I realize that I am a bit behind the curve on this posting since it relates to Black Hawk and his ancestors, but I hope that you will find it interesting anyway.
Two years ago I had the pleasure of getting paid to hear and record a great book review on a book by Charles Mann, called 1491. The year 1492, as anyone who grew up in the U.S. well knows is the year that Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain across the Atlantic in search of an east-to-west route to Indian and/or China. Instead, he blundered into the Caribbean Sea and died convinced (or at least trying to convince others) that he had succeeded. The significance of that date is that it was considered the first contact of Europeans with American (New World) cultures. (There is some evidence that Vikings and/or Irish monks made it to Newfoundland as early as the mid-fourteenth century, but that’s another story. See The Brendan Voyage by Timothy Severne for more on that and see Farley Mowatt’s Book, The Farfarers: Before the Norse. Both are compelling reads, but neither have been accepted by the historic/archaeological communities as fact, but I digress.)
In his book, 1491, Charles Mann very thoroughly examines the historical accounts and archaeological research on just what the pre-Columbian peoples of north, central and south Americas were like. He makes three basic claims about all of these people: the populations were much greater than most historians thought; the cultures were much more advanced than we have given them credit for; and finally, that the lands on which they lived were carefully managed and even transformed by the people who lived there. Another way of stating this last claim is that most 19th century historians seem to portray the “Indians” as living in some sort of natural harmony or savage state within their environment much as buffalo, bears or wolves. Indeed, for much of the 19th century the North and South American native populations were viewed not so much as humans but as highly intelligent animals within their environments. What Mann brings to light is that from the grasslands of Argentina to the Canadian Maritimes and everywhere in between, Native Americans carefully managed the lands in which they dwelt, often built cities and grew huge amounts of food to sustain their large, often dense populations.
For the purposes of this class, I will focus on an ancient city now called The Cahokia Mounds, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri near Collinsville, Illinois. The city covered some six square miles (1554 hectares) and was, as Mann describes (p.259) “preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D.” He goes on to say that this puts it on par with London within the same time frame. In its heyday (about 850 years ago) there were 15 to 20 thousand inhabitants, the houses were arranges in rows around open plazas with agricultural fields surrounded it. The central mound is an artificial hill with four terraces that would have been the highest thing around for miles when it was populated and is still the largest man-made earthen mound in North America. There are also remains of “wood henges” or large circles of telephone-size wooden posts that aligned with important celestial events and served as calendars. The city itself appears to have been carefully engineered as evidenced by the rows of houses but also because of numerous sightlines and alignments around the city and the construction of the mounds were carefully engineered to promote stability. This was not a culture of “noble savages” in the tradition of James Fennimore Copper’s The Last of the Mohicans and while Cahokia seems to have been the first and largest, it was not the only city of its kind. Over a six hundred year period, the Mississippian Culture stretched from Minnesota to Florida. These people traded and communicated over thousands of miles developed engineering and astronomy skills, arts and agricultural sciences and rivaled the cities of Europe in population and seem to have out-shown them in terms of quality of life. The Europeans who first encountered them remarked on their fine physical appearances and muscled bodies.
Archeologists point to an earthquake and related flood in the beginning of the 13th century (266) and the environmental social and religious upheaval that followed as the leading causes of Cahokia’s eventual abandonment, but even as Cahokia began its decline, other similar (though much smaller) cities emerged along the banks of the Mississippi.
In 1539, Hernando De Soto, famed mercenary, merchant and murderer, led a private army “through what is now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, looking for gold and wrecking most everything it touched” (97). According to De Soto’s accounts, the area was “thickly set with towns.” They encountered strong resistance from numerous people all along the way and remarked in particular about the large number of towns around the present location of Memphis (98).
After De Soto himself died of a fever and his remaining soldiers limped home or died trying, no European visited the Mississippi region until 1682 when LaSalle and company canoed downriver from the Great Lakes. “LaSalle passed though an area where De Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted – the French didn’t see a village for two hundred miles” (ibid.). Mann reports that De Soto and his crew traveled with pigs argues that any number of porcine-born diseases wiped out these thriving populations, not by De Soto’s brutal raids and greedy misanthropy, but because of the live, on the hoof, food he brought with him on the expedition (ibid.).
There are many, many more stories that Mann tells that show that the seeming “first” encounters between the North Americans and Europeans were actually long and drawn-out continuations of a long, sad tail of disease, ravaged civilizations, misunderstandings of the “natural” state of things and a poor appreciation of what really happened in those earliest periods of contact.
Sources
Mann, Charles C., 1491, Alfred Kopf (publ.) New York, 2005
www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/cahokia.html
www.nps.gov/history/seac/misslate.htm
Related recommended reading:
Diamond, Jared Guns Germs, and Steel and Collapse