There was a double presence which was forced upon the mind - the presence of
those who since the beginning of historic times has visited the region and gazed
upon this very monument and written descriptions of it, one after the other,
until a volume of literature has accumulated and the presence of those who in
prehistoric times filled the valley with their works, but were unable to make any
record of themselves except such as is contained in these silent witnesses.
-- E.O. Randall 1908
It was a good town.
There was no veil of hypocrisy here,
but a wickedness, frank, ungilded, and open.
-- W.E.B. DuBois 1917
The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping of the frogs, who,
with the pigs,(a course ugly breed, as unwholesome-looking as though they were the
spontaneous growth of the country), had the whole scene to themselves.
-- Charles Dickens 1842
What a city! What a population there must have been at that time on this alluvial plain.
This view is also strongly evidenced by the fact this this rich plain, which is some 75 miles
long, and 5 to 10 miles wide, is a veritable cemetery of the past, and full of evidences of
long human occupation. Relics of the stone age protrude from the banks of every creek and
ravine. In the rich fields opposite St. Louis and for miles up the Cahokia creek, we have
many times seen the market gardener literally plow through human bones. The little labor
with which enormous crops are grown here would excite the envy of the plodding planter on
the banks of the Nile.
-- History of Madison County 1882
-- Graham Taylor 1915
Beyond stretches a swampy area, criss crossed with railways and dotted with occasional factories and houses.
Still farther north the settled area peters out to straggling houses and hovels . . . unkempt, amphibious.
What a stupendous pile of earth!
-- Henry Marie Brakenridge 1811
Some of them possess features in common with all classes, and seem to have been
appropriated to a double purpose; while others in our present state of knowledge
concerning them, are entirely inexplicable. As those mounds differ individually
from each other, it is of course impossible to present anything like a general view of
their character.
-- Squier and Davis 1848
I crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis and after passing through the wood that borders
the river . . . entered an extensive plain. In 15 minutes, I found myself in the midst
of a group of mounds, mostly of a circular shape, and at a distance resembling enourmous
haystacks scattered through a meadow . . . Around me, I counted forty-five mounds, or
pyramids, besides a great number of small artificial elevations; these form
something more than a semicircle about a mile in extent, the open space on the river.
-- Henry Marie Brakenridge 1811
A dismal swamp on which half-built houses rot away; cleared here and there for
space of a few yards; teaming then with rank unwholesome vegetation in whose
baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die and
lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it . . . a hotbed
of disease, and ugly sepulcher, a grave by any gleam of promise: a place without
one single quality, in earth, air, water, to commend it.
-- Charles Dickens 1842
We have seen mounds which would require the labor of a thousand men employed
upon our canals, with all their mechanical aids, and the improved implements
of their labor for months. We have more than once hesitated, in view of one of
these prodigious mounds, wether it were not really a natural hill. But they are
uniformly so placed, in reference to the adjacent country, and their conformation
is so unique and similar, that no eye hesitates long in referring them to the class of
artificial erections.
-- Flint's Geography
A more congenial soil for cultivation I believe nowhere exists,
it may be called the Elysium of America.
-- Settler 1817
Bottoms low & level & very full of heavy wood.
-- GLO survey notes 1817
We had a pair of very strong horses, but traveled at the rate of a little more than a
couple of miles an hour, through one unbroken slough of black mud and water.
It had no variety but in depth.
-- Charles Dickens 1842
being no less profoundly than the artifacts
of the mind builders of pre-history. Slag
heap, salt dome, aggregate piles, landfill,
mulch mound—these are the forms of our
cosmologies.
As a landscape, these mound clusters and
their floodplain context is quite simply a
difficult landscape to see. “Forbidding both
to the eye and hand” writes the author
of an 1881 history of the region. And
with this forbidding, also understood as
a withholding, closure is deferred. It is an
irreducible landscape: irreducible to any of
the easy theoretical and aesthetic categories
that inhabit our ways of thinking through
landscapes–natural/manmade, human/non-
human, productive/waste. It is a landscape
that, through the visible presence of traces and active processes of (re)inscription, resists easy closure.
Which is to say, in landscape, it all matters. It
all has meaning.
The American Bottom floodplain that lies to
the east of St. Louis is rightly celebrated as the
center of a vast pre-European civilization that
had as its central architectural and landscape
expression the construction of earthen
mounds. Mound complexes from the well-
known Cahokia Mounds to the lesser-known
Big Mound and Grassy Lake sites remain
the defining traces of a long and advanced
era of North American settlement. By most
archeological accounts this constellation of
mounds marks the largest urban center north
of Mexico—with the apex of Native American mound building in the region spanning the years between 800 and 1100 CE.
Yet the construction of mounds continues.
Mound building has, if anything, even
increased. While the civic and cosmic
ordering that animated so much of the
Mississippian era mound builders has, in this
new era of mound building, been sidelined
for the logistical and the proximate, our
contemporary mounds index a way-of-
-- Jesse Vogler