University Place  Bob Birmingham Life, Death and Archaeology at Fort Blue Mounds  January 15, 2013 UP823    cc >> Welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum. My name is Bethany Brander, and today we are pleased to introduce and host archeologist and professor Bob Birmingham's presentation "Life, Death, and Archeology at Fort Blue Mounds" as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Please join me in welcoming Bob to the stage as he describes his investigations at Fort Blue Mounds. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you. I hope that the State Historical Society doesn't distance themselves too far from my comments. [LAUGHTER] After all, they published the book. [LAUGHTER] Thank you and today I want to talk about the book. And I would like first to start off by saying that this book was something that is almost 30 years in coming in that my interest in the Black Hawk War goes back to my graduate student days. I kept running across Black Hawk's path. 

I guess it's more than 30 years ago. [LAUGHTER] I like to think 30 years ago. [LAUGHTER] Who's counting? [LAUGHTER] >> We all were. [LAUGHTER] >> But when I was down in the southern part of the Rock River drainage, I ran across Black Hawk frequently. I had been assigned, as a new graduate student, to do archeological work along the Rock River, and this was in Illinois. That's Black Hawk country. Everything is Black Hawk there. And one time a friend of mine, an artifact collector in the Quad Cities area, wanted to show me Black Hawk places, including Saukenuk, the birthplace of Black Hawk. And he showed me the general area which, in fact, was under the city of Rock Island. And he showed me an area where a gas station had literally just destroyed a part of the site, and he had pictures of big storage pits and so on. 

And I remember, as I recount in the book, feeling kind of bad about that. Here was this famous person and his home site and village and a place where all these events happened were being systematically destroyed. No one seemed to really care. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice someday to do something about that. So I spin forward many decades, we won't count again, and I'm the state archeologist of Wisconsin, just by series of coincidences and so on, and was in a position to do exactly that, to help preserve great sites. And one day a guy called me and said that a famous battlefield, Black Hawk Battlefield was going to be developed into condominiums, and this is the Wisconsin Heights Battlefield not too far from here. And I sort of remembered what I was feeling about this other site, and I thought, cool, I can do something about this probably. Talked to some people and just coincidentally DNR started a new program. It was the Wisconsin River Conservation Project. Basically finding areas along the Wisconsin River that should be preserved. 

And they're speaking mostly of natural areas and so on, but they, as it turns out, actually had money... [LAUGHTER] Money. [LAUGHTER] For the old days. [LAUGHTER] For acquisition of areas. So I called the guy who was in charge of the program, a guy named Dave Gjestson, who'd become my very, very good friend, worked on a lot of projects, and I told him the story of the Wisconsin Heights Battlefield, and he was, quite frankly, blown away. And he looked at his maps and said, well, this is in our acquisition area, and, unbelievably, within a very short time, DNR had purchased the land and preserved that battlefield. So, like I said, this book is coming out of some long-term interests. Now, after that, I was thinking about Black Hawk War and thought, well, you know, most of this so-called war took place in Wisconsin. I wonder how many other places. There's a famous massacre site at Bad Axe, for example. 

And there were other places, and so I had some money, unbelievably so, to do surveys, and so we contracted with some archeologists to go find what's left of the Bad Axe Battlefield to see if we could preserve that. But when I was working here, a colleague came to me and said, well, there is this site called Fort Blue Mounds which was occupied during the Black Hawk War. It was a Black Hawk War fort, and did you know that we, that is the State Historical Society, owned it? And I said, no, absolutely not. So I skedaddled out there to the area to find out where this was because we actually had pictures of dedication of the fort in the early 20th century. Lots of people like you were out there. It was a big deal. The landowners had dedicated the fort site to the State Historical Society, and it became the first historic site of the Wisconsin Historical Society. And then everybody forgot about it. [LAUGHTER] They did. And they put a historic marker, and then they had some pillars around it, and it was a big deal. 

