I Still Hate George Rogers Clark, But Vincennes Has Two Native American Mounds, Only One Of Which I'd Seen Before

Also, Mr. Craft Knife knew I was lonely for my kids and there's nothing that will cheer me up like a national park passport stamp.

And it doesn't hurt that I'm desperate to watch Project Hail Mary on IMAX but we're listening to the book on CD first, and a day trip is a great way to bust through a good three CDs!

So, off to Vincennes!

I've only been to Vincennes, and the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park, once before, on a family day trip way back when the kids were ten and twelve and we were studying the American Revolution. I was in a phase of trying to turn composition books into single-subject journals in which the kids could take notes and record their thoughts and paste documents and write essays. We could then keep the notebooks, and every time we returned to that same subject, the kids could use them for review and then add all their new information. I still think this is an AMAZING idea, but the kids never stopped being horrified by it, so eventually I gave up.

And that's why they now don't remember all their states and capitals or all the original 13 colonies!

Anyway, I was still very much insisting on American Revolution notebooks during this homeschool field trip, and I'm so happy I did (and a little bummed at myself for not holding the line forever) when I can pull out gems like this, written by the older kid as a travel journal entry after this trip:

This was also the day that I discovered that my 10-year-old could correctly utilize scare quotes!

It's been just almost ten years since that trip, and nothing has changed. The older kid still thinks that all money would best be served by being given to her, the younger kid still strongly emits in every encounter the sentiment implied by scare quotes, and the George Rogers Clark Memorial still sits on top of the site that used to be Fort Sackville:

OT, but why am I genuinely channeling my Pappa in this photo, with my hands shoved into my pockets and my phone on prominent display in the cargo pocket equivalent of a cellphone holster? All I need is a couple of handfuls of coins and keys to jingle.

Random gossip: back in the 1930s, when plans for this building were being made and bids were being taken for the work, the limestone lobby and the granite lobby got into a big fight. The limestone lobby was all, "Yo, The building should obviously be made from Indiana limestone, because INDIANA. Granite isn't even FROM here!"

And then the granite lobby was all, "Yeah, that's awesome if you want your whole building to look like a weathered old gravestone in 30 years. You know what DOESN'T literally dissolve in the rain? GRANITE."

Ultimately, it was decided to do the outside parts in granite and the inside parts in limestone, but then someone found out that the granite they were planning to use was being sourced from Canada (gasp!), and both the limestone lobby AND the granite lobby freaked out. 

Don't worry, y'all. They eventually found enough US granite to complete the project and peace was restored.

I know the people of the early 1900s were allllllll about their huge granite memorials (see: Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park), but I far prefer the historical recreation school of thought (see Fort Necessity National Battlefield). Instead of a huge monument right where Fort Sackville used to be, wouldn't you prefer a life-sized recreation of Fort Sackville? 

At least they can't take away the river across which Clark and his "army" (lol, that kid!) sneaked... although they CAN channelize it, it seems!

There's not much of a riparian buffer zone on the east bank, but regular flooding is more historically accurate, I guess:

We walked across the bridge to get a landscape view of the site. There also used to be a French village in the area, but I'm not sure where:

You can kind of imagine a fort right where that big granite monument is!

This is my partner, who literally DROVE US HERE, being disturbingly surprised that we're at the edge of the state:

I was all, "Well, we drove southwest until we got to the Wabash River. What did you think was going to be on the other side?"

He replied, "Um... more Indiana?"

Come on, Dude! The Wabash River is the state river of Indiana! It marks the the southwest border of the state almost all the way up to Terre Haute, and then somehow manages to wrap around Indiana and end up on the other side of the state in Ohio! There have been songs written about it and how it's literally right here! One of those songs is literally the Indiana state song!

Ten years ago, I would have smugly informed him that he was welcome to join our homeschool anytime. On this day, however, I had to just let a smug look suffice.

This church isn't original to the site, but the cemetery is, and it's the site of the original church:

I feel a lot of sympathy for the French citizens of the original town, who probably spent all day, every day, swearing allegiance back and forth to whoever had happened to wrest temporary control over the fort next door.

