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| For the next
12,000 years their descendants fished, hunted, camped, buried their
dead and ultimately farmed along its banks. |
By Robert Boszhardt
The author is Regional Archaeologist at the Mississippi
Valley Archaeology Center (MVAC), University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.
The first people to come upon the Mississippi River may very well have
looked into a raging gorge filled with torrential glacial meltwaters.
Across the thundering water, they would have seen the land we now call
Wisconsin.
To get here, they needed only wait till winter, when the floods annually
subsided and the much lower river ultimately froze over. For the next
12,000 years their descendants fished, hunted, camped, buried their
dead and ultimately farmed along its banks. They were all Native Americans,
and their story is one of successful adaptation to an ever-changing
world.
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| Archaeological excavations at this island site have uncovered a 2,000-year-old shell layer that was the surface of the ground during the period when Native Americans lived here. Photograph courtesy of James Theler, Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. |
The first people, arriving at the end of the Ice Age, were initially
nomadic colonists. There is no question that they sometimes hunted the
contemporary game that included woolly mammoths and mastodons, for the
bones of these animals have been found throughout western Wisconsin,
as have the distinctive fluted spear points that archaeologists attribute
to the Paleoindian culture. But Paleoindians almost certainly hunted
smaller game and collected plants for food, clothing and shelter. One
other thing is certain: Once they arrived in Wisconsin, they quickly
learned where critical resources such as flint-like stone for making
tools existed, and they returned to these places year after year.
By 10,000 years ago, the glaciers had receded, and many species of
large mammals—including mammoths and mastodons, but also early forms
of horses, camels, saber tooth cats and giant, 400-pound beavers—had become extinct. The world had changed, and people had to adapt.
Over the next several thousand years, the climate became drier, and
prairies expanded eastward. The principal game became deer and elk,
and these were hunted with spears tipped with a variety of stone points.
During this Archaic period, cultures developed seasonal rounds in which
they would gather along the river in the summer, dividing into family
size groups in the fall, when they would seek shelter in the deep valleys.
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| This 2,000-year-old reconstructed pot was excavated
from an eroding island along the banks of the Mississippi River.
Photo credit: Robert Boszhardt, Mississippi Valley Archaeology. |
Territories began to be recognized and ultimately marked and defended.
By the end of the Archaic period, about 3,000 years ago, cemeteries
were established that reinforced territorial boundaries. At the same
time, inter-regional trade was established, beginning a period in which
exotic materials were exchanged across eastern North America, with the
Mississippi River serving as a natural highway for this commerce.
Around 2,500 years ago, there was a revolution in Native American life
ways that archaeologists call Woodland along the Upper Mississippi.
One Woodland innovation was the technological adoption of pottery. Because
earthen pots are difficult to make and fragile, they imply less movement
among the people that made them. In addition, Woodland camps included
the first small gardens, a practice that supplements natural foods but
also ties one to the land. Finally, within a short period, cemeteries
began to be marked with earthen mounds, accentuating territorial claims.
Still, for several hundred years the far-reaching trade network persisted,
with many exotic objects being placed with the dead in round mounds.
Along the Upper Mississippi, these materials included large knives chipped
from flint that originated in the Rocky Mountains, axes and ornaments
made of pure copper from Lake Superior and special pots imported from
Illinois. By this time, the islands in the Mississippi floodplain were
active summer campsites, and near Prairie du Chien tens of thousands
of clams were collected from the river.
For unexplained reasons, the trade system collapsed around A.D. 400,
but Woodland people continued to thrive along the Upper Mississippi
River. They continued to follow the traditional seasonal round, gathering
and fishing along the Mississippi in the summer and hunting deer during
the fall-winter in the interior. Soon thereafter, the bow and arrow
was introduced and once adopted became the weapon of choice for hunting
and warfare.
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| 1,800-year-old earthen mounds on a bench overlooking
the Mississippi River. Photograph courtesy of Robert Boszhardt,
Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. |
By around A.D. 800, Woodland cultures across southern Wisconsin began
to construct mounds in the shapes of animals such as birds and mammals.
By A.D. 1000, groups of these effigy mounds are located well into tributary
valleys, and because it is nearly impossible to construct mounds in
the winter, these indicate that some people were living away from the
Mississippi River all year long. Conversely, groups along the Mississippi
could no longer venture into the valleys for winter hunts.
Tensions rose, more mounds were constructed to emphasize territories
and corn was added to the gardens.
To the south, the major cultural center, called Cahokia, was established
near what is now St. Louis, and its influence spread up the Mississippi
River around A.D. 1050. Within 100 years, the Effigy Mound culture had
vanished, and the Upper Mississippi became home to its successors, the
Oneota. This culture lived in concentrated summer villages at places
such as La Crosse, planting large fields of corn, beans and squash that
were tilled with hoes made from the shoulder blades of buffalo.
They appear to have migrated west each winter to hunt buffalo, returning
in the late winter to subsist on food that they had stored in pits dug
into the ground. The Oneota buried their dead within their villages,
rarely constructing mounds. Consequently, modern development in places
like La Crosse frequently encounters Oneota village remains and not-uncommonly
burials.
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| Survey boat alongside eroding prehistoric shell midden site in the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Photo courtesy of Robert Boszhardt, Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. |
When the French arrived at the Mississippi River in the late 1600s and
made the first written record, the Oneota had abandoned La Crosse, moving
west into Iowa. Over the next 200 years, as European pressures brought
on increased war and disease, a variety of tribes moved through the
Upper Mississippi region.
By the early 1800s, when the American government began to lay claim,
the major occupants were the Ho-Chunk in southern Wisconsin, the Sauk
in northern Illinois, the Fox to the west in northern Iowa and the Dakota
Sioux in eastern Minnesota. In a whirlwind of history between 1820 and
1850, all of these tribes would be forced to cede vast amounts of land,
with the catalyst being the 1832 Black Hawk War, which ended in a massacre
on the banks of the Mississippi just below the town of Victory, Wisconsin.
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