Blood Run has long been mentioned in Indian legends as a great encampment where Native Americans once gathered for trade and ceremonial activities. From about 1700 to 1725 A.D., some 5,000 people lived here, forming what was probably the largest Indian community in the upper Midwest.
During these years, the land around Blood Run Creek was home to members of the Oneota culture. It is difficult to pinpoint the origins of the Oneota, named after a river of the same name in northeast Iowa. We do know that some of the nations that descended from them included the Oto, loway, Omaha, and Winnebago.
Like most Oneota villages, Blood Run was a bustling place. By boat and on foot, multitudes of Indians from the western plains and from the East arrived to trade and socialize. What set Blood Run apart from other Oneota villages was its large size: it covered 1,200 acres along both sides of the Big Sioux River in what is now Iowa and South Dakota. Here, the Oneota built hundreds of permanent, circular lodges. Among them children played and Oneota women made pottery, cooked meals, cleaned animal hides, cleared grounds for gardens, and processed grain for storage. Men made bows and arrows, gathered wild plants, and engraved red tablets with the figures of bison. Residents raised corn, beans, squash, and sun flowers. They stored surplus grains in pits dug into gravel deposits. After a few seasons, a storage pit was relegated for use as a trash dump. Excavating these pits, archaeologists can uncover a wealth of information about the daily life of the Oneota and reconstruct certain aspects of Oneota social life. An important hub of trade, Blood Run also served as a center for social and religious activities, as indicated by the burial mounds and other earthworks built here. An 1883 survey documented some 276 mounds - both round and in the shapes of various animals. Decades of farming and railroad construction have destroyed many of the mounds so that now only 76 remain. Also gone is a large enclosure of some 15 acres of heaped earth that may have served as a fortification.
The European influence began to infiltrate Blood Run around 1700 with the arrival of French trappers and fur traders. The French introduced the Oneota first to beads and metal goods, and then to guns and horses, radically changing the ways.of the Indians to the point where, by 1725, the traditional Oneota culture had practically disappeared. Europeans also brought with them diseases that Indians had no immunity to. Tribes were decimated. Those who survived were forced out of the region by Europeans and by Indian nations from the East.
Excavations of village sites and mounds have revealed several defining characteristics of the Oneota culture of the upper Midwest:
Metal was seldom used until the advent of the Europeans, who introduced copper, lead, brass, and iron to the Oneota.
The geology of Blood Run stretches back nearly two billion years, when its ancient bedrock was formed from compressed grains of quartz sand. Glaciers - advancing across the region some 10,000 to 30, 000 years ago - desposited a drift of soil and gravel atop the bedrock. Finally, a thin mantle of windblown glacial silt, known as loess, covered the land as the glaciers retreated. Slowly and continuously over time, Blood Run Creek and the Big Sioux River have eroded these loess deposits, carving a widening path through the rolling landscape. Prairie grosses and encroaching trees help keep erosion in check. Ponds scattered here and there across the region formed when glaciers left depressions in the bedrock, or when a stream changed its course and its abandoned turn became an isolated pool.