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قراءة كتاب Stories of the Badger State
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population consisted of not over two hundred thousand at the time when the Pilgrim Fathers came to Plymouth. Of these, Wisconsin probably had but nine thousand, which, curiously enough, is about its present Indian population. But, before the first whites came, many of the American tribes were not such roamers as they afterward became; they were inclined to gather into villages, and to raise large crops of Indian corn, melons, and pumpkins, the surplus of which they dried and stored for winter. We shall read, in another chapter, how the white fur trader came to induce the Indian agriculturist to turn hunter, and thereby to become the wandering savage whom we know to-day. Concerning the argument that the modern Indian is too lazy to build mounds, it is sufficient to say that he was, when a planter, of necessity a better worker than when he had become a hunter; also, that many of the statements we read about Indian laziness are the result of popular misunderstanding of the state of Indian society. It is now well known that the Indian was quite capable of building excellent fortifications; that the most complicated forms of mounds were not beyond his capacity; and that, in general, he was in a more advanced stage of mental development than was generally believed by old writers. Modern experiments, also, prove that the actual work of building a mound, with the aid of baskets to carry the earth, which was the method that they are known to have employed, was not so great as has been supposed.
It has been recently discovered, from documents of that period, that certain Indians were actually building mounds in our southern States as late as the Revolutionary War. In the north, the practice of mound building had gone or was going out of fashion about a hundred and twenty-five years before, that is, in the days when the French first came to Wisconsin. It is thought that some of our Wisconsin mounds may be a thousand years old; while others are certainly not much over two hundred years of age, for skeletons have been found in some of them wearing silver ornaments which were made in Paris, and which bear dates as late as 1680.
It is easy to imagine the uses to which the Wisconsin mounds were put by their Indian builders. We can the more readily reason this out, because we know, from books of travel published at the time, just what use the southern Indians were making of their mounds, in the period of the Revolutionary War. The small tumuli were for the most part burial places for men of importance, and were merely heaps of earth piled above the corpse, which was generally placed in a sitting posture; he was surrounded with earthen pots containing food, which was to last him until his arrival at the happy hunting ground, and with weapons of stone and copper, to enable him there to kill game or defend himself against his enemies. The larger tumuli were, no doubt, the commanding sites of council houses or of the huts of chiefs. Each Indian belonged, through his relationship with his mother's people, to some clan; and each clan had its symbol or totem, such as the Bear, the Turtle, the Buffalo, etc. The Indians claimed that the clan had descended from some giant animal whose figure, or effigy, was thus honored. Many white people place their family symbol, or crest, or coat of arms on their letter paper, or on the panels of their carriage doors, or upon their silverware; so Indians are fond of displaying their respective totems on their utensils, weapons, canoes, or wigwams. In the mound building days, they reared totems of earth, and probably dwelt on top of them. As in each village there were several clans, so there were numerous earth totems, many of them of great size. This, no doubt, is the origin of the so-called effigies. Add to these the mystic circles of the medicine men, the fantastic serpents, and the fortifications necessary to defend the village from the approach of an enemy up some sloping bank or sharp-sided ravine, and you have the story of the mounds. An Indian village in those old mound building days must have presented a picturesque appearance.
Just why the Indians stopped building mounds is not settled; but it is noticeable that they were being built in various parts of the country about up to the time of the white man's entry. It may be that the coming of the stranger, with his different manners, hastened the decay of the custom; or perhaps it had practically ceased about that time, as many another wave of custom has swept over primitive peoples and left only traces behind.
The mounds, with which the forefathers of our Indians dotted our land, remain to us as curious and instructive monuments of savage life in prehistoric times. No castles or grand cathedrals have come down to us, in America, to illustrate the story of the early ages of our own race; but we have in the mounds mute, impressive relics of a still earlier life upon this soil, by our primitive predecessors. It should be considered our duty, as well as our pleasure, to preserve them intact for the enlightenment of coming generations of our people.
LIFE AND MANNERS OF THE INDIANS
At the time when white men first came to Wisconsin, there were found here several widely differing tribes of Indians, and these were often at war with one another. The Winnebagoes, an offshoot of the Sioux, occupied the valleys of the Wisconsin and the Fox, and the shores of Green Bay as far down as Sturgeon Bay. If the theory of the ethnologists be correct, that most of the Wisconsin mounds were built by the Winnebagoes, then at times they must have dwelt in nearly every corner of the State. This is not unlikely, for the centers of Indian population were continually shifting, the red men being driven hither and thither by encroachments of enemies, religious fancies, or the never-ending search for food. We know only that when the whites found them, they were holding these two valleys, between Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. A broad-faced people, with flat noses, they were in personal appearance, habits, and morals the least attractive of all our tribes. Their cousins, the wild and dashing Sioux, were still using northwest Wisconsin as a hunting ground, and had permanent villages in Minnesota, and elsewhere to the west of the Mississippi River. The Chippewas (or Ojibways, as the name was originally spelled), the best of our Wisconsin aborigines, were scattered through the northern part of the State, as far south as the Black River, and perhaps as far eastward as the Wolf. East of them were the Menominees (Wild-Rice Eaters), a comparatively gentle folk, who gathered great stores of grain from the broad fields of wild rice which flourishes in the bayous and marshy river bottoms of northeast Wisconsin. The Pottawattomies, with feminine cast of countenance, occupied the islands at the mouth of Green Bay, and the west shore of Lake Michigan, down into Illinois. The united Sacs (or Saukies) and Foxes (Outagamies) were also prominent tribes. When first seen by whites, the Sacs and Foxes were weak in numbers, but, being a bold and warlike people, they soon grew to importance, and crowded the Winnebagoes out of the Fox valley and, later, out of much of the Wisconsin valley,