Mythologies of the Cahokia Tribe

The Cahokia (Miami-Illinois: kahokiaki) were an Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe and member of the Illinois Confederation; their territory was in what is now the Midwestern United States in North America. At the time of European contact with the Illini/Illinois Confederation, the peoples were located in what would later be organized as the states of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas. In the 17th-century, the Cahokia lived near the massive precontact earthwork complex that Americans named the Cahokia Mounds. By then, Cahokia Mounds had been abandoned for centuries. The Cahokia people were not related to the residents of Cahokia Mounds, who were most likely Dhegiha Siouan-speaking peoples. The word Cahokia has several different meanings, referring to different peoples and often leading to misconceptions and confusion. Cahokia can refer to the physical mounds, a settlement that turned into a still existing small town in Illinois, the original mound builders of Cahokia who belonged to a larger group known as the Mississippians, or the Illinois Confederation subtribe of peoples who inhabited the area late.

Over 650 years ago, before Columbus even thought of America, there was an immense sprawling town of thousands of pre-Columbian Native Americans. It was first occupied about 700 A.D. and flourished until about 1350 when it mysteriously was abandoned. The CAHOKIA MOUNDS today are located in southern Illinois, just eight miles from St. Louis, Missouri. One could drive right by on I-55, not realizing such a city existed back then. Especially one that at its peak held 25,000 to 50,000. Why they left has continued to be a mystery as they left no writings or drawings. Although historians can't explain it, they have several ideas. The main idea seems to be climate change, then perhaps, war, disease, drought, or even flooding. The mounds were built by the Mound Builders of America that consisted of various cultures, prehistoric, indigenous inhabitants that covered the Great Lakes through the Mississippi Valley as far as the Gulf of Mexico. The area surrounding the 2000 acres of the city was extremely fertile as the agriculture grown consisted of corn, sunflower, amaranth, squash, and beans. Because they were so successful, other cultures migrated to Cahokia, including some from the Ohio River Valley. In his book 1941, Charles S. Mann called Cahokia "the world's largest garden."

Cahokia is a modern-day historical park in Collinsville, Illinois, enclosing the site of the largest pre-Columbian city on the continent of North America. The original name of this city has been lost – Cahokia is a modern-day designation from the tribe that lived nearby in the 19th century – but it flourished between c. 600-c. 1350 CE. The city seems to have initially grown organically as more people moved into the region (at its height, it had a population of over 15,000 people) but the central structures – the great mounds which characterize the site – were carefully planned and executed and would have involved a large work force laboring daily for at least ten years to create even the smallest of the 120 which once rose above the city (of which 80 are still extant). The city flourished through long-distance trade routes running in every direction which allowed for urban development. There was a wide plaza for merchants, a residential area for the common people and another for the upper-class, a ball court, a playing field for the game known as Chunkey, fields of corn and other crops, solar calendar of wooden poles, and the mounds which served as residences, sometimes graves, and for religious and political purposes. For many years, it was thought that the people of Cahokia “mysteriously vanished” but excavations from the 1960’s to the present have established that they abandoned the city, most likely due to overpopulation and natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and that it was later repopulated by the tribes of the Illinois Confederacy, one of which was the Cahokia. In the present day, Cahokia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and ongoing archaeological site covering 2,200 acres (890 ha) visited by millions of people from around the world every year.

In its heyday in the 1100s, Cahokia — located in what is now southern Illinois — was the center for Mississippian culture and home to tens of thousands of Native Americans who farmed, fished, traded and built giant ritual mounds. By the 1400s, Cahokia had been abandoned due to floods, droughts, resource scarcity and other drivers of depopulation. But contrary to romanticized notions of Cahokia’s lost civilization, the exodus was short-lived, according to a new UC Berkeley study. The study takes on the “myth of the vanishing Indian” that favors decline and disappearance over Native American resilience and persistence, said lead author A.J. White, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology. “One would think the Cahokia region was a ghost town at the time of European contact, based on the archeological record,” White said. “But we were able to piece together a Native American presence in the area that endured for centuries.” The findings, just published in the journal American Antiquity, make the case that a fresh wave of Native Americans repopulated the region in the 1500s and kept a steady presence there through the 1700s, when migrations, warfare, disease and environmental change led to a reduction in the local population.

