Frontier Forts of Iowa: Indians, Traders, and Soldiers, 1682-1862

4. Native American Perspectives on Forts [Includes Image Plates]

l a n c e M. F o s T e r native american perspectives on Forts In the mythical John Ford cowboy and Indian movies—typically located somewhere in the dry Southwest—a lonely log stockade stands in the middle of a vast landscape, a secure base for cavalry troops led by John Wayne. Mounted heroes come boiling out like heroic blue and yellow bees to rescue desperate white settlers from an unprovoked attack by feathered and painted savages riding pinto ponies. To most people, forts were hallmarks of the approach of civilization, the first stage in the evolutionary process of manifest destiny that would conquer the West and transform a desolate land of savages into these United States. To kids, forts were where the cowboys and soldiers lived, and were safe. The Indians, well, they lived “out there,” in the wilderness. Convention held that Indians didn’t like forts or the people who lived in them. Precontact: Ancient Indian Forts in Iowa In reality, fortifications were nothing new to Native American tribes. Although we associate forts with cowboys and soldiers, prehistoric Indian fortifications were often larger, lasted longer, and housed more people than forts built by European governments. In fact, all the Euro-American stockaded forts in Iowa could fit inside the two-mile-long palisade wall that surrounded the ancient village of Cahokia, with plenty of room to spare. A number of settled horticultural tribes across the United States built and used defensive fortifications, complexes of wooden stockades and earthworks. Large Indian fortifications in the Midwest included Fort Ancient, Aztalan, Starved Rock, and Cahokia. These early forts made 4 Lance M. Foster | 43 by Indians had many of the same features found in later European and American forts, including log walls or palisades, enclosed log stockades, and earthworks such as breastworks, ditches, trenches, and ramparts. Many nineteenth-century writers, incredulous that Indian cultures could be complex, promoted the belief that these features were built by longvanished non-Indian civilizations (e.g., Ingham ca. 1912; Pidgeon 1858). By the late 1800s archaeologists proved that the Native tribes had indeed built such earthwork complexes, a fact known by Indians (Birmingham and Eisenberg 2000:3–68). A thousand years ago, toward the end of the Late Woodland period, Iowa’s Native peoples were living in ways familiar to their historical descendants . Corn farming, bow hunting, weaving, pottery manufacture, and large settled villages all reveal a complex political and social organization , but with this complexity came problems. Reliance on corn meant there would be more dependable and plentiful food, but maize supplies less nutrition than wild plants: an increase in quantity over quality. Physical anthropology has shown that overreliance on maize, with its comparatively high level of sugar, caused a decline in dental health, which also affected the overall health of Native people negatively. A growing population meant increasing competition for resources. Settled ways of life often result in increased aggression and warfare, and therefore the need for defense (Alex 2000:87). Precontact Native American warfare was caused by the same kinds of things that have always caused war in human societies: ethnic fears of “the Other,” with resultant aggression and revenge cycles, and territorial expansion because of ecosystem depletion and population increase. Cahokia, near St. Louis in Illinois, epitomized this trend. One of the earliest fortified villages, Cahokia contained about 120 mounds, many of them enormous flat-topped earthen pyramids; the core of the village was surrounded by a huge palisade. Monk’s Mound towered over the village, at more than 100 feet high (plate 3). Trade extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and Cahokia may have supported fortified outposts as far away as Wisconsin. Cahokia peaked in importance from 1050 to 1200, and at its largest may have had a population of 10,000 to 20,000 persons, although population estimates vary greatly (Emerson and Lewis 1991). A fortified village associated with Cahokia is the site of Aztalan in southern Wisconsin, occupied from 1100 to 1300. Aztalan appears to some archaeologists to have been a trading outpost, but this is not a universally 44 | Native American Perspectives held view. The palisade walls surrounding the site core measured about 4,400 feet in length. There is evidence that the site was burned down just before it was abandoned, an indication of the conflict that accompanied Indian forts (Goldstein and Richards 1991). What was the...