I don't feel any sympathy for any widower who names his dead wife as his "consort" on her tombstone:

It's apparently just the term they used on a headstone when the wife predeceased the husband, but you and I both know good and well that's so the dude could marry again five minutes later and not have to worry about a whole string of "wife" headstones tagging along behind him. You only get to be his "wife" when he dies first, because that's the only way you wouldn't get supplanted!

This headstone, however, is lovely:

You do have to ignore the apostrophe error, though. I'm too lazy to look up when punctuation was completely standardized, but I'm pretty confident this would have always been wrong. It's a plural, not a possessive!

To the memorial!

I don't know if y'all know about my lord and savior Baumgartner Restoration, but his videos are AMAZING and will cause you to become weirdly invested in art restoration, to such an extent that when you walk into a building and see old-looking art, you'll ask the nearest park ranger about what restoration looks like for that art.

And then he'll tell you, because park rangers are also amazing!

I learned that these are not actually murals, but canvases painted in a warehouse and then installed here using marouflage. The park ranger even pointed out a couple of place where you could see some wrinkling where the canvas hadn't adhered smoothly. He also mentioned this canvas that had been revised, because from the viewing angle it originally looked like that one prone soldier on the right was aiming at George Rogers Clark, lol!

The park ranger and I yapped so much that this poor dude eventually had to sit down and dissociate, lol:

He got his revenge, though, because later he left me standing by the bathrooms, wondering where on earth he was, while he'd actually wandered off to have a whole entire conversation about these Art Deco bronze embellishments with that same park ranger!

How do you end up with the Zodiac on an American Revolution memorial?

Art Deco!

My absolute favorite component is the corn:

I also like George Rogers Clark, his nose polished because that's where everyone touches him:

Fun fact: the memorial is literally falling apart, with the original bronze doors collapsing and the skylight starting to fall in and leaks from all over during every rain. There's no way to get the money to repair it, though, because Trump cut funding to the national parks. Who needs to preserve our national legacy when we can instead have a dictator's private army of jackbooted thugs committing human rights violations on our streets? 

At this point, I need to tell you that other than the Jackbooted Thug in Chief, Mr. Craft Knife and I are the dumbest fucks on the planet. To reiterate, this is the George Rogers Clark memorial:

There's a set of steps to get into the inside, and then a covered area all the way around that colonnade, and then another paved area below that enclosed by that middle wall. The bottom wall just has landscaping inside of it. 

To our credit(?), each of these areas is expansive, and it's unclear--if you're a dumb fuck, at least!--where any additional points of egress might be.

So when Mr. Craft Knife and I, busily yapping our heads off to each other, left the building, walked down a set of steps, and turned right, we found ourselves walking around the entire building via that colonnade. We kept expecting there would be another set of steps down, but nope! We walked around, spying the visitor center we wanted to go to in the distance, continued around, admired the river, and eventually circled back to the first set of stairs we saw, which we now noticed continued down another flight.

"Lol, us!" we said, walked down that flight of stairs, and turned right to go to the visitor center.

It wasn't until we saw--and then passed--it in the distance that we realized we were on that paved area below the memorial that was also elevated and walled off. But surely there would be another set of stairs HERE! Nope! There goes the river for the second time! Hello again, statue of Francis Vigo, namesake of Vigo County!

Eventually we reached, yes, that exact same set of stairs again, and noticed that oh, right, it continues down ANOTHER FUCKING FLIGHT.

Finally, we managed to conquer the world's easiest escape room, and could go get my passport stamp!

That's 34 down, and 399 to go!

Burrito and margarita break:

Now, onto the mounds!

There's a lot of conflicting information about Sugarloaf Mound and Pyramid Mound, and it's not immediately clear what information is authoritative. This webpage, for instance, names Pyramid Mound but has photos and driving direction for Sugarloaf Mound, making it unclear which mound the descriptions refer to. The Wikipedia page for Pyramid Mound also shows photos of Sugarloaf Mound. The Megalithic Portal site has accurate info on its page about Sugarloaf Mound, but its page about Pyramid Mound... also shows an image of Sugarloaf Mound, sigh.

