Map Quest: Searching for Chicago’s ‘Lizard Mound’

Judy Pollock was reading a recent Curious City story about how Native Americans shaped Chicago’s history when she spotted an odd detail on one of the old maps in the story. The map depicted the Native American trails and villages that existed in Chicago in the early 1800s, before the city was officially incorporated.

It shows an odd, reptilian-looking shape, labelled the “Effigy Mound Lizard,” in the area that is known today as the Lakeview neighborhood. That made Judy wonder, because she’d heard of lizard mounds found in other places. So she asked Curious City:

Can you tell me more about the Lakeview lizard mound?

When Judy says “other places,” she’s referring to the effigy mounds of Wisconsin. These effigy mounds are sacred burial places built by Native Americans between 800 and 1000 A.D., says Amy Rosebrough, an archaeologist at the Wisconsin Historical Society and co-author of Indian Mounds of Wisconsin. They are large earthworks made from soil, usually about 3 to 7 feet high, that form shapes that can be seen from overhead. Some look like bears, others resemble lizards or turtles.

To answer Judy’s question, Curious City dug into the archives to find out if there’s any evidence that a lizard-shaped effigy mound actually existed in Lakeview, who built it, and why it disappeared. It turns out the answers to these questions illustrate how racism among early archaeologists prevented them from getting to the bottom of the effigies’ origins.

If we assume Dilg was correct and the Lakeview mound was in fact the same kind of effigy mound found in Wisconsin, that raises another important question that scholars and archaeologists have been asking for 200 years: Who built it?

Early American archaeologists believed the mounds may have been built by a mysterious “lost race” of “ mound builders,” sometimes thought to be an earlier Native American civilization connected to Mayan, Aztec, or Incan cultures. Some have theorized the mound builders weren’t indigenous to the Americas, but instead were a lost tribe of Israel or a travelling culture, like the Phoenicians or Egyptians.

These hypotheses, which range from unlikely to absurd, reveal a bias common among white Americans in the 19th century: They didn’t believe contemporary groups like the Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, or Ojibwe, who all lived in areas with effigy mounds, were sophisticated enough to build them.

Richard C Taylor, a writer who travelled through Wisconsin in the 1830s, was typical of the time. He wrote:

This prejudice made archaeologists slow to accept the idea that these mounds were built by the ancestors of the Native Americans who lived near the mounds. But eventually, beginning in the early 1900s, American archaeologists began a more deliberate effort to talk with Native Americans about effigy mounds. Charles Brown and Paul Radin, two Wisconsin based archaeologists, documented extensive conversations with Ho-Chunk people (then known as the Winnebago tribe).

The current consensus among archaeologists is that the mounds were built by several tribes or groups who might have been closely related and treated mound building as a ceremony. Archaeologists believe the Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin are one of several tribal groups descended from people who built effigy mounds, including the Iowa and Winnebago of Nebraska.

Curious City reached out to the Ho-Chunk to comment on this story, but they did not respond. Over the years, the Ho-Chunk have claimed to be the descendants of effigy mound builders. In an interview with the Portage Daily Register in 2016, Bill Quackenbush, the cultural resources officer for the Ho-Chunk, said he prefers not to explain the significance of the mounds to outsiders. He said people should try to appreciate the mounds rather than analyze and understand their exact meaning.  

“The culture that we live in today and society 100 years ago, they tried to do that,” he said. “They dug through them, they took screens out there, they shook the dirt and looked for every little piece of information they could. They couldn't find what they were trying to get. ... They had a preconceived notion in their heads already.”

So early settlers destroyed hundreds if not thousands of ancient sculptures, along with  the historical record. They plowed under mounds to farm the land or levelled them and built homes on the sites. In some cases, early settlers claimed to have asked local Native Americans about the origins of the mounds without receiving a clear answer.

John Low, a Potawatomi Indian and professor of American Indian studies, says he’s suspicious of these accounts given that they took place during a power struggle over land.

“[The Natives] may have said that because they aren’t going to share with people, [who] they regard as the enemy, the specialness they know about a site.”

Or, Low suggests, the white settlers may have displayed selective memory.

By the late 1800s, when Native Americans were no longer seen as a threat to westward expansion, white Americans became interested in many aspects of their culture, including effigy mounds. But that interest was not necessarily respectful, especially considering mounds often contain human remains. Archaeologists felt free to dig through burial sites and take home human remains for display. Amy Rosebrough describes the popular pastime of “mounding”:

“You take a family out on a picnic and give the kids a shovel and bucket, and they would dig into a mound and see what was there.”

Unless we find new evidence in an archive somewhere (perhaps missing pages from Carl Dilg’s manuscript), the “lizard effigy” of Lakeview will remain a mystery. That’s because so much of the historical record was lost when the mounds were destroyed, says scholar and Potawatomi Indian John Low. As a Native American, he feels like the destruction of the mounds represents a desecration and willful disrespect of his culture. But he also sees a universal human tragedy.

“It’s something we should all feel sad about when they’re lost,” he says. “Like when the acropolis is lost. Or the pyramids. Or stonehenge is lost. These too are part of the human record of achievement. What a shame.”