The following experimental digital documentary poem is composed of citations of William Ellery Leonard's new verse translation of the Old English poem Beowulf (1923), George Gales's Upper Mississippi: or, Historical Sketches of the Mound-Builders, The Indian Tribes, and the Progress of Civilization in the North-West (1867), and "The Spirit Raccoon," a Ho-Chunk narrative of Lake Mendota by a storyteller once known, collected by Charles E. Brown and the Folklore Section of the Federal Workers' Project in Wisconsin in Wisconsin Indian Place Legends (1936).
When this MOUND web page is loaded and/or reloaded, server-side code selects and loads a random collection of lines from a relational database of citations:
And with battle-bucklers, as his prayer had been.
Buried without a funeral, because the church had no prayers.
At present known as Maple Bluff. Here the raccoon had.
As useless unto mortals as it was of old.
What object the MOUND-Builders had in the laborious erection.
Water or tried to go ashore. In the lake he was obliged to.
His wonder-works of glory. Let it ever be.
They bore. But those suggestions are not only based on two.
To a wooded point on the eastern shore of Lake Mendota.
Around the brands and ashes a wall they ran and wrought.
In life's next scene of transmigration be.
Years Indians camping near this bluff have heard.
Unglad of mood, in grief they mourned their great Chief dead.
The second suggestion is, that they had names like the modern.
The Yahara (Catfish) River at Lake Monona saw in the sandy soil.