Here's what's written about Sugarloaf Mound in the 1911 History of Old Vincennes:

Fortunately, a study of Sugar Loaf Mound was done in 1998. It found that Sugar Loaf Mound is natural--it's essentially a sand dune formed from all the silt/loess blowing around after the glaciers receded. The "red altar clays" are a misidentification, but there was significant human activity on the mound, as this study found human bones and chert in the core samples. The author theorizes that the mound was used as a "cemetery" by the Late Woodland peoples. The Woodlands people just loved burying each other on top of nice knolls! This article said they'd sometimes build artificial burial mounds, too, but those were pretty small--what they really liked is a nice, tall mound that was already there for them. So now I'm wondering if they'd also take advantage of the super old Mound Builder-era mounds and also pop some of their corpses in. Or maybe they thought that these mounds WERE from the Mound Builder era, since they look so similar!

You certainly can't beat the view from the top:

...and of course I've got my hands in my pockets again:

I made my partner walk alll the way down by himself so he could take a photo of me looking tiny at the top. It's not every day that you get to stand on top of a mound!

Just between us, it's a little less exciting when it's not an earthwork that was built by the ancient peoples, but if they thought it was special, then so do I.

Although the author of "The Geomorphology of Sugar Loaf Mound" didn't also sample Pyramid Mound, he theorizes that it's also natural, since it has the same shape and is in a similar geographic situation that could have resulted in the same type of dune formation. A previous excavation of that mound uncovered more human burials and a piece of the fancy Yankeetown pottery. This sign said that the human remains were repatriated but the pottery lives at Grouseland, the historic home of that asshole William Henry Harrison.

Notice the signage is explicitly calling the mound natural, but as far as I know that hasn't been directly ascertained through core samples or other excavations. But I do think that 1998 Stafford study made a convincing argument!

I've been avoiding paying admission to that bag of dicks' house because I hate him, but I guess now I'll have to!

The whole area of Pyramid Mound is really overgrown, and you probably wouldn't be able to hike it much further into Spring without getting mobbed by ticks:

There's a line of little blue utility flags, though, that mark a trail towards the top, and as you walk it, you can--again, at least this early in the Spring--make out the profile of the mound:

The top of the mound is very overgrown with old trees, but there are also a lot of divots dug deep into the mound, making me wonder if sometimes people sneak up here and do some pothunting:

Sugarloaf Mound is straight ahead in the below photo, and it's actually pretty close. Without the trees in the way, you might even be able to see it from here:

And here's... Jesus Christ, I've got my hand in my pocket AGAIN. I guess my Pappa was really with me that day! 

That's kind of funny, because Pappa would have HAAATED a day trip to mosey around American Revolution crap and big piles of dirt. HIS Special Interest was the Wild West!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 2)

What a difference a day makes!

The day before had been, if not quite Fool's Spring, mild enough that while packing for this overnight trip I'd considered not even bringing my coat, but eventually tossed it into the car anyway, because I'm no fool.

Well, I kind of *am* a fool these days--perimenopause brain fog is hitting me soooooo hard!--but not about the weather, at least.

But regardless, I was VERY glad to have that coat on this day, because look at the snow!

And, of course, the mound!

I promise that I DID do some non-mound activities with my daughter on this trip. We walked around Columbus, browsed a giant bookstore, ate hot chicken that bothered my stomach all night because I'm old, she got me to do an impression of Tor Thom doing the world's worst impression of Kip Grady from Game Changer, she egged me into griping so loudly about the Florida Panthers NHL team that a random guy glared at us (Panthers fans are everywhere, gag!), and just that morning I left my husband sleeping in our hotel room, picked her up from her apartment, and drove her back to our hotel to eat waffles and watch the Olympic men's hockey Gold medal match with me. I had not yet been outraged by the ham-handed misogyny of Team USA, and so we had a glorious time treating the breakfast buffet like a sports bar and cheering a bunch of jerks on to victory. 

But as much as I miss this kid when she's away at school, we're not really sit-and-yappers--you can yap just as well when you're poking around a pre-Columbian mound set in a cemetery next to an abandoned church!

I think it's so interesting to have a mound in a churchyard. The Fairmount Presbyterian Church was organized in 1834, so sayeth this History of Licking County.

