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Blood
Run
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.
Life
in an Oneota Village
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.
Oneota
Culture Yields to Change
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.
Artifacts
and Traditions Survive
Excavations
of village sites and mounds have revealed several
defining characteristics of the Oneota culture of the
upper Midwest:
-
unique
pottery made of clay and shell
-
tools
called "manos" and "metates"
used to grind foods such as corn into-a powder
-
small
stone triangular projectile points, or ar rowheads,
used in hunting pipes and tablets made of a red
stone called catlinite.
Metal
was seldom used until the advent of the Europeans, who
introduced copper, lead, brass, and iron to the Oneota.
Blood
Run Today: A Landscape of Change
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.
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