Through the years, people just kind of forgot about it. Farmers had plowed the area around it, knocking down pillars and stuff like that. I went to check the deed in the historical society because I thought if there's going to be a land transfer, there must be a deed. And there was a deed in the State Historical Society vault that pinpointed the site. It said starting at the middle of the fort go so many feet. [LAUGHTER] And so many and so many. [LAUGHTER] No external reference. A local individual, one of the descendants of the early Brighams, who founded the first American town here, took me out and said, well, here's the fort and there was a historic marker. But again, there were no pillars, there were no external references, and worse, I could see from my vantage point there that subdivisions were popping up all over the place. And I thought, holy cow, within a very short time we're going to have Fort Blue Mound Estates around this and we don't even know where our property is. 

It was a quarter acre that they donated that contained at least a part of the fort. And so we decided, I decided, well, this is a good chance to use archeology in order to find the fort, find where our property was, and at least get that preserved, and then maybe we could work on other aspects of preservation later. >> How long ago was that? >> This was in 1990. Well, actually, 1991. >> When was it deeded? When was the property deeded? >> I think it was 1922. It was actually deeded before that. The dedication ceremony was in 1922. So, all of that had taken place. So, looking at the project however, doing an archeological project like this is usually hugely expensive. It requires lots of expertise, lots of time and so on, and I didn't have that kind of money. 

But, on the other hand, we were hot on this Black Hawk preservation project and, again, subdivisions, so we decided to tap into the public, and for the next, almost the next decade we had volunteers help us. A few staff members, volunteers who worked only on weekends and only during the summer. And we had something like 125 volunteers working, helping to relocate the fort. It was wonderful because everyone who worked on the project became Black Hawk War experts. [LAUGHTER] Seriously. They went home, they read everything they could find about it. And discussions in the work pits and screening would be all about Wisconsin history. Isn't that wonderful? And that was because they could actually touch it, and things were more meaningful. You find a nail in your backyard, you wouldn't think anything of that, but when you find a nail from a fort site that played an important role in history, that's a little bit different. And one of our volunteers, his great grandfather was at the site and was a blacksmith. 

So any piece of metal he would just be very please with. So, one of the problems we faced was the historical record, interestingly. The fort was described by a number of people. Especially in the late 19th century there had been an anniversary of the Black Hawk War, so the State Historical Society got a lot of people together to write memoirs and Fort Blue Mound played a big role because a lot of dramatic events took place there. It was a hugely important fort in this whole thing. But the several accounts of the fort suggested it was huge. It was 150-foot on a side, which for a fortification of that type was pretty big. And the land that we owned was a quarter acre, which meant that the whole fort could not be on that quarter acre. It's 150-foot. This historical record gave us a pain in the butt throughout the project because we kept looking for a big fort, and, as it turns out, the whole fort was on the quarter acre, but we kept looking for a big fort. 

Any case, so that's sort of the history and motivation, and I want to talk a little bit more specifically about the book and about the research involved. One is the book really tells three interrelated stories, maybe four interrelated stories. One is the Black Hawk War, so-called Black Hawk War. An event so huge that I personally consider it the most important event, historical event, to happen in what is now Wisconsin history. And why is that? Anybody guess why I would think that? >> Marked the end of Native American -- in Wisconsin. >> At the end of the war, 1830, President Jackson implemented a new policy and said all Indian people must move to the west side of the Mississippi River. It's obviously you can't have two people involved here. Obviously the Americans wanted land, and so, systematically, people were being removed. And this gave the government the excuse, the opportunity at the end of the way to say, see, even thought Wisconsin tribes were not involved, right away they sat down with the Ho-Chunk and said you got to go, with the Pottawatomie and said you got to go. My good friend Ada Deer is here. 

They had some powerful leaders. Menominee were supposed to be removed too, but through a variety of circumstances they, fortunately, got to stay. But any case, most of southern Wisconsin was, literally, to be vacated by native people, inviting settlement. So within a very short time, Black Hawk War took place in 1832, by 1848 Wisconsin had a population big enough to be a state, and that could not have happened, at least at that time, had it not been for this conflict. The second story I tell is, and the Black Hawk War has been dealt with by many, many historians, but because of my interest in Fort Blue Mounds the second story is how are the settlers involved in all of this. You have the army and militia chasing Black Hawk and then you have the native people, Black Hawk's band and so on, but the area was occupied by several thousand new settlers who got caught and were active participants, in fact, in terms of militia against native people. And then I use, sort of the third part then, I use as an example of this Fort Blue Mounds, for which we have a lot of documentation, and of course which we have the actual items, the material culture and so on, from the archeology. The fourth part of the book is, in fact, a great preservation story. And that is, remember, we wanted to find the fort so we could make sure it was preserved. And so we did that. 

