Trempeleau Mountain is a few miles to the south of Winona downstream on the Mississippi’s east bank. The mountain is 450 feet high, ragged with green forest or winter-grey and snow-veined depending upon the season. The big hill is so close to the river that from the Minnesota shore, the mountain looks like an island improbably rising from Mississippi itself. Several tributary rivers meander across wetlands below the bluff’s south face. Between bends in these streams, hummocks of prairie like grassy causeways extend toward the Mississippi’s main channel. Steep bluffs, some of them showing palisades of crumbling grey cliff, ring the horizon. The Mississippi, and the smaller rivers flowing through the inundated grasslands, pooling in marshes and lagoons, seem scarcely to move, but are immensely powerful in their repose, watery giants sprawled out across the land. The Indians who once lived here called the bluff “the mountain that dips its toes in the water.”
Trempeleau is old, timber houses with white walls and old wharf-side warehouses made of stacked pink-yellow limestone blocks, all above a railroad embankment that runs like a dike across a pool impounded by the right-of-way and a dam downstream. Cafes on timber docks, bridges to nowhere, jut out over the ponds and marinas leak little white boats through canals to the Mississippi’s main channel along waterways bored through tongues of wooded isles along the river. Viewed from overhead, the broad valley sits between uplands dissected into narrow, forested valleys and the river-bottoms, here three or four miles wide, are all thatched with meadows and shards of golden prairie that seem to float on the river. Old Victorian era houses are hunkered down among the trees lining the residential streets in the town. An ancient inn served travelers at the time of the Civil War and, today, the trim, white-washed building hangs over an old boat-house like a grotto opening onto the riverbank. Every alley and back yard runs up against steep hillside tangled with dense brush, poison ivy and wild parsnip tangled in sumac rising like a palisade wall over the semi-circular flats where the town is built.
Timothy Pauketat is a well-known archaeologist employed by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and, indeed, also holds the position of official State Archaeologist for the Land of Lincoln. On the 18th of November, 2021, Dr. Pauketat delivered a lecture for the Archaeological Conservancy called “The Moon’s Tears Fell on Cahokia”. I enjoy watching these lectures and, since I have visited Cahokia many times, looked forward to his speech. Pauketat is the author of a monograph on Cahokia, written in a simple popular style, and the book was a modest best-seller a few years ago. The scholar is a tall, gaunt-looking fellow with a beak nose, a cowlick of dishwater blonde hair over his glasses and the appearance of a friendly scarecrow.
Dr. Pauketat’s lecture was presented in the form of a Power Point. One of his first slides is a map showing Meso-American influence on the land that is now the United States. The map extends south to Mexico City and the Yucatan. On the northwest borders of territory delimited by a dotted line, the place-name “Chaco” is inscribed, signifying that this ceremonial center or complex of pueblos or Great House palaces or whatever it was in New Mexico was a place influenced by the high civilizations to the South. At the center of the map is Cahokia, the vast city that once occupied the flood plains a few miles to the east of what is now St. Louis. But the really interesting aspect of this map, showing the geographical boundaries of Mexican civilization in North America is to the north. A tongue of this region mapped on the slide, the land of the Caddo-speaking Mississippians who raised mound-pyramids from the Gulf of Mexico throughout today’s Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri, extends up the great river valley and ends with the words “Trempeleau”, Cahokia’s most northern outpost. It seems remarkable to me that Trempeleau, Wisconsin, five-hundred miles upriver from Cahokia, in the driftless bluff country around the Mississippi River Valley, a place in which the upper slopes of the hills are dotted with Hopewell Mounds raised two-thousand years ago, as well as Effigy Mounds outlining marching bears, turtle earthworks and birds with outstretched wings (900 to 1500 years before present) was the site of a Cahokian shrine.
Pauketat’s thesis is that the Caddo-speaking Cahokians subscribed to a moon-cult and that many of their monuments attest to these beliefs. In Meso-American pre-conquest cultures, rain is often referred to as the “tears of the moon.” When the moon appears within a concentric circle, the atmosphere is congested with water and this phenomenon is a harbinger of rain. A cultural preoccupation with rain would not seem likely in the relatively humid Midwest. But, although Pauketat doesn’t make this completely clear in his lecture (he is covering lots of ground), crops and farming require rain and an understanding of wet and dry meteorological cycles. Beginning around 900 AD, the Caddo and other similar tribes in the Mississippi basin began growing corn. Throughout the Americas, the cultivation of corn is an immediate precursor to a village-based economy. After 150 years of corn cultivation, the Indians were congregating in urban centers, most notably Cahokia, probably one of the largest cities in the world at that time, boasting over 100,000 residents, The sustenance of a large urban population is dependent upon robust crops and surpluses. And crops, of course, are water-dependant. On this basis, the Cahokians looked to the skies and the moon for guarantees that there would be sufficient rain to support their villages and cities.
