Effigy Mounds National Monument

[mallorys_camera]

Jump: Cresco, IA → Monona, IA – Gordon Subdivision/Garden View: 55 miles
RIGHT out of the back of the lot where we came in… arrows to LEFT onto HWY 9 EAST
At Decorah, RIGHT onto HWY 52 EAST to Monona
Arrows to the lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

The barrows used to be everywhere. They filled the prairies, tens of thousands of them, earthworks in the shapes of bears, bison, eagles, lynxes, alligators, abstract shapes. Some were burial mounds, some of them were primitive astronomic observatories aligned to the patterns of solar and lunar sightlines. The oldest were built around 1300 BC; the most recent around 1200 AD.

Then the mound building just… stopped.

Nineteenth century farmers – staunch Lutherans or Presbyterians all – ran ploughs through them, built roads over them. A few citizen scientists – entrepreneurs with time on their hands – studied them but refused to believe they’d been built by Indians. Instead they theorized the mounds been built by stray Vikings or members of the lost tribes of Atlantis.

Only a small fraction of all the mounds that once were survive today and two hundred or so of those have been preserved at the Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa, only about 10 miles from Today’s Town so Jessi-the-Clown and I drove over this morning to check them out.

Maybe the good yeoman farmers weren’t being self-righteous. Maybe they just didn’t notice the mounds.

Because honestly if I hadn’t known that’s what they were, I wouldn’t have recognized the mounds as human artifacts. They may have been huge once but after 700 years all they look like is big grassy humps.

Park keepers have changed the terrain too, planted trees all around the surviving mounds which further obscures the landscape. Originally, the mounds were all on savannah or high plains.

Anyhoo the trip was more notable for the hike through the forest, the spectacular views of the Mississippi – now a mile and a half wide – and the cool original tin ceilings in every old building along Prairie du Chien’s main drag.