Patricia Cleary is a historian who grew up in St. Louis, listening to stories of the World’s Fair, and who later wrote a book about St. Louis’ colonial era. But even she was surprised when researching information for her new work, “Mound City.”
Born in Ferguson in 1962, the Rosati-Kain graduate didn’t grow up knowing that the nickname Mound City referred to the west side of the Mississippi River. And she says she is far from alone:
!["Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis"](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=150%2C226 150w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=200%2C302 200w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=225%2C340 225w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=300%2C453 300w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=400%2C604 400w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=540%2C815 540w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=640%2C966 640w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=750%2C1132 750w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=990%2C1494 990w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/7c/e7c43716-34b3-11ef-bca7-9ff66ada2e44/667db17d45aeb.image.jpg?resize=994%2C1500 1035w)
“Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis” by Patricia Cleary University of Missouri Press, 440 pages, $44.95
“I can’t tell you how many times people in St. Louis, when I say I’m working on a book about the mounds in St. Louis, said, ‘You mean Cahokia? And I was like, ‘No, there was a complex of 27 mounds around a plaza with specific uses right in what’s today downtown St. Louis.’ And very few people are familiar with that.”
Her extensively cited, academic history has earned endorsements from people like Jay Gitlin of Yale University, who wrote that the book “restores the Indigenous past and continuing presence in the urban landscape.”
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This interview with Cleary, a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, has been edited for clarity and length.
Q. What is new in the book that has not been written about?
A. Well, pretty much everything in the book is new. Prior to my book, there has been work done by archaeologists about the mounds, particularly the ones around Cahokia. And there was an article that I want to say maybe came out in the 1950s that summarized what was known about the St. Louis mounds, a short article in an archaeological journal. But there’s been no systematic or sustained documentation or analysis or recounting of what the mounds were, how many there were in St. Louis, how they were used, and repurposed and destroyed.
And in fact, one of the things that was really surprising about this, that no one had ever found anything about, was material from the Board of Aldermen. There was in the early 1850s an effort to preserve the biggest mound. And they kind of did a resource study about whether or not they were willing to buy the land and preserve the Big Mound, which stood near where the Stan Musial bridge is today.
They decided not to preserve it because the aldermen decided it wasn’t in good enough condition.
Q. You say that the mounds previously in present-day St. Louis were little known.
A. So in my book, part of what’s new is the whole recounting of the rise and fall of the mounds from the time they were constructed up until Big Mound was leveled in 1869. Everybody talks about St. Louis as Mound City and refers to the mound, but I guarantee you that in any history of St. Louis, they don’t have more than a couple of sentences mentioning the mounds.
People know maybe more about Sugarloaf Mound because it’s been in the news off and on the last 15 years. So part of my book is just documenting history of the mounds: their use, repurposing and destruction. But, also in the aftermath of their destruction, sort of the place of Indigenous history in the civic culture of St. Louis. So that you had things like an Indian school, and Geronimo was on display, and there was discussion in the Post-Dispatch itself of the “Chouteau-Osage” in Oklahoma.
![Big Mound rock moved for Stan Musial Bridge](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=150%2C102 150w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=200%2C137 200w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=225%2C154 225w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=300%2C205 300w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=400%2C273 400w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=540%2C369 540w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=640%2C437 640w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=750%2C512 750w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=990%2C676 990w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=1035%2C707 1035w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=1200%2C820 1200w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=1333%2C911 1333w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=1476%2C1008 1476w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/6a/16a3ebae-4ed6-5750-97e8-3238c52bcb3b/561a7e65a509f.image.jpg?resize=1600%2C1093 2008w)
A granite rock has been moved next to the new Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge to remind St. Louisans that this location used to be the site of Big Mound, built by Indigenous people and destroyed by developers in 1869. The rock was moved due to the construction of the bridge.
There was a pageant and a masque in 1914 — a huge pageant in which something like 500 white St. Louisans played Indians with, actually, copper face paint. And so the book includes information about the whole history and tradition of “playing Indian.” And then trying to think about how and why people were commemorating Native American history, so that the colonial dames established the Big Mound marker in 1929, but they had inaccurate historical information on it (saying the mound was leveled “about 1870”). And that’s the marker that has been moved close to the Stan Musial bridge.