Generally wet weather in the Mississippi basin occurred at a time when much of the Meso-American world was suffering drought. It was dry at Chaco Canyon -- indeed the drought lasted for several hundred years, and, probably, forced migration of the ancestral Puebloans into more moist mountainous regions in the southwest. Similarly, drought afflicted west Mexico and the Yucatan circa 1000 to 1200 AD. It was during these times that the Huastecan Indians in northwest Mexico began to construct circular shrines, little round buildings with pointed thatch roofs. Rounded buildings in Mexico symbolize the wind and, therefore, are sacred to forces imagined to blow rain clouds across the dry land. This sort of building program seems to have been adopted by the medieval era Cahokians. (Pauketat notes that there’s no direct evidence of trade suturing together the Mexican world and American Midwest – archaeologists have not found copper bells or obsidian or macaws in their excavations in Illinois and Wisconsin. But Pauketat believes that priests or shamans traveled long distances to visit other tribal groups and, most likely, transmitted influences based upon what they had seen to members of their own cultural group.)
Archaeologists first discovered evidence of a moon-cult at two outliers near Cahokia, the Pfeffer and the Emerald Acropolis sites about twenty miles west of the big urban center. The Pfeffer site was threatened by agriculture and, so, salvage archaeology occurred at that place in 2000 and 2007. The most noteworthy finding was a complex of houses supported by posts, generally rectangular structures with closely spaced vertical palisades supporting what must have been thatched roofs. The curious feature was that the houses were rebuilt probably at about 20 year intervals with a changing central axis orientation. In effect, the houses were built in iterations that predictably rotated through an arc of about 20 degrees. In the center of these structures, surmised to be sweat-baths (saunas), the direction of the long axis was signified by a central groove packed full of yellow-black fill obviously exotic and imported to the site. This “pointer,” as it were, was laid down in conditions of inundation – in other words, the exotic fill was packed into the central trench either during a naturally occurring rainstorm (with the structure’s roof removed) or with the builders pouring large amounts of water onto the clay to “laminate” the silt. The periodic changes in the orientation of these buildings seemed correlated to the lunar “long cycle”, a 19.3 year periodicity defined by a north-south maximum and minimum moon rise. Apparently, every 19 to 20 years, the axis of the sweat bath was changed to point in the direction of either the lunar maximum or lunar minimum.
(I’m always skeptical of archeo-astronomy, a view that Pauketat also espouses, noting that he had no interest in this subject until studying the findings at the Pfeffer site. The sky is full of all sorts of moving objects and it would seem to me that an assiduous researcher could readily correlate points of the terrestrial surface with phenomenon in the sky. But Pauketat seems to be a reasonable fellow and, therefore, I am willing to accept his conclusions on this subject at face-value, particularly since a number of separate Cahokian sites seem to share a common lunar orientation.)
The consensus opinion interpreting the Pfeffer excavation is that this work uncovered a complex of sweat baths, probably on the order of a pilgrimage site, all of them oriented toward astronomical landmarks in the lunar cycle and, indeed, rebuilt periodically to conform to the maximum and minimum moonrise. Obviously, the shrine buildings were intensely involved with water – steam was produced in them and they were equipped with inundated clay floor markers produced by pouring water on yellow and black fill.
These findings were confirmed by the discovery of similar structures at Trempeleau. Immediately to the southwest of Trempeleau mountain’s main ridge, there is a hill called Little Bluff. On top of Little Bluff, several mounds were known to exist, previously thought to be either Hopewell or Effigy Mound woodland culture sites. Excavations beginning in 2009 and continuing through 2016, including some actually conducted in people’s lawns in the town, showed that the area was a Cahokian outlier. Characteristically, Cahokian ceramics were found as well as gaming pieces known from the big urban site near St. Louis. In fact, middens discovered in the middle of modern-day Trempeleau were full of Cahokian red potsherds.
