“From the time of earliest settlement, there was a road from Grey Cloud Island to Newport and one leading to Point Douglas and Cottage Grove,” the website for the Washington County Historical Society says at www.wchsmn. org, then going on. “The island itself is separated from the ‘mainland’ by a small channel known as Grey Cloud Slough. By 1846 there was a way across the slough that could accommodate wagons hauling wheat from the island to Afton for milling. A timber frame bridge, erected in 1882 at the “old county road crossing,” was replaced by a steel bridge in 1946,” it says, while the arterial plan notes that present infrastructure linking the mainland to Grey Cloud Island is “fracture-prone.”

With last week’s story that a route for a major arterial is being planned in South Washington County, among the concerns addressed in the study for the route were those related to “archeological” sites, which raises the question: just what is being talked about here?

The State of Minnesota, for sure, has existed as a separate incorporated political entity since 1858, having been a territory prior to this and split from the Wisconsin Territory, after the borders of Wisconsin as a state were finalized in 1848, ten years prior to the same happening for Minnesota. In like manner, people were in Minnesota before it became a state (population being one threshold to meet for such distinction) and a lime kiln of 1840s vintage on the Mississippi along with the failed settlement of Grey Cloud City along with a cemetery do exist in the southern part of Washington County on Grey Cloud Island. The lime kiln, damaged in a flood during the past decade , is located near/at10398 Grey Cloud Island Trail, or in plat map coordinates the southeast quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 30, Township 27, Range 21, on private property, we should add.

At one time, however, the two main resident societies were bands of Dakota (also called Sioux) and Ojibwe (sometimes called Chippewa) tribes that called the area home, with the river forming a convenient highway, boundary line, and occasional place of contention, as at Stillwater on the old prison site, since redeveloped When speaking of Washington County historical sites, then, the traces of Dakota and Ojibwe civilization in the area cannot be ruled out as archeological sites alongside those of more recent vintage. In point of fact, the southern part of Washington County does contain sites from before white settlers came in from the east, among them the Schilling Site on the Mississippi River, as well as “the largest collection of mounds in the county, per the Washington County Historical Society site. Whereas places like Newport and St. Paul Park became cities in the mid-twentieth century, Grey Cloud Island has retained its rural character to the present. Along with other sites, the Schilling Site helps compose what is known as the Grey Cloud Island Locality.

To understand the nature of tribal life prior to white European settlement it is helpful to know something of its fundamental social structure. Whereas modern European-influenced nation states tend to base their societies upon written documents (read “a constitution”) along with common law bonds, the basic structure of Native society prior to European contact was essentially different. Beginning with the family unit, pre-contact native society was followed by the larger ‘clan’ or ‘band,’ then a ‘tribe,’ and finally the ‘nation.’ This essential structure ruled by chiefs was unavoidably blood and kinship-based, while a shared language or set of dialects helped form the basis for communication and neighborly relations as different small bands migrated.

Inhabited by different groups from 12,000 years ago after the last Ice Age retreated, the river served as a common highway, and those who traveled it left behind traces of their passage, which returns us back to Grey Cloud Island. The great collection of mounds on Grey Cloud Island is a testament to the Woodland Mound builders civilization, which thrived between 100 and 600 A.D. Four groups of mounds are scattered across Grey Cloud Island, or else over 300, if counted individually. Once known across the Midwest, many such mounds have been plowed over or otherwise no more. So who were the Woodland mound builders, who succeeded them in the area, just when exactly, and how?

This is where things can get complicated, for whereas European-sourced history tends to favor the use of written texts to establish historical fact, much of Native American history was retained and passed along by word of mouth, which doesn’t necessarily mean less reliable, despite a bias towards print in the West.

Native history as defined in Western categories extends in succession through the Paleoindian (12,000 – 10,000 B.C.), Dalton (10,500 – 9,500 B.C.), Archaic (8,000 – 500 B.C.), Woodland (500 B.C. – 1100 A.D.), and Mississippian (11001541 A.D.) periods, along with the Historic Occupation (16th century – Present). Still, what of the Woodland mound builders in Washington County?

“Grey Cloud Island has a long history of human habitation,” the website www.mississippivalleytraveler.com run by author Dean Klinkenberg relates. “The island has dozens of mounds, and archaeological surveys have also found evidence of villages that date roughly to the early Woodland period,” or else the time of Julius Caesar, for those using European- sourced benchmarks. Grey Cloud Island is the name bequeathed through translation from a Dakota-Scots woman, while the preceding Woodland culture which left its sites behind on the island was “characterized by the raising of corn (maize), beans, and squash,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica article “Woodland cultures,” with pottery styles and (you guessed it) “the building of burial mounds” factoring into the society as well. That said, not all mounds built within North America were dedicated to burial, and the people who followed Woodland culture before themselves being succeeded in time by others, exemplify this fact. Meet the Effigy Mound builders, of the late Woodland period after Grey Cloud Island, tied to the Middle Woodlands period. So who were the Effigy mound builders?

