I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life the Dramatic Events That Changed America (Vintage) - Softcover

Hollinshead, Byron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400096545 ISBN 13: 9781400096541

Publisher: Anchor, 2007

Synopsis

I Wish I’d Been There brings together twenty of our most distinguished historians’ responses to the question “What scene or incident in American history would you most liked to have witnessed—and why?” The answers illuminate crucial moments in our past and give readers a front-row seat at some of American history’s most dramatic events.The Salem witch trials, the raid on Harper’s Ferry, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the voting rights march on Selma, the beginnings of the Vietnam War—all of these and more are vividly recreated here by a stellar list of contributors, including Mary Beth Norton, Joseph Ellis, Carol Berkin, Geoffrey Ward, Robert Dallek, Jay Winik, Robert Cowley, Carolyn Gilman, and William Leuchtenburg, among other luminaries of the profession. With imagination, insight, and vivid detail, I Wish I’d Been There is an engaging tour through key events in American history.

About this title

About the Author:

Byron Hollinshead is president of American Historical Publications, a producer of books in history for adults and for children. Previously, he was president of American Heritage Publishing Company and Oxford University Press, Inc. He was publisher of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and Time Machine: American History for Kids. He is a former president of National History Day and, currently, vice-chair of The National Council for History Education. Hollinshead has been a consultant to several PBS documentaries in history including, most recently, Freedom: A History of US, a sixteen part series from Kunhardt Productions. As an editor and publisher, Mr. Hollinshead has worked with many of the authors in this anthology on their previous books and articles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Biloine W. Young
A Day in Cahokia–AD 1030

Biloine (Billie) Young lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is involved there in a number of cultural and civic activities. She is also the founder of Centro Colombo Americano, an educational and cultural center in Cali, Colombia. Among her published books are Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis; Mexican Odyssey: Our Search for the People’s Art; A Dream for Gilberto: An Immigrant Family’s Struggle to Become American; and Three Hundred Years on the Upper Mississippi. In this essay Billie Young takes an imaginary journey to the Mississippi River metropolis of Cahokia in the summer of 1030. It is an unforgettable experience.

***

A Day in Cahokia–AD 1030

One of the first discoveries made by the Spanish who came to the New World following Columbus was that the Americas were filled with people living in advanced civilizations. Cortez and his men were astounded, in 1519, at the sight of the Aztec Tenochtitlán, a city of 300,000 that was larger, cleaner, and more efficiently managed than any in Europe. The sight was so extraordinary that the superstitious soldiers thought they had been enchanted “on account of the great towers and pyramids and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry.” Houses, shaded with cotton awnings, were “well made of cut stone, cedar, and other fragrant woods, with great rooms and patios, all plastered and bright.”

The Europeans would have been even more amazed if they had known that five hundred years earlier the Indians of North America had also established a metropolis–a planned urban center housing tens of thousands. Located on the American Bottom, where the Missouri, the Illinois, and the Kankakee rivers flow into the Mississippi, the Indian city we call Cahokia culturally dominated a densely populated region from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Cahokia was based on corn agriculture, a compelling belief system, and a trading network that spanned half the continent.

Cahokia is unique in North America because of its geographic reach, the skills of its builders and astronomers, and the sophistication of its culture. Cahokia is one of the few places in the world where a complex level of social organization evolved without the impetus of outside conquest or diffusion. Strangely, the Toltecs of Mexico, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, and Cahokia have almost identical trajectories. All rose and fell at the same time but only the Toltecs were preceded by another complex civilization. Because the Anasazi left buildings of stone their culture may appear to have been more sophisticated than that of Cahokia. It was not. The Cahokia phenomenon was much greater.

Cahokia dominated the heart of North America for approximately four hundred years–from ad 900 to 1300. Yet the city had been abandoned for two centuries when the first Europeans arrived. Settlers saw only hundreds of mounds, some—despite centuries of erosion—still as high as ten-story buildings. They found it hard to believe these massive structures could have been built by the despised Indians and so theorized they had been constructed by someone else—the Spaniards, perhaps, or the Vikings or descendants of Canaanite refugees from Palestine!

Not until the second half of the twentieth century did archaeologists grasp the full extent of Cahokia—a Native American metropolis larger than any other city in North America until Philadelphia eclipsed it in 1800, a city whose downtown covered six and a half square miles with suburbs extending another fifteen miles in all directions, a city that was a destination for worshipping pilgrims.

While Cahokia was flourishing in North America, London and Paris were still villages, Ethelred II was bribing the Danes to cease their raids on England, Leif Eriksson was finding his way to Newfoundland, and the Visigoths and Moors were battling for control of Spain.