At the Wisconsin site, the Cahokian pilgrims had re-sculpted the entire top of Little Bluff, shaving off the domed profile of the hill to make a flat terrace. On the terrace, a small central pyramidal-shaped mound supported a central shrine of some sort. Embankment causeways ran from the central prism-shaped mound to circular mounds at the north and south edges of the bluff. These mounds, also, supported rounded wind-water structures similar to the Huastecan model in western Mexico. Pointer fill, a sort of mound dug down into the hilltop as an intaglio feature (as opposed to built up over the bluff terrace), aimed directly at the lunar minimum – that is, the moonrise as seen at its minimum point. The clay floors of the structures showed signs of periodic inundation. Accordingly, the site was similar in most respects with features found at Pfeffer. Again, the structures were interpreted as sweat baths, probably regarded as salubrious and healing, suggesting that people who were ill may have been brought by dugout canoe to his location to be treated for their sicknesses in the tightly built saunas. Pauketat interprets the general footprint of the site as suggesting the moon flanked by moon-dogs (paraselenae), a well-known phenomenon in very cold weather when the air is suffused with ice crystals. The shrine at Trempeleau was probably occupied seasonally for about fifty years.
Beginning in 2011, Pauketat worked to excavate the so-called Emerald Acropolis, an Illinois site near Pfeffer. This was also salvage archaeology necessitated by agricultural development encroaching on an isolated, densely wooded hill rising above the otherwise flat prairie. Again, the dig resulted in the discovery of a number of circular buildings, sweat lodges, and, even, a large “council house” with a central axis mundi post probably projecting several feet above the center of the structure. The complex structures were made from bent-poles and arbor-roofed. Many of them had intaglio yellow-black clay features, oriented toward the minimum and maximum moon rise landmarks. Periodically, the structures seem to have been literally washed away, possibly by human-induced flooding and, then, rebuilt. In the council house, archaeological workers discovered a human sacrifice, an inhumation of a young boy or girl in the corner of the structure. (Discovery of human remains like this can be catastrophic to a “dig” in that local tribes have to be consulted as to the meaning of these relics, skeletal artifacts may have to be carefully extracted for repatriation, and tribes claiming an affiliation with the culture once at the site have veto power over further excavations. Here it was decided to not remove the skeletal remains and simply leave them in the excavation, as Pauketat is quick to note, well below the level that will be disturbed by future plowing. Tribes claiming an interest in these artifacts are the Pawnee, Ho-Chunk, the Ohio Miami now living in Oklahoma and the modern-day Caddo.)
The hill called the Emerald Acropolis contains a geological phenomenon known as a “perched aquifer”. This means that the upper part of the knoll is comprised of permeable soils and rock allowing waters to seep down to what is called an acquitard or acquilard, that is, an impermeable barrier to the water’s further descent. Where an impermeable layer of rock blocks seepage, the water table is “perched” above the adjacent land – this results in springs flowing from the side of the hill at the level of the acquitard with circumadjacent ponds or lagoons at the base of the knoll. In Meso-America this geological structure, a “perched acquifer” is called a “water-mountain”, not coincidentally the Aztec and Mayan name for a city. Clearly, the Cahokians regarded the Emerald Acropolis as a sacred location, a “water-mountain”, and built pilgrim houses around its base. These places were not permanent dwellings, but periodically inhabited over several hundred years, presumably on the basis of religious festivals conducted there.
Pauketat observes that the area around Cahokia is rich with dramatic water features. First, there are vast flood plains around the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri. The high lands on both sides of these flood plains are karst formation, riddled with impressive Cenote-like sinkholes. The marshy lowlands are full of oxbow lakes that attract an abundance of water fowl. Knolls like the Emerald Acropolis provide evidence of perched aquifers with flowing springs. Cahokia itself was a watery city, a sort of Venice filled with canals and lagoons. Borrow pits near the big mounds fill with runoff even today and were probably semi-permanent water-features 900 years ago. Raised causeways strike across the swampy land connecting platform mounds on which there were erected very large sweat baths, circular in form after the model of the Mayan and Huastecan structures. For instance at the highest point in Cahokia, the summit of Monk’s Mound, modern archaeologists working with Pauketat have found a massive sweat lodge circular in shape and equipped with a huge vertical axis mundi central pole. Again long-cycle lunar orientations govern the construction of many of the rectangular religious buildings.