One settlement, Cahokia in modern-day Illinois, had a population of 20,000 at its peak around 1100-1150 A.D. Around that same period in time, New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon was the center of a sophisticated culture that erected what were the most massive buildings on the continent, until the rise of skyscrapers built from steel girders in the late 1800s. Those urban centers were part of what historians Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven Hunt Corey have described as “a landscape rich with its own history—a land shaped by diverse peoples living in varying patterns of settlement.” Like cities in other parts of the world, Cahokia, which sprawled over an area of about five square miles, developed in a highly desirable spot. The settlement was situated along a flood plain that provided fertile soil for agriculture, with nearby hickory forests to provide wood and other raw materials as well as wildlife to hunt, according to Lori Belknap, site manager for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Cahokia also had convenient access to the nearby Mississippi River, which its residents—a people known as the Mississippian culture—navigated in large dugout canoes. “It likely was a trading center,” Belknap says. Like a modern city with suburbs, Cahokia’s outer edge was a residential area, consisting of houses made from sapling frames lined with clay walls and covered by prairie grass roofs. Further inside was a log palisade wall and guard towers, which protected a central ceremonial precinct of the site, including Monks Mound, the Grand Plaza and 17 other mounds. More than 100 mounds extended more than a mile outside the wall in all directions. Some served as bases for what probably were important community buildings, while other cone-shaped mounds functioned as burial sites. Still others apparently were markers that delineated the city’s boundaries, according to Belknap.

Cahokia Mounds, archaeological site occupying some 5 square miles (13 square km) on the Mississippi River floodplain opposite St. Louis, Missouri, near Cahokia and Collinsville, southwestern Illinois, U.S. The site originally consisted of about 120 mounds spread over 6 square miles (16 square km), but some of the mounds and other ancient features have been destroyed. Some 70 mounds are preserved in Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Established in 1979 and encompassing 3.4 square miles (8.9 square km), it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982. Cahokia was first occupied in 700 CE and flourished for approximately four centuries (c. 950–1350). It reached a peak population of as many as 20,000 individuals and was the most extensive urban centre in prehistoric America north of Mexico and the primary centre of the Middle Mississippian culture. The area was later named Cahokia (meaning “Wild Geese”) for a group of Illinois peoples that inhabited the area in the 18th century. Skilled administrators and a large labour force were needed to plan, build, and maintain the site. It was laid out with clearly defined zones for administrative and ceremonial functions, elite compounds, residential neighbourhoods, and even suburbs—all with similar orientation on the cardinal directions. Among the largest features are an enormous central plaza encompassing nearly 40 acres (16 hectares) and numerous immense earthworks, including the pyramidal Monks Mound (built between 900 and 1200), the largest prehistoric earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere, which rises to 100 feet (30 metres), covers more than 14 acres (6 hectares), and contains more than 25 million cubic feet (700,000 cubic metres) of earth. The seat of governance for Cahokia, Monks Mound is believed to have housed a building some 100 feet long, nearly 50 feet (15 metres) wide, and 50 feet tall. Materials excavated at the site indicate that the city traded with peoples from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico, the Appalachians, the Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountains.