I must warn you, though, that the same History of Licking County also sayeth this:

          The mound at Fairmont Church was a lookout mound and it was opened at one time but, I am told, it didn’t contain much. A number of smaller mounds like this have disappeared because of plowing fields over the years. In 1860 a keystone, a small triangular shaped sandstone engraved on both sides with Hebrew letters, was found in a mound near Newark. A Decalogue tablet was also unearthed in this mound. The tablet contained an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments copied almost entirely from Exodus 20 in the Bible. For years, it was regarded as a hoax, but two Hebrew scholars along with some scientists confirmed it to be true. This tablet is seven inches long, black limestone, and was found in a circular light brown sandstone box with a whitish cement at the edges. The “Holy Stones” (five in number) were found near the intersection of Rt. 13 and Interstate 70 and at another location in Madison Township are still a subject of controversy, but scholars now think that perhaps people from the Mediterranean sea area reached this country in the days of the mound builders. This was long before Columbus came and these people left their messages carved on stones found in the Adena Burial Mounds as well as on rocks throughout North America.

 The author is referring to the Newark Holy Stones, which were a Big Deal back in the 1860s but have since gone the way of the various Oklahoma "runestones" that were talked about when I was a kid. 

Wait, it looks like some people are still talking about the Oklahoma runestones! I guess the Newark Holy Stones have just gone the way that the Oklahoma ones have NOT, lol!

Anyway... Vikings and runestones and Hebrew tablets and angel-human hybrids aside, I can't help but wonder what the congregation of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church thought about putting their Christian cemetery around that clearly pagan monument. It reminds me that when the Sutton Hoo ship burial was excavated, archaeologists discovered that people hundreds of years after that burial, long after all knowledge of it had passed, had been burying their dead around that then-mysterious mound, too. Did that feeling of awe that you get when looking at an ancient monument feel like religious sentiment? Was it the sense of ancient history and connection to the past that they thought translated well to a cemetery? Or did the place maybe just seem important, and that's what people wanted to connect with?

Regardless, it does make a lovely setting for photos, and I have to think that even though the mound is clearly being regularly mowed, it must fare better as cemetery property than it would have in a farm's acreage.

I need to come back here and take more photos on a sunny day!

Okay, remember this map of the earthworks as Squier and Davis saw them back in 1848?

So far, I'd seen most of what was remaining, i.e. the Great Circle (bottom right) and the Octagon and Circle (top left). But there's one little bit left that I hadn't yet seen...

Specifically, this bit!

The site is pretty depressing, bordered by a neighborhood, some kind of warehousy/factory-ish building, and a highway that, incidentally, used to be where the Ohio and Erie Canal ran instead:

The Goodwill at the top is where we got the kid a couple of shirts for job interviews and where I'm still pissed that I didn't buy two vintage green glass ashtrays. The kid said they were tacky, but what the hell does she know? The gas station in the middle is the closest parking I could find to the intersection of the street with the railroad tracks just north of it, which is where the semicircular earthwork on the Squier and Davis map was until it was demolished to make that street and railroad tracks. I hate civilization sometimes.

But still, we made the best of it and had a proper wander in that limited space:

The ridge that's running horizontally across the photo below is the top left edge of the square--I'm inside the square, and the kid is outside of it. The ridge in the background is the outside edge of the avenue that would have led straight towards that now-demolished semi-circle enclosure:

There's an opening where the two ridges meet, but I don't know if that's how it was originally. I also can't imagine that the original square and avenue earthworks were this short:

Because I'm curious and I waste my focus on that which is inconsequential, I even got into Google Earth's historical maps to see if maybe the ridges had looked different, taller or shorter or maybe more of the avenue was evident, 20 or so years ago, but it doesn't look like anything has really changed. And then I got VERY distracted looking for Kinzer Mound in South Salem, which is on the National Register of Historic Places but has its address redacted so I tried searching old Google Earth images, reddit and Facebook posts, property records for the name "Kinzer," etc., and never did find it, but I did waste almost two hours and there's apparently a cool covered bridge in South Salem that I now want to see, so there's that!

Here's me also checking Google Maps to see how far I'd have to walk and in what direction to get to the Great Circle and the Octagon:

The Great Circle is just about three-quarters of a mile from here, and the Octagon is about a mile and a half. Perhaps an adventure for another day!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 1)

Well, *technically* all I wanted to do was visit my college kid since she isn't coming home for Spring Break--but she's happy to tag along with any adventure, as is my husband, so that worked out just fine!