“Clues can be found in American Indian legends and mythology and to a lesser extent, scientific research,” an article on the Effigy mound builders of the late Woodland period from 1,400 to 750 years B.P. (i.e. “Before Present”) says at the website of the National Park Service at nps.gov. “The stories and legends of the Native Americans whose ancestors built the mounds describe the effigy mounds as ceremonial and sacred sites. Archeologists believe the effigy mounds delineated territories of choice gathering and hunting grounds. Unfortunately, much of the data is inconclusive.”

Extending north from Dubuque, Iowa and following river ways into southeast Minnesota and across southern Wisconsin, the Effigy Mounds often have animal characters associated with them; the bear, bird, deer, bison, lynx, turtle or panther for instance. Also the water spirit, for the record— but that’s not all the Effigy Mound building civilization constructed.

“The Effigy Moundbuilders also built linear or long rectangular mounds that were used for ceremonial purposes that remain a mystery,” the National Park Service website relates. “Some archeologists believe they were built to mark celestial events or seasonal observances. Others speculate they were constructed as territorial markers or as boundaries between groups.”

Tribes associated at present with the effigy mounds include the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux (Dakota) Community of Minnesota, the Prairie Island Indian Community, also of Minnesota, and the Ho-Chunk nation of Wisconsin with land near Black River Falls—but not the Ojibwe, per the National Park Service. In short, tribes were diverse, so that just as the Effigy Mound culture succeeded the Middle Woodlands culture, with often mixed results. French traders like those who settled Grey Cloud Island and intermarried, for instance, were sometimes more favored than the English, whose stated policy of non-settlement past the Appalachians became an empty promise with the winning of the American Revolution and the birth of the United States. A new nation, had no use for English guarantees made prior to its own founding—such was the law of conquest and/or settlement, though not universally. By 1830, the boundary map west of Appalachia had been and would yet be substantially redrawn, though a long view of history would suggest this is not forever.

At any rate, the people who came in the stead of those who first inhabited the Washington County area after the retreat of the northern glaciers brought with them habits and along with adaptive innovations of their own, neither all bad nor all good. Among the good in terms of food production, was the John Deere steel plow, invented the same year (1837) that treaties ceded what had formerly been Dakota territory to the U.S. government.

Pulled by either horse or oxen and allowing for a smoother soil cut with less ‘stick’ to it (so to speak), the John Deere plow revolutionized farming. With a greater planting capacity than had formerly been possible with the rocky and rich Midwestern soils, the steel plow greatly increased capacity for food production and with this support of a larger population, like the suburban Twin Cities area that rural Cottage Grove would come to join in the 1960s and 70s as development spread outward from a common center at St. Paul and Minneapolis. But technological innovation, did not ensure a feeling of brotherhood or equal distribution of goods and services.

With the Dakota people after the federal government broke its treaty obligations in the era approaching the Civil War, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 broke out in the region while federal troops battled elsewhere to suppress Southern revolt, the Dakota (not Southern) theater of battle resorting to violence after broken federal promises. When all was said and done with the Dakota uprising put down six weeks later, Prescott Wisconsin namesake Philander Prescott (himself married to a Dakota woman) was dead, killed while trying to reach safety at Fort Snelling from Dakota who judged guilt by skin color, although Prescott had recognized and voiced protest to the injustice suffered by the Dakota tribe. Months after Prescott’s death in the war, 38 of those Dakota ostensibly involved in the six-week uprising (not all Dakota chose to take part) were hanged at Mankato, Minnesota on December 26, 1862, or the day after Christmas. The names of the hanged 38 are listed at www.indiancountrytoday.com, in an article entitled “The Traumatic True History and Name List of the Dakota 38.” But while such events may seem like long-ago history, they do teach a lesson; that without a shared feeling of brotherhood between men, no technological advancement guarantees or else signifies moral improvement, whereas superior technology (like the gun), can be used to nefarious ends. And that leads us finally to the author Steven Vincent Benet, and his story, “By the Waters of Babylon.” Written in 1937, the story foretelling the neutron bomb and a post-apocalyptic New York state, wherein the Forest People and Hill People haven’t learned from the mistakes of their ancestors, as typified in the destruction of a monument to “Ashing,” otherwise George Washington, the beginning and end of the Washington name struck off as though restricting his passage through time.

Traveling the highway as a “god road” before returning home from visiting a postapocalyptic New York City, John the Priest realizes that those who came before were men, and that if those now living and still to come, are to build a better future it will require building a sense of brotherhood.

In the meantime, the mounds persist, by the waters of Grey Cloud Island.

Photo is from the website of the National Park Service at nps.gov