Road Trip Through History: Effigy Mounds National Monument
Marching Bears Mounds
When My Own True Love and I reached the end of our Great River Road trip last October, we stopped just short of Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa.
As far as I was concerned it was both frustrating to walk away from it and something to look forward to. I’ve been interested in the mound-building cultures of the Americas ever since I was a nerdy little girl with dreams of being an archaeologist, and I’ve been dragging other people to mound-related sites ever since. Lucky for me, My Own True Love is both a good sport and endlessly curious.
We went to the Effigy Mounds site on a damp morning, which meant the site trails were treacherous for those of us who had not thought to pack hiking boots in addition to rain boots. (i.e. both of us.) That means we didn’t get a good look at the mounds themselves, but the site’s interpretive center was fabulous, as they so often are.* They told the story of the site in several different ways: within the larger context of mound-building cultures, within the context of Native American peoples in the area (including their interactions with Europeans), and as part of the story of the archaeology of the Upper Mississippi region. They also did a spectacular comparison of different types of tools and pottery horizontally across a vertical timeline that ran from the Paleolithic cultures (ca 10,000 BCE) through the Oneota people ( ca. 1300-1650 CE)
Here are the highlights:
- The basics: We know of three major mound-building cultures that flourished at different times along the Mississippi River: the Hopewell culture, which flourished around 300 BCE, the Mississippian culture, centered on Cahokia, which flourished between 800 and 1400 CE, and the Effigy mound builders, who flourished between 700 and 1300 CE.**
- Unlike the mounds produced by the Mississippian and Hopewell cultures, the effigy mound builders built animal-shaped mounds that are often described as birds and bears.***
- Most of the effigy mounds builders lived in the Driftless Area: a geological concept that became a recurring theme of the trip, and possibly the most important thing we learned. (After all, geology is history on the grand scale, right?) Here’s the short version: In geology, the word “drift” means the rocks and sediment left behind by glaciers. Because most glaciers missed the triangular area made up of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, and the extreme northwestern corner of Illinois, they left no drift behind. They also didn’t press the area flat the way they did other portions of the American Midwest, creating a region that feels mighty comfortable for a transplanted Ozarker like myself.
In short, a stop worth making. Though I wish I’d had my boots.
*Can we get a round of applause here for the National Park Service?
**It is worth pointing out that both the mound-building cultures and the great cultures of Latin America are often described as “ancient cultures”. If you look at the dates, this is only true of the Hopewell culture. While these cultures were prehistoric in the sense of not having written histories, the Mississippian and effigy-mound cultures were both contemporary with the European medieval period. The Aztecs and the Incas were contemporaneous with Early Modern Europe. Rant over.
*** In the site’s introductory film, a National Park Service archaeologist carefully pointed out “As an archaeologist I cannot say this a a bear.” I honor the academic rigor behind his caution. But they sure look like bears to me. And exhibits in the center pointed out that bears, with their annual death and rebirth in the form of hibernation, had religious significance for later Native peoples of the region. I chose to believe in bears.
Road Trip Through History: The Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum
On the first day of our Great River Road adventure (1), My Own True Love and I veered about 45 miles off the Great River Road so I could sneak in a bit of a research for the book proposal I’m working on at the Vesterheim Norwegian American Museum and Heritage Center in Decorah, Iowa.(2) Sandy was a willing co-conspirator because 1)it would be a shame to have to come back if I sell the book and 2)it looked like a pretty fabulous museum.
And let me tell you, it IS a pretty fabulous museum.
The museum explores the story of Norwegian immigration to the United States, putting it in the context of nineteenth century Norwegian culture and the broader experience of nineteenth century immigration to America. It also celebrates Norwegian folk art, then and now. In fact, if you’re in Decorah for a longer period, you can sign up for classes in rosemaling, traditional embroidery techniques (3), folk music, flatbread baking (4), etc, etc, etc.
Kubbestol–Traditional Norwegian log chairs. More comfortable than they look!