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places but, in the meanwhile, created such a great interest in the public, especially local public, that even as we speak, Dane County has acquisition of the lands around the fort in their plan. And a new organization started, Blue Mounds Historical Society, and preservation and interpretation of the site is their number one priority. So it turns out to be also a wonderful preservation story that unrolled here at the Wisconsin Historical Society. So let's look at some images illustrating all of these things. It would take me about three lectures to even do an adequate job of talking about the Black Hawk War, Black Hawk conflict. Fortunately, in my book I give a concise discussion about it. But, as many of you know, the conflict began when a great warrior chief named Black Hawk crossed the Mississippi River from Iowa with a band of about a thousand men, women, and children, mostly Sauk and Fox but some other people also, in order to reclaim lands that had been ceded to the federal government much to the displeasure of a part of the Sauk and Fox band tribe. Some people were in favor of this, some people, especially Black Hawk was not, and after a time, many incidents led, especially when Black Hawk came back to his place of Saukenuk, his home village. He found settlers on his village and that they had even been disinterring graves of his ancestors. So, a bunch of this led him to seek, to reclaim Saukenuk, some other lands. 

As I discuss in the book, historians have any number of theories about what he really had in mind because when you look at it objectively, it seemed like a crazy, absolute crazy idea. And he didn't bring just warriors. He brought men and women. So what was he thinking? That the Americans were just going to go away? And in his own words, he sheds only a little light about it. He says, I loved my country. I fought for it. But in the book, I give a little bit different spin. Being an anthropologist, I point out the importance of religion, what we call religion or belief systems in Native American decision-making and actions. Very important. Far more important than others. 

And to that extent, I point out that Black Hawk also had advice from others, especially a prophet named White Cloud, who basically told him that if he did this, the Americans would honor this, or if they didn't, that the British, the British had not been far removed from this area, the War of 1812, for example, still had kind of interest, but the British and other tribes would come to their aid. But anyway, this prophet said he dreamed that this would all turn out to be fine. And in the book I point out many other instances in which Black Hawk seems to be making decisions based on dreams and visions and other sorts of things which do not make sense to us in the more Americanized community but are perfectly understandable in terms of Native American beliefs. This connection with the supernatural. So that's one spin that I put on there a little bit. But Black Hawk had been chased, or rather crossed the river in spring of 1832. The governor of Illinois, Illinois was a state at the time, ironically said that the Indians were invading a sovereign state and called out the militia, the Illinois militia, which in turn called up another militia which was the predecessor of the Wisconsin State National Guard which was a Michigan territory militia. This was all part of the Michigan territory at one point. And the head of that militia was one Henry Dodge. The boss hog of settlements in the southwestern. 

Henry Dodge, a very colorful person, also one of the first people to bring black slaves with him. So there was slavery at Dodgeville at one point. In this drawing, by the way, of Illinois militia, this is supposed to be Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln had joined the militia and went up as far as Fort Atkinson where he was mustered out, and then according to him, somebody stole his horse, and he walked back to southern Illinois. Another Lincoln story. Lincoln says that the only sort of violence that he encountered were mosquitoes. [LAUGHTER]  So, they called the militia and the United States Army was alerted, and basically, to make a long, long story short, Black Hawk was chased up the Wisconsin River. As it turns out, no British came, no other tribes. [INAUDIBLE] >> You said Wisconsin. >> Oh, yeah, sorry. 

Rock River. A few Ho-Chunk joined him at one point, but there was no massive uprising, and Black Hawk's band came into Wisconsin starting in late May and early June. And, by this time, the band was starving. They were mostly on foot. They came up to where Fort Atkinson is right now. Fort Atkinson is named for the general at the time. In fact, they made a fort there. And then, at that point, Black Hawk had disappeared from the military radar. A thousand people on foot. The military lost them. 

