July 1997
The monthly newsletter for people who live, work or play on the Upper Mississippi River
Vol. 5, No. 7 $2.75
Indians, Mussel Shells and Very Old Islands
Take Me to the River
By Robert Boszhardt
By David Syring
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n April of 1884, Theodore Lewis took a break from surveying Indian mounds along the Upper Mississippi Valley near Lansing, Iowa, to write to his sponsor, Alfred J. Hill of St. Paul: "I have discovered a new feature, that is shell heaps. The natural surface gives no indication of them, but where there is cuts on the R.R. and the river bank is working away, they are exposed ... The shell beds here contain broken pottery, bones, and fish bones." Lewis' brief note is our first record of pre-European archaeology in the floodplain of the Upper Mississippi River. Forty years later, Ellison Orr, a naturalist from Waukon Junction, Iowa, provided a second account of floodplain archaeology in his description of the High Banks site, above Prairie du Chien, Wis. Orr described pottery, stone tools and mussel shells exposed in a cut bank on a sharp river bend. He lamented the impending loss of the site from construction of the lock-and-dam system in the 1930s.
July 1997
Despite these early reports and the well-known abundance of Native American mound and village sites on the bluffs and terraces of the Upper Mississippi Valley, professional archaeologists largely ignored the Mississippi's floodplain until the 1970s.
The re-discovery of floodplain shell heaps near Prairie du Chien launched new surveys and excavations along the entire Upper Mississippi River and revolutionized our understanding of its past cultures. Perhaps they assumed that the islands shifted so rapidly from flooding that they could not be very old and, therefore, could not contain prehistoric sites. That assumption changed thanks to a "river rat" from Prairie du Chien, named Al Reed. Al spent most of his life roaming the floodplains near
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or years the Twin Cities riverfront has been an industrial corridor with few opportunities for public use. At one point, the river became so polluted that virtually no fish lived in the Mississippi from the Twin Cities to Hastings, Minn. That situation seems to be changing, as St. Paul mayor Nick Coleman observed when he recently described "the retreat of the industrial glacier from the riverfront." According to John Kerr, editor of the neighborhood-based monthly, The
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What's Inside. • • River Map Comparing the Floods ......... 5 Current Events Drawdown, Paddlefish, Bridges 6 River Calendar & Almanac Coon Rapids Dam, Festivals .... 8
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Big River
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