Yesterday, Nate and I traveled to the University of Madison, where American Indian burial and effigy mounds are tucked in between residence halls and along park trails.
These mounds, most of which are just a foot or two above grounds, are all over Wisconsin, and have been used for burials, to hold buildings, to guard against evil spirits, and for many other purposes. Some are more than 2,500 years old.
Not much is known about many of the mounds, and hundreds, if not thousands, of them have been bulldozed by settlers. But now, it’s against state law to disturb them, even if they are on your property.
Here’s one by the UW dorms:
And here is one on Picnic Point, a peninsula that juts out into Mendota Lake:
You probably can’t see the signs because the pictures are so small, but it doesn’t matter. They don’t really say very much, other than not to walk on the mounds. It doesn’t say who built them, why they were built, or anything in particular.
I think that’s a bit sad. It’s great that they are being preserved, but if no one knows exactly why, then not as much is gained as should be. The mounds become a part of the scenery, a nice thing to color a morning stroll, rather than an expression of faith and the world view of an ancient people.
So today, we set out to see the Man Mound, a larger mound about an hour north of Madison, and a rare one at that. In the shape of a man with antlers, horns, or some other protrusions on his head, the Man Mound is one of the first monuments to be preserved, almost exactly 100 years ago in August, 1908. In fact, the Ho-Chunk tribe, known for its lucrative casinos, recently celebrated “Man Mound Day,” celebrating the history of these mounds, which their ancestors may have built, and American Indian culture in the area.
Here’s a picture of the Man Mound in the early 1900s, outlined with flour from the Sauk County’s website:
The site quotes an early white settler as saying, “We were rather irked by the large number of Indian mounds we had to plow down. There must have been at least 25 on our land….Some were shaped like animals and some like birds, and all were from three to five feet high…I suppose we should not have destroyed them. But they were then regarded merely as obstacles to cultivation, and everybody plowed them down.”
This mound is special because it’s quite rare to find one in humanoid form. The builders of mounds like these began as early as 300 A.D., continuing until around 1400 A.D., when they either abandoned the practice or were assimilated into other American Indian cultures.
Unfortunately, this mound, even though it is considered to be so special and the center of the movement for mound preservation, was partially destroyed due to road construction (of course).
But we never got to see the mound. The Sauk County website says that the mound is to the northwest of Baraboo. It’s not. It’s northeast of Baraboo. By the time we realized we were in wrong spot, we had to turn back to drive my friend Thea to work. Thanks, Sauk County.
But I did get some cute photos of Thea. Here she is driving, frustrated at having had to drive all the way out there for nothing:
And here she is, at Peck’s Farm, a cute roadside stand with a mini-zoo and a corn maze. She was especially enamored with a boisterous pot-bellied pig:
