Deep Time in the Upper Mississippi River Valley: Little Bluff
A thousand years ago, around the year 1050, a group of Mississippian people from Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, paddled 500 miles upstream on the Mississippi River. After this 30-day journey, they established a village and temple site amid the prairie-oak savanna and floodplain forest ecosystems of present-day Trempealeau, Wisconsin.
The Trempealeau Interpretive Path (TRIP) at Little Bluff helps modern explorers understand the significance and power of this unique locale. The TRIP is located near the aptly titled Little Bluff Inn, just a few blocks up from the venerable Trempealeau Hotel and the shores of the mighty Mississippi.
In the heart of the Upper Mississippi River Valley, Middle Mississippian (i.e., Cahokian) voyagers constructed flat-topped mound temples, bringing with them distinct styles of pottery, architecture, stone and tools, and religious practices centered on cycles of the sun and moon. They lit a fire and kept it burning. After just a few decades they departed, possibly returning to Cahokia, which saw its population peak around the year 1200. By 1350, Cahokia was all but abandoned.
The Middle Mississippians did not seem to interact much with local populations of Late Woodland peoples indigenous to the Upper Midwest. These groups would have likely known of each other’s presence in the valley and some evidence exists of at least limited interaction. Throughout present-day southern Wisconsin and edging into Iowa and Minnesota, an Effigy Moundbuilder culture developed in the Late Woodland epoch (1,400 to 750 years ago). While older conical and linear mounds were also plentiful, the animal or spirit-shaped (i.e., effigy) earthworks were an innovation, possibly acting as territorial boundary markers, religious monuments, burial sites, or combinations thereof.
Fifty years after the vacancy of Little Bluff, other Mississippians arrived to what is now the Upper Midwest, bringing yet again unique pottery, tools, and craft. They also constructed places to live and conduct ceremonies but, different this time, they built palisades as defense against intruders and located themselves in interior valleys rather than on the Mississippi. These locations are now known as Aztalan and the Fred Edwards sites in southern Wisconsin and the Hartley Fort site in northeast Iowa.
Just across the Mississippi from the sacred mountain-island at Trempealeau were other signs of long-past human innovation, art, and storytelling. Petroglyphs by the dozen were documented by surveyor Theodore H. Lewis at the LaMoille Cave near Trout Creek. Between 1832 and 1895, Lewis surveyed and sketched over 12,000 mounds in Minnesota — including hundreds in present-day Houston, Fillmore, and Winona counties. In this work, Lewis also noted many petroglyphs, pictographs, and other ancient works throughout the region.
Deep time in the Upper Midwest goes even deeper, of course. In the Pleistocene era (prior to our present Holocene or, now, Anthropocene, as it were), flora and fauna now mostly extinct once thrived. In 2008, for example, the skull, shoulder blade, and leg bone of a scimitar-toothed cat (a smaller species than its more well-known cousin, the saber-toothed tiger) was found within Tyson Spring cave in Fillmore County, MN, along with a piece of stag-moose antler (bigger than a modern moose, with more elk-like antlers). These creatures roamed the tundra-like landscape of southern Minnesota 26,000+ years ago!
Whether ancient earthworks, artworks, or Ice Age animals, the greater Upper Mississippi Valley region holds surprises large and small. For more information on Little Bluff read Beneath Your Feet: Archaeology at Trempealeau (Boszhardt & Benden, 2017; Driftless Pathways, LLC). To see fossils and artifacts, visit the Bell Museum in St. Paul, the Geology Museum at UW-Madison, and the Mississippi Valley Archeology Center at UW-La Crosse.
Originally published in Ocooch Mountain Echo, Issue 7, Winter 2024. https://www.ocoochmountain.co/echo