At its peak around the turn of the first millennium, Cahokia, a city in what is now Illinois, was home to as many as 20,000 people. Members of North America’s Mississippian culture, Cahokia’s residents constructed enormous earthen mounds used alternatively as residences, burial grounds, meeting places and ceremonial centers. Per the Washington Post’s Nathan Seppa, the bustling community included farmers tasked with cultivating maize, artisans who crafted ornate clay vessels and sculptures, and even ancient astronomers who tracked the passage of time with the help of Stonehenge-like timber circles. Cahokia grew from a small settlement established around 700 A.D. to a metropolis rivaling London and Paris by 1050. But just 200 years later, the once-thriving civilization had all but vanished, abandoning its patchwork collection of monumental earthworks for still-unknown reasons. Theories regarding Cahokia’s demise run the gamut from environmental disasters to political clashes with neighboring groups. Given the lack of concrete evidence left behind by the Mississippians, scholars will likely never know exactly what led them to leave their home. Still, new research appears to rule out at least one oft-cited explanation: As Glenn Hodges reports for National Geographic, a team led by Caitlin Rankin, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has found that the soil surrounding one of Cahokia’s mounds remained stable until the mid-1800s—centuries after the Mississippians’ departure. The analysis, published in the journal Geoarchaeology, refutes the idea that Cahokia’s inhabitants overharvested wood from the surrounding forests, sparking erosion and flooding that rendered the area uninhabitable.

The Cahokia were an American Indian tribe indigenous to the Midwest. The tribe is extinct. Their descendants may have accompanied the Confederated Peoria to Oklahoma in 1867. The Cahokia were members of the Illinois, a group of approximately twelve Algonquian-speaking tribes who occupied areas of present Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas. Although little is known about their culture, the Cahokia were not related to the prehistoric inhabitants of the Cahokia Mounds, which are located near Collinsville, Illinois. That ancient site was named for the Cahokia who dwelled nearby during the late seventeenth century. The Cahokia resided in present Illinois near the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers when Father Jacques Marquette visited the region in 1673. About 1700 they moved south along the east bank of the Mississippi to a site near present Cahokia, Illinois, where a Catholic mission had been established in 1699. There they joined the Tamaroa, a people with whom they had been closely allied. The two tribes combined for a total of about ninety lodges. The Tamaroa separated from the Cahokia in 1701. The Cahokia continued living near the mission until they relocated south in 1734. French influences, especially liquor, had negatively impacted their population. It also brought attacks by pro-British tribes, who destroyed their village in 1752. The Cahokia subsequently resettled near the Michigamea, who had likewise been attacked. The Cahokia and the Michigamea were soon assimilated by the Kaskaskia and were recognized as such by the United States in 1803. As Kaskaskia they banded with the Peoria and removed from Illinois to present Kansas during the 1830s. There, as members of the Confederated Peoria tribe, they were assigned land in northeast Indian Territory (present Ottawa County, Oklahoma) in 1867. That reservation was allotted to 153 Peoria beginning in 1889. The number of allottees who were of Cahokia descent is unknown.

The Cahokia were an Algonquian-speaking tribe of the Illinois confederacy who were usually noted as associated with the Tamaroa tribe. At the time of European contact with the Illinois Indians, they were located in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas. Like all the confederate Illinois tribes, they were a roving people until they and the Tamaroa were gathered together into a mission settlement in about 1698 by Jesuit Priests. This mission, first known as Tamaroa, but later as Cahokia, was near the present-day site of Cahokia, Illinois, on the east bank of the Mississippi River, nearly opposite the present-day St. Louis, Missouri. In 1721, the settlement was the second town among the Illinois in importance. On the withdrawal of the Jesuits, the tribe declined rapidly, chiefly from the demoralizing influence of a neighboring French garrison, and was nearly extinct by 1800. Five Cahokia chiefs and headmen joined those of other Illinois tribes at the 1818 Treaty of Edwardsville, Illinois, ceding to the United States half of the present state of Illinois. With the other remnant tribes of the confederacy, they moved westward in about 1820, first to Kansas and then finally to present-day Oklahoma. The Cahokia, along with the Michigamea, were eventually absorbed by the Kaskaskia and finally the Peoria. The Cahokia tribe is now considered extinct. Another earlier tribe, also referred to as Cahokians, built one of the largest man-made earthen structures in America and a large city. Referred to today, as the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, it was inhabited from about A.D. 700 to 1400. Built by ancient peoples known as the Mound Builders, the city’s original population was thought to have been only about 1,000 until about the 11th century, when it dramatically expanded. At its peak, from 1,100 to 1,200 A.D., the city covered nearly six square miles and boasted a population of as many as 100,000.