People of the Morning Star (2 page)

Due to federal and Illinois cultural resource laws—which mandated archaeological survey prior to highway and in some cases, urban development—wherever archaeologists looked in the American Bottom and in the eastern uplands they found what we now call “urban sprawl.” The mound centers around Cahokia weren’t separate towns; they were part of a megaplex. To date, more than two hundred mounds have been identified in association with the Cahokian phenomenon in the American Bottom and atop the upland bluffs in Illinois and Missouri. We know that then, as today, from the top of Monks Mound, the city expanded farther than the eye could see—perhaps thirty miles in every direction.

The amazing thing is that it happened, essentially, overnight. In 1050, Old Cahokia was razed, new Cahokia was planned, surveyed on a great scale as a cosmic representation of the heavens, and building began. More than five square miles of land was leveled and graded to create the great plazas around Monks Mound. Mounds were raised in precisely determined, astronomically important locations. Once completed, huge amounts of lumber were hauled in, and palaces and temples—some five stories tall—were constructed on their tops. To attempt this with modern earth-moving equipment would be a huge undertaking. What the Cahokians accomplished with sticks and strings, hoes and baskets, and bent backs, was nothing short of monumental!

But what force on earth would motivate a couple hundred thousand people to pick up, move hundreds of miles, and once plopped down amid a polyglot of strangers, to build an incredible city?

We think it was a religious miracle, perhaps inspired by the 1054 supernova, which spawned the Crab Nebula. Our best guess is that the Cahokians believed the nova, shining so brightly in the midday sky, to be the return of the mythological hero Morning Star. Then, in a dramatic ritual, the Cahokians somehow resurrected or “requickened” the divine hero in the flesh.

Messianic movements are common in anthropological literature, and we think eastern North America had a long tradition of prophesy and messianic movements with roots going back to the Woodland Archaic, that just such a movement explains the Hopewellian interaction sphere that we wrote about in
People of the Lakes.
It swept the woodlands two thousand years ago and may have laid the foundation for the religious phenomenon that reached its peak at Cahokia between 1050 and 1100.

Remove the question from the hypothetical: What if it were true? What if Jesus chose this moment to return to Jerusalem? Or if Mohammed miraculously reappeared in Mecca? What if tomorrow the Buddha stepped out of the sacred dimensions to sit and preach under the Bo tree? How many
hundreds of millions
of the faithful would trek to see or to revel in the mere presence of the miracle? Global chaos would ensue.

The notion that souls could be resurrected into other bodies was widespread across eastern North America when the Europeans arrived. If you have read our
People of the Longhouse, The Dawn Country, The Broken Land,
and
People of the Black Sun,
you are already familiar with the Iroquois “requickening” ceremony. For those seeking additional information, we refer readers to Dr. Robert L. Hall’s
An Archaeology of the Soul,
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1997. For a discussion of Morning Star’s presence at Cahokia see Dr. Timothy Pauketat’s
Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi,
Viking, New York, 2009.

Resurrected gods or not, Cahokia was an overnight sensation. Hundreds of thousands flocked there, and in doing so, they changed the face of North America. Cahokian colonies were established throughout the eastern woodlands, its traders and influence spread from the Atlantic to the Gulf Coast, to Oklahoma and the Dakotas. Reverberations from its messianic religion are still observed in renewal ceremonies like the modern Sun Dance. In a sense, we are all descendants—in one way or another—of Cahokia’s majesty.

Introduction

Listening to the St. Louis morning news on the car radio, John Wet Bear made a face. The entire world seemed to be crumbling, cracking, and coming apart at the seams. But then, he himself was emblematic of the problem. After all, if his source was correct, he was headed to Cahokia to kill a man.

Morning sun beat through the window as John’s Toyota thump-thumped on the expansion joints as he headed east over the Mississippi on the I-55/70 bridge. Behind him, St. Louis gleamed in the morning sun, the silver arch looking pristine and magical where it stood before the backdrop of shining buildings.