If I could visit Cahokia, I would choose to be present on the day in approximately 1030 when a great chief, his retainers, and his servants were buried at the site modern–day archaeologists have labeled Mound 72.
***
The air is humid, so saturated that the first rays of the sun cast a defused light over the landscape. I am standing on the bank of a river that drains over half the continent and for a moment the backlit rising mist gives the appearance that water and sky are one. Here, at its midpoint, the river flows steadily south through a mile-wide maze of islands, sloughs, eddies, and backwaters.

The stillness that greeted the rising of the sun is broken by the calls of hundreds of birds taking flight from the marshes. Turtles slip off floating logs into the water, fish break the surface to strike at hovering insects, and muskrats drop with distant splashes into the river. Though the sun has barely risen above the horizon, its heat is already oppressive.

To my left is the valley of the great river and to my right, in the far distance, is the escarpment of the vast eastern prairie. Between them lies a flat crescent of land, ten miles wide at its widest point and eighty miles long from north to south. This fertile bottomland is the cradle of Cahokia.

Other sounds now come from the river—the rhythmic strokes of canoe paddles, dipping and pulling through the water in measured cadences. Emerging through the mist, ghostlike, a fleet of a dozen high–prowed canoes, each carrying forty or more individuals, appears. The canoes move swiftly upriver toward the mouth of a smaller stream that empties into the river near where I am standing. Each canoe in the line makes the right turn into the smaller stream, heading northeast, and soon they have passed me by and are out of sight.

I am not alone. My companion is a youth, Anton, who is acting as my guide. We are among a throng of hundreds who, though it is still early in the morning, are striding purposefully toward Cahokia along this wide road topping the ridge bordering the stream. I had stepped aside to watch the passage of the canoes and to survey the landscape, but now I rejoin the crowd, jogging to catch up with Anton and his companions.

A short distance from where the stream empties into the river we come to some of the most dramatic features of the landscape— enormous mounds, rising like giant breasts on the flat land. The first group is a cluster of forty-five arranged in a semicircle over a mile in diameter. Anton laughs at my frustration as I try to estimate the size of the mounds—each one several hundred feet around its base, many bearing buildings on their summits. The tops of some of the mounds have been flattened into what look to be parade grounds so large that, if so ordered, hundreds of men could execute maneuvers on them.

Cahokia, Anton explains, has men who are mathematicians, engineers, and materials specialists whose task it is to design and supervise all construction. Once a mound is designed and its location approved by the priests, everyone participates in its building, carrying basket load after basket load of soil to the site. Anton points to one of the mounds and tells me his relatives helped build it.

There is tension in the air and Anton makes no attempt to hide his excitement. Drums have been beating for many days, he tells me, hunters have brought food for thousands to the city, and enormous storage pits of grains have been opened in preparation for the ceremonies that will soon take place. A powerful chief has died and today he will be buried. The leaders of Indian communities for hundreds of miles up and down the river, along with their retainers and nobles, have come to Cahokia to participate.
Some will have brought tribute to be interred with the fallen leader—a politically significant acknowledgment of Cahokia’s dominance over the region.

The men around me wear brightly colored tunics of woven cloth and the women short skirts wrapped around their waists. Many of the garments are ornamented with pink and white shell beads so finely crafted that it takes twenty-four hundred beads to fill a quart measure. All wear leather foot gear and most carry packs of provisions on their backs. Many of the men also carry spears, bundles of bows and arrows, and deerskin pouches filled with arrow points. A few wear long capes embroidered with thousands of beads and these individuals are treated with respect, bordering on reverence, by others.

Around us the bottomland is planted in corn mingled with varieties of tomatoes, beans, squash, and peppers, the vines of the beans twisting around the cornstalks in an exuberant embrace. Punctuating the fields are occasional houses, the walls made of sticks sunk into the ground and plastered with mud and straw. The steeply pitched roofs are covered with mats of thatch. Paths, like long stems, connect the houses to the road on which hundreds of us are now walking.

As we pass one field Anton steps to the side and picks two tomatoes. Plucking off the stem, he hands one to me with a grin and sinks his teeth into the other. I take a bite and we stride on, juice dripping off our wrists.
***
Canoe landing areas, broad leveled sections of stream bank, appear frequently. Just ahead of me a line of laden canoes pulls up at the bank. People of all ages disembark, hand up bundles of cargo, and then stand together in groups, waiting until everyone is ashore before continuing the journey. The high pitch of their voices betrays their anticipation. At a signal from a leader, they move off.

We come upon more mounds, spaced at regular intervals, fires blazing on their summits, that form a ceremonial entrance to the city. I turn off the road onto a path leading to the summit of a mound to get a better view and there, lying before me for as far as I can see, are the tightly packed residences of Cahokia, the Indian metropolis. Its suburbs extend for leagues beyond in every direction.

