Photography by Thomas Easterly, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
For 83 years, it sat on a tiered cobblestone plinth on a weird little island in the road at North Broadway and Howard Street: a giant rock. It had a bleached rectangle where the plaque had been, leaving its reason-to-be a mystery. Rams tailgaters blew past it. So did bikers on their way to Shady Jack’s, or people on their way to Smoki O’s for barbecue or the St. Louis Gospel Choral Union Hall. Now the boulder’s in the middle of a roundabout at the end of Mound Street, right under the footings of the new Mississippi River Bridge. It sits on a modern-looking concrete base. And it has a plaque. “St. Louis,” it reads, “often referred to as Mound City, was once dotted with over 40 Indian mounds. One of the largest mounds, Big Mound, was located near this spot.”
Big Mound sat fairly untouched till 1841, when something worked its way out of the soil: a cypress-wood coffin, shut with iron screws. It contained the remains of a man wrapped in a European blanket, plus some rusty steel bracelets with characters too corroded to read, and a queue of human hair, “about a foot long and plaited, and besmeared with vermilion paint.” An old man called the Daily Missouri Republican to report it was “one of the Osagus” who’d died of smallpox in the ’20s, interred there with four other men at the tribe’s request. Newspapers acknowledged it was a burial site, yet still ran op-eds—including one from a professor at the St. Louis Academy of Science—arguing that Big Mound was a buildup of silt from the river.
Perhaps this is how the North Missouri Railroad justified using it as fill dirt—even after workers unearthed, 25 feet down, a cache of conch shells, beads, and a skeleton. On either side of the skull were copper plates “about the thickness of a table spoon” and bearing a face. “The nose is greatly prolonged,” the Republican reported, “and more nearly resembles the beak of a bird than the proboscis of a man or animal.” Those bones, those beads, those ear spools—forever lost. But we do better now, we say. Even though private landowners would rather cash in on the new bridge than let archeologists dig. Even though the real footprint of Big Mound is under the bridge. But hey, it could be worse: There is a marker. And now, it has a plaque.
