Spirits of Earth: The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes

3. The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes

3 The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes 92 T    F L are among the best documented in the effigy mound region. This is a result of more than 150 years of attention stimulated by the unusually dense concentration of spectacular mounds as well as the early establishment of Madison as a political center and one of learning and history. The Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) was established in 1846, two years before statehood and the founding of the University of Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Mendota in 1848. Both institutions have contributed heavily to our knowledge of ancient people of the Four Lakes. Largely through the early efforts of Charles E. Brown of the WHS and the active membership of the Wisconsin Archeological Society (est. 1901), more than two hundred individual mounds are preserved on or near the lakes (figure 3.1). Among these are stunning examples of effigy mounds and the largest remaining in the effigy mound region. In the city of Madison alone, visitors can see a dozen mound sites, including whole groups in parks and other public places, preserved largely at Brown’s instigation. In contrast, not one effigy mound exists today in the nearby city of Milwaukee , once another large effigy mound center. Long gone are the very effigy mounds that first captured the interest of a young land surveyor from Ohio by the name of Increase Lapham, leading him to start a landmark documentation of Wisconsin mounds and putting him on the road to becoming a famed natural scientist. Reconstructing the Landscape Documentation of mounds in the vicinity of the Four Lakes began in the early nineteenth century. Richard C. Taylor, a visitor to the area, wrote about the puzzling earthworks in an 1838 article titled “Notes Respecting Certain Indian Mounds and Earthworks in the Form of Animal Effigies, Chiefly in Wisconsin Territory,” which was accompanied by the first fairly accurate maps. Taylor had apparently read a widely published newspaper account of effigy mounds written by Lapham in 1836 and had heard of a concentration of such mounds in the area of the Four Lakes. He characterized the curious mounds he found here as “forming a species of alto relievo of gigantic proportions.”1 Shortly thereafter, the mounds of Madison and the Four Lakes gained a bit of fleeting national fame. John Locke, a physician, natural scientist, inventor, and earthwork researcher from Cincinnati, Ohio, traveled to the area to see the mound landscape for himself. He was so struck by the mounds that he published descriptions in the Congressional Record in 1844 under the title “Earthwork Antiquities in Wiskonsin Territory.”2 Increase Lapham, destined to be recognized as Wisconsin’s first natural scientist, continued his interest in mounds with the book Antiquities of The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes 93 Figure 3.1. Charles E. Brown taking a mound measurement. Wisconsin in 1855, a landmark in North American archaeology published by the Smithsonian Society and dealing mainly with the subject of effigy mounds of southern Wisconsin (figures 3.2 and 3.3). He visited the mounds of the Four Lakes in the 1850s, where “the mound-builders have left unusually numerous traces of their former occupancy and industry” and later engaged in some informal mound excavation at the Dividing Ridge mound group, apparently to help settle the question of who built the mounds.3 The numerous mounds attracted many more mound researchers throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers who, like Lapham, published or otherwise provided descriptions and maps of many mounds and mound arrangements now no longer extant. Among the most valuable studies of this period are those of Theodore H. Lewis, A. B. Stout, Charles E. Brown, and Dr. W. G. McLachlan, a physician from McFarland on Lake Waubesa. Stephen Peet, a minister from Beloit, Wisconsin, also took an interest in the effigy mounds of the Four Lakes and other places, writing articles and books on the topic in the late nineteenth century. He founded American Antiquarian, a national archaeology journal, and published many maps of mounds he saw in Four Lakes. Despite his enthusiasm, however, the maps are often impressionistic and incorrect , making them difficult to reconcile with later information. Errors can also be found in the later works of Stout and Brown, who no doubt mapped with...