More about Indian Mounds (no poems!)

This time of year is Rouge River clean-up time. People go to the river to try to restore it to some sort of original condition. But trying to imagine the river before the white man came may be more difficult.

I thought that the mounds around here were burial grounds but after some thought and conversations with more historically apt people I now think that the mounds were a way to keep dry. The rivers were clogged with trees and the water would drain very slowly. Many areas we now think of as flood plains were a vast lake but only a few feet deep at most. Travel would be difficult; no way a canoe could be paddled through this tangle. There were foot paths that were probably animal trails in the beginning. The aboriginal people then improved the trails into paths. These paths became the first roads such and Woodward, Telegraph and Grand River. Because there was nearly always shallow water they started piling up dirt for living areas and encampments for meetings or gatherings.

The early white settlers just buried their dead in these mounds because they were high and dry. One day I'm going to plot these mounds/cemeteries on a map and then transfer it to a blank sheet of paper, then overlay it with just the rivers and streams and then the first recorded trails and last the roads.

Not that I have anything better to do. I'll let you know...