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

4. Yahara Inlet and Mendota

4 Yahara Inlet and Mendota Lake of Spirits 115 T Y R has its headwaters several miles north of Lake Mendota. It flows through the Cherokee Marsh and widens into Lake Mendota at a point near where Late Woodland people built some of largest and most spectacular mounds in the Four Lakes. Late Woodland people used the marshy headwater areas for small seasonal hamlets or other special purposes, constructing keyhole-shaped pit houses (see chapter 2). One such place, the Statz site, is located on the marshy west end of Six Mile Creek that once flowed to the Yahara River at its original inlet at Lake Mendota. Prior to the construction of a dam and lock at the lake outlet, the water levels were about five feet lower and the mouth of the inlet well south of where it is today. The largest of the Four Lakes, Lake Mendota now covers nearly ten thousand acres. The Wisconsin state capitol overlooks this body of water from an isthmus dividing it from Lake Monona. Lake Mendota was originally referred to as the “Fourth Lake” by early settlers. The Ho-Chunk also called it Wonk-sheek-ho-mik-la (“where the man lies”), derived from a legend concerning the love of a young a man for a female spirit that lived in the lake.1 The legend recounts how the man obtained a vision from the spirit and magically turned himself into a catfish to pursue her. Traveling from lake to lake, he arrived at Lake Mendota where he found his spirit love and lives with her today beneath its waters. Mounds occupied virtually every elevation and piece of dry land around Lake Mendota. Current state records count at least 370 individual mounds at more than fifty locations, most of which appear to date to the effigy mound era between A.D. 700 and 1100 (figure 4.1).2 Particularly dense concentrations were at the Yahara River inlet and on a large, high rock-bluff area overlooking the northeast shore, north of the formerly marshy outlet of the lake. Mounds on the lake include some the of best and largest examples of effigy mound forms, and in several instances provide models for the ideological structure of effigy mound landscapes. Yahara Inlet and Mendota 116 Figure 4.1. Mounds of Lake Mendota. Those mentioned in text are identified. Yahara Inlet and Mendota 117 Most major types of effigy mounds can be found in the vicinity of Lake Mendota although, as elsewhere in the Four Lakes, conical and linear mounds dominated the landscape. Of the zoomorphic mounds, birds, long-tailed water spirits, and bears were the most common. Snake forms were plentiful, if we can include tapering linear mounds in that category, as proposed here. Here too are major Late Woodland lakeshore settlements, including the fortified Camp Indianola village and the probable village partly encircled by effigy mounds on the other side of the inlet at the Mendota Mental Health Institute. Everything about this large lake suggests it was the center of the Four Lakes effigy mound society and its most important ceremonial area. Given the number, size, diversity of mound forms, and degree of modern preservation, one could rightly consider Lake Mendota the symbolic capital of the whole effigy mound region. Other Lake Mendota Legends The Ho-Chunk lived on Lake Mendota during the early nineteenth century and had their principal village on the western shores, perhaps because of major Indian trails that skirted the lake and ran from the Mississippi River to the Fox River, the main transportation route to eastern Wisconsin and Lake Michigan. Some Ho-Chunk people continued to use the lake long after their formal removal west in the 1830s. These landless people passed down stories about the lake’s supernatural inhabitants, possibly inspired by the visible presence of these very beings in the form of ancient effigy mounds. The long-tailed water spirits dwelled in deep water off Governor’s Island on the north shore. Here, the legend says, one must exercise caution should the water spirits rise, capsizing canoes and drowning people.3 The Indians made tobacco offerings to gain the goodwill of the water spirits. Marl deposits, the dens of the water spirits, cover some of the bottom of Lake Mendota. According to one Ho-Chunk story, the thunderbirds once roosted on the west...