They couldn't find them for a long time, which led Jackson to be so angry that he fired Atkinson and had him replaced, but his replacement never showed up so Atkinson kind of supervised it through there. But they literally lost them for a long time. But near Fort Atkinson Dodge picked up his trail. Black Hawk came through this area. Who knows? Right here. He came up right through the Isthmus here. Could well have walked right here across the Capitol grounds here. And then lit out to Wisconsin Heights on the Wisconsin River where the militia caught up with him. There was a short battle there which Black Hawk held off the militia but just for a time. And the band escaped. 

Again, many deaths taking place, not just because of battle but because of starvation, exhaustion, other sorts of things. The militia and the United States army joined up. Once they had his trail, went to the Wisconsin River at a place near Bad Axe, and there much of the band were massacred by the militia and the army, thus ending the conflict in August of 1832. This is part of the Battle of Bad Axe. A gun boat had been set up, and as the natives had tried to cross the Mississippi River, they were literally gunned out in the river by a gun boat and killed. Many of them losing their life crossing the river. Although, there was a horrific battle on the land itself. This, I just wanted to show this. This is an ax, battle ax, Sauk or Fox, that was actually found or was captured at the Bad Axe battle and is a part of the State Historical Society collections. So we actually have a remnant of that battle. 

Now, during this time there had been two principal occupations of settlers in the Midwest. One was along the Illinois River and its branches, which was the agricultural area of the Midwest. Lots and lots of new settlers, mostly making farms, communities that supported the farms and so on. And the other principal area of settlement was right here, just west of where we're standing in the driftless area. This was the lead mining region. Lead, in fact, had been mined here by natives for thousands of years. And when the Americans found out about that, and the British before them, a great lead mining industry began in this area. Lead was needed, was critical in this portion of Wisconsin, excuse me, national history. Anybody know what for? Lead? >> Bullets? >> That's logical. >> Paint. 

>> Paint. What was it? >> Pewter. >> Oh, pewter. No, it was actually paint. By this time all of the early colonial houses were looking pretty shabby out in the east coast. They'd been around for a while. And, gradually, people started to paint their houses. And they painted them white. And for this they needed a lot of lead. So, actually, it was, the lead mining district here in Wisconsin grew because of eastern house fashions. 

But bullets too. But, actually, the main industry was paint. Remember lead in paint? White paint especially. >> Does that account for neatness and stupidity? [LAUGHTER] >> Yeah, with the miners, yeah. [INAUDIBLE] >> I often think about that but before lead poisoning would get you, life on the frontier killed you some other way. [LAUGHTER] So, it probably didn't affect them as much as dysentery and small pox and any number of nasty people that were around. >> How about the people who are using the paint? >> Oh, I see. Out there? Next book. [LAUGHTER] Now, all of these black spots are places where, in fact, people banded together and built fortifications. All they heard was Black Hawk and murderous natives were coming to kill you. 

And so almost everybody, Americans living in the Midwestern area here, vacated their homes. The whole frontier had been vacated. Towns emptied. And people built fortifications. Sometimes these were just houses that put fences around. Others were barricades. Some built proper fortifications, like at Blue Mounds, and they actually formed militia. And they were talking about at least 3,000 American men had volunteered to be a part of either the Illinois or the Michigan territory militia. So, during this period, during a three to four month period, virtually the whole area of American occupation had been vacated. That's how great affect this had on the local populations. 

Forts were built. This is Fort Hamilton. You can see how many forts are built in the lead mining district. Twenty-one I counted and many more. Over 80 fortifications were built in Illinois and what is now Wisconsin during the Black Hawk War and some more in Indiana. The panic had spread throughout the Midwest, and I'm talking about panic. People were lined up in Galena to get steamboats to get out and to go down the river and so on. There was a great deal of sense of panic, and it was promoted by some incidents during the Black Hawk War. You can imagine any time somebody got killed this rage through the frontier and got everybody concerned and excited and so on. At Blue Mounds, this person, Ebenezer Brigham, was a lead miner, and it was at this community, what is now called Blue Mounds, that Fort Blue Mounds had been built. 

It's largely a lead mining, mostly young lead miners and a few families. That's it. There you can see on the bottom, this is the land survey records from 1833 that show Brigham's establishment, and he built his fortification up on a high hill. Brigham's digs. And this is the high hill. There you see the Blue Mounds. I presume everybody knows what the Blue Mounds are. They're big geological formations out there. Very beautiful. Blue Mound State Park was up there. 