We pass another enormous mound. I interrupt our progress to pace it off and find it measures more than three hundred feet long, its height at least fifty feet. Anton tells me ancestors of Cahokia are buried near its summit. We are now part of a river of people that flows around the base of the mound like water around an island in a stream.

We have entered the city from the east and are in a neighborhood where the houses are lined up, side by side, with only a few feet between each residence. At each house women are cooking food over a fire. I sniff appreciatively as smoke from a thousand cooking fires rises in the still morning air bearing the fragrance of roasting meat.

Children race about, adults call to one another, penned-up turkeys gobble, and in the background is the ever–present sound of drumming and the haunting tones of notes blown through instruments made from seashells.
***
Walking due west we emerge from the confines of the neighborhood and come to a circle of forty-eight massive posts, each one about thirty feet high and set deep into the ground. The posts are arranged in a perfect circle over four hundred feet in diameter. Anton approaches the circle with solemnity and makes some gestures that I interpret as signs of reverence. The area inside is covered with a layer of fine white sand and I am struck by the fact that, except for the tracks made by birds or a running animal, the sand is undisturbed. No one, not even an errant child, walks inside the circle of posts. This is sacred space.

Anton has more to tell me. If I had a high place on which to stand so that I could look across the expanse of downtown Cahokia, he says, I would see that there are four of these giant place-marking sacred circles, one at each of the cardinal points of the compass–North, South, East, and West. The mound that I can see ahead of us in the distance rises at the point where lines from the four circles cross. This, one of the largest earthen constructions in the Western Hemisphere, is the Great Mound on which stands the residence of the Lord of Cahokia.

The log circles, Anton explains, reflect the plan of the city. The people of Cahokia envision their cosmos as a great circle with an east-west axis representing the pathway of the sun. We are at the circle representing the East. The North, believed to be Sky World, is represented by a circle monument far to my right, across the stream and near another cluster of mounds and houses. The South is Earth World, where many of today’s ceremonies will take place, adjacent to the consecrated ground of the south circle. Cahokia is laid out as a mirror of the cosmos.

Careful to walk around and not across the sacred circle, we approach the central precinct of downtown Cahokia encircled by a massive log palisade. Inside the palisade is the Great Mound, the Grand Plaza, and the residences of the elite of Cahokia. The log palisade, plastered inside and out, stands thirty feet high with bastions located at regular intervals. I gape at it in astonishment. At least twenty thousand logs had to have gone into the construction of this palisade, most of them measuring almost three feet in diameter. “How did they ever cut these logs?” I ask Anton. In reply he pulls his hatchet from his bag. It is edged with sharp black obsidian, the volcanic glass from the Rocky Mountains.

Guards standing on platforms within the bastions scrutinize us as we approach. After an initial hesitation they recognize Anton and wave us through. We step out onto the Grand Plaza of Cahokia. Before us is a 200-acre expanse, five times the size of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, that has been reclaimed from the ridge and swale topography of the river bottomland and raised three feet to create this giant, perfectly flat ceremonial space. I am staggered at the labor involved in constructing it. I give Anton a questioning look and he pantomimes dumping a basket of soil on the ground.

On my right, at the north side of the plaza, standing more than a hundred feet high and broader at its base than the great pyramid of Egypt, is the Great Mound of Cahokia. It covers sixteen acres, contains twenty-two million cubic feet of earth, and rises through four terraces to its summit, where the Lord of Cahokia lives in his grand residence. A broad stairway leads from the plaza to the top of the mound.

Seventeen additional mounds are enclosed within the walls of the palisade. Fifteen mounds are arranged in rows along the east and west sides of the plaza, while twin mounds guard the southern end. Some mounds have buildings on their summits, others blaze with fires that are never extinguished.

The sun is high in the sky and, despite my midmorning snack of tomatoes, I am growing hungry. Anton invites me into his home within the palisade to eat. His residence consists of a complex of five buildings surrounding a courtyard where a tall post, painted in colors, flies a standard. When I step down into one of the houses—the floor is almost eight inches below the level of the courtyard—and leave the brilliant noonday sun it takes my eyes a minute to adjust to the dim light. I am in a rectangular room measuring about thirty square yards and covered with a high thatch roof. This building, like all the other buildings in Cahokia, is oriented to the cardinal directions with the long axis running east to west.

The floor is hard-packed dirt covered with woven mats; the walls, benches, interior screens, and stools are of wood–hickory, oak, red cedar, bald ypress, and cottonwood. Although there is a cooking hearth inside, the cook, perhaps because the day is hot, is working under a cooking shelter outside. Venison is frying in a shallow ceramic skillet over a charcoal fire,...

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1400096545
• ISBN 13: 9781400096541
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352