Apparently, a central component of the moon-cult at Cahokia was the consumption of something called “the Black Drink.” The “Black Drink” is a tea comprised of Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria), a stimulant and, if consumed in sufficient quantity, an emetic as well. Scholars discovered use of the “Black Drink” at these sites accidentally. Cups elaborately decorated with spirals derived from the natural forms of the lightning whelk shell (a kind of nautilus cephalopod) were found to contain residues of some dark substance. Initially, it was thought that these deposits were chocolate or cacao imported from Mexico. But analysis showed not cacao, but fragmented tea leaves of the Ilex vomitoria. This herb doesn’t grow in central Illinois or Missouri and was imported from the Gulf Coast along with great quantities of whelk shells that were somehow associated with the brewing of this tea, as witness ceramic cups bearing their patterns. Clearly, the Cahokians were venturing to the south as far as the Gulf to acquire this “Black Drink” and, also, lightning welk shells found in abundance in their city. A red-colored ceramic vessel shows a figure holding a cup imprinted with whelk-shaped patterns; on the other side of the figure, there is a urn with a cap, presumably a boiling pot of this powerful tea. A Cahokian outlier in northern Mississippi further confirms this Drang nach Sueden (or the impulse toward the South) in Cahokia’s culture. Near Clarksdale, there is a Cahokian pilgrimage site similar to the complex built in the north at Trempeleau. The Carson site, as it is called, shows a number of round pilgrim-shrine sweat baths and other structures, many of them aligned to lunar minimum and maximum moonrises.
On the night that Professor Pauketat presented this lecture,someone attending the program said that the moon was rising dramatically over a mesa outside of Albuquerque. The lecture’s facilitator sent a note to participants encouraging them to look for the moon climbing into the skies over their own landscapes. And, later, during the early morning hours, there was a partial eclipse, the face of the moon eroded by the earth’s shadow casting a pinkish-red light, that is, a so-called “Blood Moon.”
Crossing into Wisconsin on Highway 43, the bridge from Winona spans two lobes of dark water and, then, joins the river-road parallel to the Mississippi at a tee intersection. At intervals, two-story taverns set back a couple hundred feet from the train tracks stand along the highway – presumably the owners of these places live above their bars open on the ground level. Although it’s early on a Sunday morning in late November, each isolated pub has a couple of pickup trucks dutifully parked in the gravel ringing the place, hunters, perhaps, having an eye-opener before chasing deer in the cold, windy coulees or alcoholics driven out of town by Sunday closing laws. The valley opens up south of Winona and Trempeleau Mountain stands entirely isolated, a single ridge of dark hills, mostly with rounded summits, but, also, spiked with a pointed horn of rock at one end of the little range. Obviously, the mountain was once an island, surrounded on all sides by overflow from the Mississippi because these highlands are apart, separated by several miles, from the ring of bluffs lining the valley on all sides. It’s an anomalous-looking landscape, flat lands now bearing row-crops, mostly corn, that lap up along the sides of the ridge pressed here against the river.
At Trempeleau, the valley’s flood plain is seven or eight miles wide and, after passing a few unincorporated villages, the highway jogs four miles west across river flats golden with corn stalk stubble to slip into the town under the south flank of the island mountain. The village feels closed-in, the mountain blocking passage to the north along the river except along a narrow terrace crowded with a two-lane blacktop and train tracks running along the levee. Trempeleau is butted into the main channel of the Mississippi, here a lake-shaped reach of water where a tug-boat with a prow like a white church steeple is chugging along the embankment. The Minnesota side of the river, beyond a couple football fields’ width of water is rugged, high hills heavy with trees crowded close to the channel, a tangled chaos of steep valleys and cliff-lined bluff tops that looks entirely primeval – there are no houses and no signs of any infrastructure on the other side of the river: the landscape seems like something that might have inspired and daunted the first pioneers here, steep ravines and wild wooded hills now and then flashing cliffs like bared teeth. (This perception turns out to be wholly wrong.)
I don’t know where the trail head leads up to the Cahokia mound-site and so I take the winding way, north along the channel to the State Park gateway. A typical Wisconsin supper-club, a bit like a barge improbably beached on the river bank stands just beyond the entrance to the Park. This is Sullivan’s, a place where I have eaten a couple times, a pleasant place in mild weather with a redwood deck leaning out over the railroad tracks nearby and the heaped up waters of the river, impounded here by a Corps of Engineers lock and dam downstream. On Trempeleau Mountain, the ridge rises to piles of stone like columnar crow’s nests high in the hills. There’s no trail in this direction and so I drive back to the village, one mile downstream, a place where all the lanes are L-shaped and dipped down to dead-end along the river. The wind is cold and blows a gale and the lake is shingled with bright-tipped waves. A bronze horseman with dogs stands on a plinth on the levee – this is apparently Trempeleau himself. The town was once a railroad hub and a river-boat harbor, full of bars and whorehouses no doubt, but it’s now a place for summer-people, modest bungalows to rent for a night or a week along the main street, and, down, closer to the water, some ancient brick buildings that have odd pointed pediments and turrets like witch’s hats. The village has changed its vocation from swindling river-boat passengers and train crews to selling tourists coffee, bagels, and boat rides along this scenic stretch of the Mississippi.
