"Help Save the Great Cahokia Mound"
By C. H. Robinson, Normal, Illinois.
On April 20th, 1913, an enthusiastic party of Bloomington and Normal men made an archaeological expedition to the great Cahokia mound group in Southern Illinois, which is located in Madison and St. Clair counties, about two miles east of the corporate limits of East St. Louis, Illinois. The location is easily accessible by way of the new hard road or by the St. Louis and Collinsville electric system.
The great Cahokia, or better know as Monk's Mound, together with many smaller mounds are located on a 204 acre farm belonging to the Hon. T. T. Ramey's heirs. This farm is situated in the most picturesque and richest part of the famous "American bottoms." Land which is so fertile that even the aborigines raised much with but little effort and which no doubt led to the location and construction here of the largest earth mound ever built by primitive man, the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt or the Aztec temple mound of Mexico excepted. Monk's mound covers more ground than any pyramid of Egypt. Cheops is but 746 feet square, the Aztec temple of Mexico is 680 feet square, while Monk's mound is 1080 feet by 780 feet and 104 feet high making about 84,000,000 cubic feet of earth.
This mound has never been touched with pick or shovel, although great quantities of archaeological material have been removed from many of the surrounding smaller mounds and cultivated fields, and many fine collections are to be found in both private and public places, taken from this most ancient residence site of a vanquished race.
The variety and nature of material formed around the great Cahokia group clearly indicate that the mound builders or their successors had access to or traded with other tribes or people located at the headquarters of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, also on the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, as evidenced by the vast quantities and nature of the material, from which such large varities of implements and ornaments were constructed. For as workmen are known by their chips so here may also be found the evidence of past ages wrought in such material as flint, jasper, pipe stone, granite, agate, galena, obsidian, hematite, copper, quartz, crystal, deep sea conch shells and much other material foreign to this section of the state.
The surrounding cultivated fields are strewn with pottery fragments mingled with which may be found many human bones and implements of the stone age. Here after the heavy spring rains are over may be plowed up many characteristic specimens. Surely in ages past what a mecca this location must have been!
Regarding the shape and size of the great Cahokia mound group it may be said that all types except the effigy are represented here the form of the largest mound is a parallelogram, with straight sides, the longer of which are north and south. On the southern end thirty feet above the base is a terrace or apex, containing two acres of ground. On the western side some thirty feet above the first terrace is a second of some what less extent. The top of the mound is flat, containing about one acre and a half, and is divided into two parts the northern portion of which is some four or five feet higher than the southern portion.
Near the middle of the first terrace, at the base of the mound is a projecting point apparently the remains of a graded pathway ascending from the plain to the terrace. Monk's mound stands true to the exact points of the compass.