2/3/2009:
It was this date in 1989 that the Falkirk Mining Company donated a bit of land high on a bluff overlooking a small lake in McLean County to the state of North Dakota. At first glance there isn’t anything special about the place. Absent a nice view, it seems just like any other part of North Dakota; wide-open, majestic prairie set beneath a startling blue sky. But as you take a closer look at the ground directly in front of you, you notice two mounds of dirt rising up underneath the prairie grasses. They aren’t particularly large, about three or five feet high, and forty-five feet wide. Yet, these man-made structures in the middle of the Dakota prairie beg the question: who built them and why? To find the answers, you’ll have to turn back the clock nearly 2,000 years to the Woodland period.
Over one-and-a-half millennia before the mapping of the Northern Plains by European explorers, and centuries before the migration of the Mandan or Hidatsa into present-day North Dakota, the Woodland people, the early ancestors of the Assiniboine and Chippewa, began to settle the Northern Plains.
The new settlers differed greatly from their predecessors, the Archaic people. They built permanent dwellings constructed with wooden frames and covered with grasses or animal hides, instead of easily transportable homes such as tepees. While they still hunted, they also farmed; among the first in the future state of North Dakota to grow crops for food. Besides new methods in home construction and food production, the Woodland people brought an entire new culture to the Northern Plains. They developed their own pottery from local clay deposits. They traded for shells or copper with other American Indian groups in a trading network that extended to the ocean. And they brought with them their own customs honoring the dead.
Earlier cultures of the Northern Plains often honored their dead by placing the deceased on raised funeral platforms or under piles of rock. The Woodland people instead placed their deceased under the ground; often burying them with goods needed in the after-life; such as jewelry, tools or weapons. Over their burial-site, the Woodland people built mounds of various shapes and sizes. Many were simple in their design; built of packed earth in a cone or round shape; while others were more complex, constructed to resemble the form of animals. Unlike a modern grave, constructed for an individual person, the Woodland mounds were not single occupancy. They were closer to a cemetery than a grave; interring many people over many generations. Some mounds were in use for more than a thousand years.
The Pulver Mounds State Historic Site is not readily available for visitation. However, the two mounds in central North Dakota are a sacred site for many American Indians, and are an important reminder of the people who settled the windswept Dakota plains nearly two millennia ago.
Written by Lane Sunwall
Sources
"Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site: Teacher's Guide", Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site http://www.nps.gov/archive/knri/teach/intro.htm (accessed January 26, 2009).
"Pulver Mounds." In A Traveler's Companion to North Dakota State Historic Sites: 2nd Edition, ed. J. Signe Snortland. Bismarck, ND: State Historical Society of North Dakota, 2002.
"State Historical Society of North Dakota Strategic Long Range Plan", State Historical Society of North Dakota http://www.nd.gov/hist/LRPlan.htm (accessed January 19, 2009).