Listener Call 2

BRIAN BALOGH: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED AYERS: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER ONUF: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today we’re following the twists and turns of the Mississippi River throughout American history. And we’re fielding a few calls from our listeners.

BRIAN BALOGH: Our next call has a little less to do with the river itself, and more to do with the history that happened along its shores. It’s from Dave, a listener in Waukegan, Illinois.

DAVE: Well, I know that you guys’ expertise is in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. But in 1250 AD, the city of Cahokia, in southern Illinois, actually had a larger population than London or Paris at that time. It was a major urban center for over 700 years, had a population of 20,000 or maybe more. And it’s located near modern day Saint Louis.

But most people in the US today, I think, don’t even know it exists. And what I wanted to ask you about– number one, why don’t more people know about this site and this Mississippian civilization that existed? And how have people interpreted these sites over the years?

PETER ONUF: Why didn’t people know about it and talk about it in our centuries. That’s why Dave is trying to put it to us. The mounds all over the Mississippi, Ohio River valleys were well-known. But they didn’t fit in to Anglo-Americans’ original scheme of historical development. They couldn’t really explain them. They were what we call in the biz anomalies.

The conventional view of looking at native America during the period of encounter was that they were encountering a pre-civilized natural condition of man. That ruled out any advanced civilization. So there was an inability to grasp these native civilizations.

The first mounds that were uncovered were in Marietta, Ohio. When Thomas Jefferson heard about these, he said, nah, they don’t exist. That’s just not real. There’s not a real civilization there.

The idea that native peoples who were supposed to be savage could be civilized just didn’t make sense to early ethnographers. Now by the early 19th century, it was well-known that there had been advanced civilizations in the Midwest. But there still was a difficulty in explaining where they came from.

DAVE: From what I understand, many of these people in the 19th century attributed these sites to just about anybody except for Native Americans– to Egyptians or to lost tribes of Israelites.

BRIAN BALOGH: They would have been very lost.

ED AYERS: Well, that’s one of the things I was getting ready to talk about, is that in the absence of actual knowledge, Americans have populated the rest of the continent with all kinds of possible histories. The Mormons early on believed that the Garden of Eden had been in Missouri.

It was a widely disseminated idea that something had happened here before the Europeans arrived. But they did not know, because there was nobody to even know the name. And Cahokia is not the original name. We don’t know what it was.

There seems to have been a break in the memory. And this probably as a result of disease. But we don’t know, it’s my understanding, about what might have happened to the people who built these remarkable series of mounds in Cahokia. Or we don’t really know what happened to the Anasazi– and that’s not even their real name either– in the Southwest. So what should we do to establish a narrative of connection to these folks?

DAVE: Well, I think right now there’s a lot of good research going on. I’m actually planning to go down to Cahokia to participate in the excavation as a volunteer. I’m not an archaeologist. I’m actually an engineer. But I figure I can dig as well as anybody else and follow directions as well as anybody else. So I’m hoping to help out.

ED AYERS: So Dave, what’s leading you to be willing to invest your time and energy, and I’m assuming sweat, this summer in working on this project.

PETER ONUF: Very much, yeah.

DAVE: Well, it it’s kind of amazing, growing up in Illinois and having this World Heritage site right here our state, and more so being a metallurgist. That’s my field. Cahokia is one of the few places in the Americas that had an advanced metalworking center. The people in Cahokia made a lot of things out of copper. And so there’s been a lot of recent research on the copper-working center in Cahokia. And so that’s something I’m very interested in.

PETER ONUF: So Dave, you’re thinking that the license plate should be changed in Illinois? Enough of this Land of Lincoln business– Land of Cahokia?

DAVE: Oh, no. I’m a big fan of Land of Lincoln.

BRIAN BALOGH: Well, maybe you can put Cahokia on the front license plate, Dave.

DAVE: Yeah.

PETER ONUF: All right. Well, we’re glad that you have such enthusiasm for our 19th century. We’re a lot more comfortable with that. So thanks for reminding us that something happened before us. And thanks for calling.

BRIAN BALOGH: Thank you, Dave. Happy digging.

DAVE: Yeah, thanks.