Honestly, though, my fever-pitch fervor for earthworks is SO bad. We'd barely rolled onto campus and hugged the kid's neck before I was all, "Sooo... y'all wanna catch up while we walk around Octagon Earthworks?"

Happily, they did!

I even got to play tour guide, because thanks to that time that I just happened to be driving the kid back to school on one of the four days a year that it was formerly open to the public (it used to be leased by a golf course that had, like, a million-year lease already signed, but now it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so Ohio was finally able to boot them and open it up properly to the public), I'm the only one who's been there before!

There's a viewing platform that elevates you a bit above the terrain so you can see some of the earthworks from above:

That's really important, because once you're in them the scale is so massive that it's very hard to visualize what you're walking within:

That outer perimeter isn't really there anymore, nor are the paths that lead away, but you can around walk inside the circle and the octagon.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Squier and Davis work that mapped the site is now old enough to be in the public domain, so here:

It's crazy that the site was mapped AFTER they built the Ohio and Erie Canal through part of it, but I'm going to talk more about that later, because OBVIOUSLY I went over there to investigate what was left.

Here it is also in outdoor banner format, lol, and yes, I DO want a large-scale weather-proof map just like this one!

It's so ridiculous that when the site was a golf course, that elevated viewing platform was the only place you were allowed to be to look at the earthworks, because you can barely see them from that platform! Here I am on the platform, looking straight ahead at the path that connects the circle to the octagon. To the left, if I crane, I can see the closer part of the circle, and to the right, if I crane, I can see the closer couple of walls and one mound from the octagon:

But now, THIS is my favorite sign here!

Octagon Earthworks is a lovely site to simply stroll around. Just as promised, we walked the inner perimeter while catching up and gossiping:

The trees wouldn't have been here when the site was in its original use, but there are a few trees that are allowed to grow presently. This site also used to be an encampment for the Ohio National Guard, then part of it was a potato field... and then came the golfers!

Three geniuses, one of whom is graduating with a degree in Environmental Science this May, another of whom still brags an awful lot about the very thorough Ohio state study she led her little homeschoolers through once upon a time, stared in bafflement at this nut for ages before one of us (not me, sigh...), finally said, "It looks kind of like that candy? Oh, it's a buckeye!"

These two really liked the open space within the octagon best:

You can sort of see one of the walls leading off into the distance to the left, but the rest is too far away. The space inside is so big!

I kept wandering off to go hug the little mounds that block the entrances, though. I love a little mound!

So, it's well-established that I love a dedicated, protected earthworks site. I mean, of course! But what I LOVE is a poky, little-known, obscure, under-studied earthwork that's encroached upon by modern civilization in some weird way. I really like that undercurrent of something other and ancient behind the trappings of the everyday. I also love the research aspect, because while these preserved earthwork sites are well-known and Googleable, most of the earthworks still extant are unstudied, poorly mapped, and largely forgotten. 

There are a couple of good historical resources for searching out the thousands of minor mounds in Ohio. The Archaeological Atlas of Ohio has a county-by-county map that's impossible to parse for specific locations, but does show the overall spread and general vicinity, as well as wealth of now-forgotten mounds. The book, for instance, says that the kid's college town used to have 20 known mounds, and now there is definitely just one! A more useable resource is this ZeeMap of Native Sites of Ohio, which looks to have placed the sites from the archaeological atlas onto a Google Map. Whenever I've been able to match one of its mounds with the real mound, they've lined up perfectly, but there are sooooo many sites on ZeeMap that also look like absolutely nothing in real life. Is the site simply gone, or is the ZeeMap location off?

Earlier this year, I treated myself to the very sketchily titled Nephilim Chronicles: A Travel Guide to the Ancient Ruins in the Ohio Valley, because boycotting the economy doesn't count if it's an independent, self-published author. If you can overlook the author's premise that the mounds are the burial sites of angel-human hybrids, it's actually a fairly contemporary guidebook to many of the minor mounds noted in that archaeological atlas and on the ZeeMap. 

And that's what I used to direct us here!

The mound is presented completely without context adjacent to a community sportsball field, but it's this one. 

Over 2,000 years old, and we can just drive up to it, walk around it, and then hop back in the car to head over to spend the evening at the biggest bookstore in Ohio.

Because boycotting the economy doesn't count if you buy it in an independent bookstore!

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