Ahead of him, the Illinois shore waited, its appearance grubby after the chrome-and-glass opulence of downtown St. Louis. Below him, the great river flowed brown, roiled with spring runoff, the water welling, sucking, and swirling. Bits of foam and flotsam dotted the surface, and a barge was being shoved upstream, a frothing white wake rolling where a tug pushed it.

He stabbed the off button and silenced the oh-so-serious voice on the radio. Fingers tightening on the steering wheel, he took the exit ramp off Interstate 55/70. Slowing at the bottom, he followed the brown Cahokia Mounds signs to the old Collinsville Road and headed east.

John Wet Bear had just turned thirty, tall and muscular. His long black hair hung down his back in a braid. Uncle Max liked to remind him that a braid was a historic Sioux style, while John’s Osage ancestors wore their hair up. He had on a red-checked, long-sleeve shirt and faded Levis that formed to his muscular legs. You name it, he’d done it: stickball player as a kid living with his mother outside Tishomingo City in the Chickasaw Nation, dropped out of high school, three stints in the Marines serving downrange in the sandbox, tried and failed at college, but thoroughly succeeded at substance abuse.

His Osage father’s brother, Uncle Max, had saved him, reached out and physically hauled John back from the edge of the abyss. Even the memory of it hurt; John reached up and rubbed the top of his head. He had been passed out between two urine-stained Dumpsters behind a downtown Kansas City bar. Uncle Max had found him somehow, knotted his callused fingers in John’s thick hair and dragged him, screaming and crying, through the filth to Max’s battered old Chevy pickup.

What followed would have been considered kidnap and torture by the White world. After stripping John bare and shooting him down with the garden hose and a spray washer, Uncle Max had chained John to a post in his garage as if he were some sort of sideshow bear. Food and water had been provided, and while John sweated out the d.t.’s, Uncle Max had read to him from a whole pile of books about Osage culture.

John had learned about
hunga ahuito,
the two-headed Creator eagle who dwelt above the Rainbow realm in the sky, about the middle waters of the earth, and the four realms of the Underworld clear down to where First Woman lived in her cave beneath the roots of the world tree.

“This is who you are,” Uncle Max had told him. “This is your father’s blood and heritage as much as you are Chickasaw through your mother. Chickasaws trace their ancestors through the mother, the Osage trace heritage through the father. You are the descendant of two powerful cultures.”

“Man, what the hell do I care? That world’s dead, Unc. And who’d want to live in it?”

Uncle Max had stared at him through the same hard and stony black eyes that had once stared over M16 sights as he shot down Vietcong in Hue, Vietnam. “You’d rather starve and die in filth in Kansas City? You’d rather pollute your souls with white man’s whiskey, Columbian cocaine, and Afghan poppies? You don’t know who you are. Who you came from.”

“Who’s that? A bunch of conquered Indians?”

“Your ancestors built Cahokia. They changed the world. Descended from lords who ruled America, you would prefer to fade away in squalor until your corpse is rotting in a gutter?”

“Cahokia? Never heard of it.”

Uncle Max had said nothing, only stood, walked out of the garage, and come back an hour later bearing another stack of books. The old army drill sergeant had seated himself in his plastic chair, propped his feet on his Snap-on toolbox, opened a book, and begun to read aloud.…

At first John thought it had sounded like a foreign language. Then, as he grasped the concepts, he had started to read the books himself. The archaeologists’ terms had defied him in the beginning, but he’d begun to understand. And after a month of being chained like some wild animal, Uncle Max had unlocked the padlock, tossed John new clothes, and they’d made the drive to western Illinois to see Cahokia for themselves. That day walking among the mounds had changed John’s life.

Now he was returning for what would probably be the last time.

