50; through trade, 63; Osage, 262 weapons, 286; European, 54; Indigenous, 29, 132, 229; Black, 258 Weber, Charles C., 303, 390n27 Weber, Philip C., 303, 390n27 Webster, Noah, 82–83 Weigers, Robert P., 333 Weil, Andrew, 334 Welsh, as moundbuilders, 104, 111 West Virginia, mounds in, 100 Western Engineer (steamboat), 117 Wetmore, Alphonso, 153, 161 Wharfs, 164, 197, 200, 367n9 Whelpley, collection, 224 Whelpley, Henry Milton, 292 White Cloud (steamboat), 172 White, Richard (author), 257–58 whites. See IORM, Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, “Playing Indian,” settlers, “Vanishing Indian” Wild, John Casper, 157-­59, 164 Wild West shows, 228, 244, 249; Native participants in, 255–58 wilderness, ideas of, 107, 259 Wilhelm, Paul, duke of Württemberg, 132, 138–40 Willis, Art, 319 Wilson, Eugene, 285 Wiltshire (England), 28 Winnebagos, 323 Wisconsin; excavations in, 30, 217; mounds in 22, 241; 55–56; Indigenous refugees in, 55; land cessions, 141 Wislizenus, Friedrich Adolph, 223

440 Index women. See Colonial Dames, marriage, sex/ sexuality, slavery Woodland, designation, 22, 37, 335 woodlands, 54, 60 World’s Fair, Chicago (1893)/World’s Columbia Exposition, 244, 250, 261, 309 World’s Fair, St. Louis (1904): 7, 62–63, 249, 258–59, 266, 275, 279; anthropology exhibition, 268–70; Indian school, 269–70

World War II, 317–18 Wounded Knee: massacre, 229–30, 250; occupation, 325 Wrench, Jesse E., 333 Y Yucatan Peninsula, 239 Z Zanesville (OH), 117 Zunis, 323