MOUND TWO

Charles Brown and Vivian Morgau are at the excavation site of mound No. 5 at the Reynolds farm.
Wisconsin Historical Society, Charles E. Brown, "Charles Brown and Vivian Morgau," Image ID 147182 (1931).

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:

Now where yet it liveth, in the mould, the gold.

Buried without a funeral, because the church had no prayers.

The Yahara (Catfish) River at Lake Monona saw in the sandy soil.

Over and over: how 'twas hers to dread.

Indians; as, Black Hawk, White Bear, Buffalo, etc., and that.

"Animal" discovered in a hollow tree was a catfish.

And upon the hill-top the warriors awoke.

In life's next scene of transmigration be.

Refusing to partake of this feast.

Calling him a World-King, the mildest under crown.

To represent the tribe, as the English use the coat of arms.

A great fish-the unfortunate Indian- followed by the.

Then for him the Geats made the pyre, firm on earth.

These effigies may have been designed to perpetuate the name of.

The Yahara (Catfish) River at Lake Monona saw in the sandy soil.

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Creative Commons License

MOUNDS by Maxwell Gray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. (Based on a work at https://madisonmounds.com.) Project research and development take place at the Wisconsin Historical Society Library and Archives and University of Wisconsin—Madison. Both institutions occupy ancestral Ho-Chunk land called Teejop (day-JOPE) ("Four Lakes"), where the Ho-Chunk people have lived and called home since time immemorial. Indeed, both institutions were founded upon exclusions and erasures of the Ho-Chunk and other Indigenous peoples. Today, the Ho-Chunk and other Indigenous peoples continue to have a special connection to the region's land and water, and to resist white settler colonialism and conquest in the state. The project is committed to the development of new modes of collaboration, engagement, and partnership for the care and stewardship of past and future heritage collections and objects. (Learn more about Cultural Institution (CI) notices at Local Contexts.)