When John Wet Bear’s Toyota cleared the last of the buildings and drove out into the grassy flat, the effect was as mesmerizing as it had been that first time he’d seen Cahokia. Monks Mound immediately captured his eye where it dominated the horizon. Only when he peeled his gaze away did the other, smaller grassy mounds begin to imprint on his consciousness.

John bowed his head as he passed the reconstructed Woodhenge—one of the most sophisticated observatories in the prehistoric world. To the uninitiated it looked like nothing more than a circle of telephone poles about one hundred and fifty yards across. Or maybe some kind of framework for a circus tent, shy of its canvas. Instead Woodhenge functioned as a 365-day calendar, an 18.6-year lunar calendar, and who knew what else.

Like the rest of Cahokia, the sketchy remains merely hinted at the profound complexity of the Cahokian empire.

Wet Bear craned his neck to peer up the stairway leading to the top of Monks Mound as he drove past. That’s where his quarry would be. And, like all pilgrims to Cahokia, he took a left into the parking lot.

Climbing out of the battered Toyota John shrugged on a Levi coat against the chill. He thrust the old Model 10 Smith & Wesson .38 in his belt at the small of his back. Perching his sunglasses on his nose, he locked the car and set off for the climb.

Once a warrior, always a warrior.
But unlike Iraq and Afghanistan the battle he now fought had grown more convoluted, more insidious. He’d seen the announcement on the Internet, along with today’s date. And from that moment on, he’d been in a rage.

John stopped at the bottom of the stairway and offered a prayer to his ancestors—many no doubt buried in this very mound—to give him courage and steady his hand at the last moment.

After reading the plaque at the bottom, he started up.

Archaeological research in the last twenty years—especially the FAI-270 highway project and proposed interchanges for the I-55/70 Interstate—had led to remarkable new research. And with it, a reinterpretation of Cahokia and its place in both the world of archaeology and its impact on America’s Native people.

John was breathing hard by the time he stepped out onto the high top of Monks Mound. The breeze pulled at his coat and teased his long black braid. He could sense his ancestors, share the link across time as he stood where they had.

He turned, looking west to where the distant silver arch marked downtown St. Louis. In Cahokian times, that high bluff had been home to a thriving center of temples, palaces, and population.

A couple of miles away, between him and St. Louis, a new mound rose above the broad Mississippi floodplain. Maybe thirty stories high it dwarfed Monks Mound. But where the Cahokians had used mounds as foundations for sacred buildings, the modern mound encased St. Louis’s discarded garbage. The irony wasn’t lost on John Wet Bear.

“Leave it to a bunch of white guys,” he muttered.

The Great Plaza with its extraordinary visitors’ center lay just across the road, the Twin Mounds on the south. He could imagine his ancestors, bedecked in bright feathers, playing stickball and chunkey there. He could feel their passion burning as hotly as it had in his youth as he grasped the racquets and sprinted for all he was worth in pursuit of the ball.

Turning east he could see the irregular bluff behind Collinsville and the closer mounds that marked the Eastern Plaza. Someone sat at the eastern mound edge, a Pendleton blanket over his shoulders, a canvas hat pulled low over gray locks as he stared into the distance.

I’m sorry to disturb your meditation, mister. But you’ll be witness to a day that changes lives forever.

As always, it took a moment to recover from the sense of awe, and only then did John locate the film crew on the northern end of the mound top. His heart slowed into an angry beat.

A camera rested on a tripod in what would have been the middle of the Cahokian’s five-story mound-top structure. A skinny cameraman was fiddling with the focus; a burly man was folding out a chair and positioning it.

Aware of the pistol pressing against his sacrum, John stuck his hands in his pockets, strolling to where the overweight bearded man was cleaning his glasses. Wearing a white shirt and a big, blue tie under his tweed jacket, the big guy seated himself on a portable stool against the backdrop of the interstate and the old meander lakes. The cameraman, dressed in the requisite vest, stared into the viewfinder on the Sony digital. It looked like an expensive piece of equipment.