The trail to the Cahokian shrine is on 35, where the highway enters the village, a block to the east of the post office. Some rugged-looking rustic steps lead up the side of a ravine and, then, the trail climbs very steeply, hanging off the side of the coulee, to the top of Little Bluff. A couple of lanes, more like jeep tracks, intersect at the edge of the bluff-top, and, then, a narrow road runs along the ridge skirting deep drop-offs on both sides. The archaeological site occupies a tongue of hilltop running to the southwest and overlooking the village. There’s almost nothing to see. The mounds run in a procession away from a causeway between two deep and shadowy borrow pits, excavations from which the Indians scooped dirt and dumped it, basket upon basket, to make the prism-shaped high points on the hill. In fact, the largest mound, which now looks like a natural feature, is a big flat-topped embankment where the City of Trempeleau built its grey vat of a concrete water tower. The steep ramp-like roads climbing to this height presumably were for servicing this facility although it’s mostly long gone, torn down “about 1991", an odd locution suggesting that we know what happened here a thousand years ago, better then we understand events only thirty years before the present.
Archaeologists in 2016 sunk a tee-shaped trench into the highest mound, still bearing a rough semi-circle of broken concrete foundations embedded in the old Cahokian mound like envious, broken molars. Beneath a yard of dirt disturbed by the construction of the water tower, the scientists and their teams found layers of orange-yellow and black fill, very precisely set down in alternating strata. The fill was polished with water poured across each layer and created a mound densely layered like an expensive chocolate and toffee cake. The bright yellow clay came from the bottoms of the borrow pits, loess blown here from the great west. The black dirt was pulled out of the bottoms of ravines where sometimes water flowed. At the center of the mound, a pit was found calcined to a crimson-color, a place where fire had burned periodically for many years. The diagrams of the mounds as originally constituted are confusing – it looks like the row of mounds rises toward the overlook over the village and river. In fact, the narrow promontory of land was shaped to step down in four platforms toward the sheer edge of the bluff above the prairie below where the Indians built several council houses. The pier of prairie hanging over the ancient village (probably only occupied in the warm season) provided a theatrical stage for ceremonial rites. Probably, only some of the people living below were allowed access to the bluff-top shrines. But the place as configured so that rituals could be performed so as to be witnessed by the people along the side of the river below. Things were done on these heights for the benefit of those below.
Work on the hilltop shrine probably took twenty years and involved moving 1.8 million bushels of dirt. Cahokian water shrines often had round walls to suggest that these structures had been rolled and pummeled and pounded by rain-bearing winds. So it’s interesting to observe that on the temple mound at this water shrine, sacred to the Tears of the Moon, the city fathers in Trempeleau built for themselves a perfectly circular concrete reservoir to hold water and, in fact, planted this wind-abraded tower exactly where the ancient shrine was located.
A man named Thomas Hayes Lewis, a professional surveyor, first mapped this site in 1884. At the time, the shapes of the mounds crowning the hilltop were very clear. Photographs taken by an antiquarian named Squiers in 1905 show the hilltop as naked with only a few trees, mostly lean-looking saplings, gathered around the edges of the rectangular mounds. Another picture made by Squier from the valley below shows the flank of the bluff, numbered in ink painted on the photograph, marking the mounds along the ridge-line. Surprisingly, the bluff top is almost completely treeless. It seems that the forests that now grow densely all along the ridges and steep hillsides and that crown the bluff are modern. Apparently, these steep hills overlooking the Mississippi were mostly barren 116 years ago.
The director of the Milwaukee Museum of Natural History wrote a letter to Trempeleau’s mayor in April 1938 pleading that another location be found for the water tower. The Milwaukee Museum director said that this hilltop complex was one of the most notable prehistoric sites in all of Wisconsin. But apparently the entreaties in the letter were ignored. The water tower survives today as a hedge of ragged concrete half sunk in the weeds. The mounds are hard to see, but they are still there.
On 35 south of Trempeleau, a big catfish as long as a semi-trailer greets visitors to the village. The catfish is green and white with a tangle of barbels like airplane cable. Reputedly, it is the largest fiber-glass catfish in the world. The highway crosses three flat, broad rivers wrapped in a grey fog of underbrush. It’s hunting season, four days before Thanksgiving, but the only deer I see are road-kill, brown barrel-shaped torsos lying in the gravel at the edge of the road.
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