The folk art exhibits are breathtakingly beautiful. Well-trained docents give tours of a campus of well-maintained historic buildings, ranging in size and complexity from a small log storage cabin (5) to a nineteenth century Lutheran church. And the exhibit on Norwegian immigration not only told me a portion of the story of immigrants to the United States that I had not heard before, but it made elements of the broader story of nineteenth century immigration to this country more vivid for me.
Here are some of the things that caught my imagination:
- The first group of Norwegians emigrants sailed from Norway on July 4(!), 1825. They were known as the “Sloopers” because their ship was a sloop that was tiny for ocean-going even by the standards of their time. Like so many early emigrants they were religious dissenters. Some of them were Quakers; (6) others followed the pietist teachings of Hans Nielsen Hauge. The official state church of Norway persecuted both groups.
- Norway was second only to Ireland in the percentage of its population it lost to emigration in the century between 1825 and 1930. Norwegians left their homes for many of the same reasons as the Irish: growing population, limited arable land (7) and the potato famine that swept Europe in 1845.
- In the mid-nineteenth century, emigrants provided their own food for the voyage and cooked it on the ship on open fires in long bins filled with sand.
- A “stove wood” house, built of pieces of wood cut to the length that would fit in a woodturning stove and held together with plaster. The walls were about one foot thick and well-insulated. Unlike log cabins, a man could build a stove wood house by himself.
I came away stunned by new awareness of just how hard it was for emigrants to leave their homes to travel to a new country. I was also stunned by the love of decoration pervasive in traditional Norwegian culture.
If you’re anywhere near Decorah, take the time for a visit.
(1)Part 3, or maybe Part 4, depending on whether you count our consolation prize four-day weekend in 2014. And you really should, because it was weird and wonderful.
(2) Yes, that’s a hint. But it won’t help you much.
(3) Personally, I’m tempted by the hardanger classes. (Autocorrect changed this to harbinger classes. Perhaps a good choice for Halloween weekend. Beware, beware….)
(4) Or Norwegian Christmas cookies
(5)The answer to the question of where people stored things in a one-room cabin.
(6) Norwegian Quakers, you ask? I did, too. According to our docent, Denmark/Norway fought on the French side in the Napoleonic Wars. (Brief pause while I check this.) Some Norwegian prisoners of war were taken to England, where Quakers and Methodists visited them in prison and managed to convert a number of them from the state-sponsored Lutheran church.
(7) In the case of Norway, the limits were imposed by the country’s geography. In the case of Ireland, they were artificially created by British policies.
Travel Tip:
The Magpie Cafe and Coffeehouse is a wonderful lunch spot. Good coffee and imaginative sandwiches. I can’t speak for the quality of the pastries. But I’ve regretted not getting the cardamom cinnamon roll. It looked fabulous.
On the Road Again
This is not a blog post, it’s a preview of coming attractions.
It took us five hours to reach the trip’s first historical marker.
My Own True Love and I are back on the Great River Road. Today we reached the banks of the Mississippi and are ready to take up where we left off. While part of the charm of our adventures on the Great River Road is discovering the unexpected, here are some stories I think you’ll be seeing:
- Norwegian immigration into the upper Midwest
- The geology of the Driftless area (a small patch of Iowa and Wisconsin that was not touched by the glaciers)
- Laura Ingalls Wilder
I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, don’t touch that dial.
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Last week, the universe slapped me up the side of the head twice about the fact that I’m not very good at promoting my newsletter. For those of you who don’t know, in addition to writing posts about history tidbits, book reviews and road trips twice a week here on the Margins, I also write a newsletter. It comes out twice a month and the content is completely different than what I post here. Instead of telling stories from history, I explore the who, what, when, and how of writing history. Here’s a link to the most recent issue, with a place to subscribe if you’d like to see how the sausage is made: https://mailchi.mp/ec2b22bb5998/thinking-about-creativity-again-still?e=141f8f248e