Q. I’ve read that tourists used to visit the Big Mound.
A. There was even a restaurant constructed on the top of the great mound. So there’s a long and very complex history of how a city that has a nickname of Mound City, how its residents managed to repurpose and destroy those mounds, even while celebrating the idea of mounds.
There was actually a lot of attention in the late 1700s and the early 1800s to Indigenous mound sites, sort of through the eastern half of the country, partly because Americans, as they’re trying to establish a new national culture, are trying to find sources of antiquity. There was a schematic drawing from 1819 that has measurements of the mounds and the plaza and the dimensions of the Big Mound in St. Louis. And there’s no way that somebody could look at that without acknowledging it as an ancient site, and they weren’t. Americans were not intent upon destroying ancient sites. They wanted to preserve them as if the white settlers were inheritors of an antique tradition.
![Big Mound watercolor](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=150%2C121 150w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=200%2C161 200w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=225%2C181 225w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=300%2C242 300w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=400%2C323 400w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=540%2C435 540w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/6b/86bec20f-6ee4-5910-ac39-fea3e8758ec2/62708c67939a9.image.jpg?resize=620%2C500 640w)
Left: A watercolor by Anna Maria von Phul (1818), of a mound in St. Louis depicted in graphite, ink and wash. The work is about 8 by 6 inches. Right: A watercolor by artist Anna Maria von Phul of the view from Big Mound, looking toward the Mississippi River in 1818. The prominence of the mound helped to give St. Louis one of its first nicknames, the Mound City. There used to be dozens of businesses with Mound City in their names.
So there were people who thought of them as valuable and an important part of St. Louis’ reputation. St. Louis’ reputation in the first half of the 19th century is really, this is where you go if you want to see Indigenous mounds. This is also where you want to go if you want to see William Clark’s Indian museum. And this is where to go if you’re going to get set up with supplies to journey to the West to see Indigenous peoples where they are. So St. Louis has a really Indigenous population, right? It’s just that there are all these paradoxes: that you’re simultaneously celebrating an ancient Indigenous past, while you’re doing your darnedest to destroy any Indigenous presence.
Q. What is it that you want people to take from your book and do with that?
A. There’s a relatively new exhibit in the museum under the Arch about the history of treaties and land acquisition, and it’s headed, you know, “How the West Was Won, or How the West Was Lost.” There needs to be a recognition that Missouri, like all of the United States, was initially not only native ground, but it was fully populated and settled by Indigenous peoples.
The census used to produce maps in the 19th century that would show the spread of white population, and that where people were settled was largely the East and the West coasts. And then there’s a little bitty asterisk that said “excluding Indians, not taxed.” So the government is only claiming whites as the population.
So as a historian and a teacher, what I really want people to be thinking about is, how does the history that we’re taught and how we teach history, how does it matter? If we treat Indigenous peoples as mascots, like the Kansas City Chiefs, ... as cultural artifacts, but not as living, breathing people, that is a very important issue in the first place.
The other is that because of the mounds’ being leveled in St. Louis and elsewhere, lots and lots of Indigenous peoples’ remains were removed. It was grave robbing, it was desecration, and those remains have ended up in museums across the country. And so these issues are not past tense.
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Under the supervision of its owners, the Osage Nation, a crew from Spirtas Wrecking Co. finishes up demolishing the home on top of Sugarloaf Mound located at 4420 Ohio Street in 2017. The Osage Nation plans to restore the mound.
I love the United States. I love St. Louis. I’m a historian. I’ve devoted my life to studying and writing about and teaching history, and I think it’s just a huge omission in the collective historical profession, as well as in the way young people are taught history, that native peoples’ place in both the history and the present of our country is not more foreground.
Q. Do you think it’s changing?
A. It’s changing slowly. There’s a lot of new scholarship, much of it by Indigenous historians and archaeologists. There’s also works by non-Indigenous people like myself. But it’s very, very slow. I mean, we still find college students need to have corrections. They are not getting it this way in K through 12th.
And so the first thing that happens is that people like me have to spend 15 years doing research to write a book, right? Then it gets read by people who then write textbooks, and then it trickles down to lower-grade textbooks, and then it becomes implemented and taught in state standards and classrooms, but it’s a very slow process.
Take a look from the air at the 2,200 acre Cahokia Mounds state historic site that was once home to a large prehistoric native civilization. Video by Colter Peterson, cpeterson@post-dispatch.com