They built the fort here because it was prairie and it was a high hill and you could see for miles. You could see why this mound, Blue Mounds, up there would be a poor place for a fort, fortification, because it looked very much like this in 1832. It was wooded. So, people could crawl right up to your fort without you seeing them. So it was logical that they built this fort then. And also, it was right next to his digs, and so he had lots of lead, inexhaustible ammunition. So, they built the fort in May of 1832, and subsequently, because it was the closest fortification to, literally, Black Hawk's trail, it turned into a very strategic place. The US Military used it to resupply. They sent supplies to Fort Blue Mounds to be redistributed. Dodge told the militia at Fort Blue Mounds, you are especially important because you're close to where the action is, so don't run away. 

Stay here. Do not run away. And because of its strategic location too, it was, in fact, the place of three very dramatic events. One was an attack on the fort that killed one man. And then another attack by Black Hawk's warriors themselves that killed two men in the fort. And so, as you can see, the people after this were plenty scared, and one of the problems is that they had no guns. A timely sort of observation here is that the people on the frontier had very few guns. We sort of imagine them bristling with guns and so on, but there were 50 men at Fort Blue Mounds and they had a couple of pistols and a couple of rifles. That was it. One place, a couple places in the Illinois valley, one community got together when they wanted to build a fortification. 

They were all farmers, and they found that they had two guns and one didn't work. [LAUGHTER] The others, people actually had to donate pewter and lead objects so they could make ammunition because they had no ammunition. Now, the United States provided lots of guns. They brought in guns and distributed them, but not all people got them, and the people that didn't get them were Fort Blue Mounds. We have these sad notes from Brigham saying what does Dodge have against us? We don't have any guns. We've got people killing our people and there's no guns. And so that was another thing that we looked for in our excavations. What evidence backs this up, that they didn't have much ammunition? One of the characters I highlight in my book is Esau Johnson. Esau Johnson pops up. He was a great, great frontier character. 

And he left volumes of his notes on the Black Hawk War and his existence at Fort Blue Mounds which are curated by the State Historical Society. He wrote them in the 1880s, when he was probably in his 80s, and, obviously, nobody else was still living to contradict him. [LAUGHTER] It was him that gave this 150-foot size of the fort. Now, we should have been suspicious because he also claimed that he was the strongest man in the fort. [LAUGHTER] It was his idea to build the fort. It was his wood that supplied the fort. Everyone envied his horse. [LAUGHTER] And it goes on. You get the idea. Genuine character. 

Tall-tale spinner and so on, but unfortunately that's where a lot of our information came from in regard to the fort. But one incident stands out as real interesting, and that is the famous release of the Hall girls. In May of 1832, some Pottawatomie warriors decided to take the advantage of an atmosphere of war to settle some personal issues they had with a settler family. Some arguments and insults that had been traded. And they went and they slaughtered the family. And apparently some Sauk and Fox from Black Hawk's band accompanied them. They slaughtered the family except for two girls. Teenage girls who were held captive. Now, you can imagine how this played in the eastern press, right? As an example of the horrific acts that Black Hawk himself was perpetrating. And this happened a lot, by the way. 

One of the incidents at Blue Mounds, as I point out in the book, was also motivated by a general atmosphere of war, and one young man had gotten into some arguments with a guy's wife at Blue Mounds. And it was this guy who was killed and it turns out with some Ho-Chunk participation. But it was settling a score rather than a political action. So it happened a lot. But, anyway, so these girls had been captured and held captive, and so the word got out that they should try to find where these girls are and negotiate that. So the Indian agent who was stationed at Fort Blue Mounds actually asked the chiefs of the four lakes area, Lake Mendota and so on, to try to find where these girls are being held. They knew Black Hawk was somewhere in the general area. They didn't know exactly where. And the Pottawatomie apparently had given these girls to the Sauk and Fox, and the Sauk and Fox are apparently holding the girls as a negotiating chip, basically. So, the Indian agent came here, Lake Mendota, met with the local chiefs, the local chief said, hey, we want to keep peace and everything, we'll see what we can do, and within a couple days they reported back that they could deliver the Hall girls for a payment of some horses and some other things. 

And so that took place. The Hall girls were delivered up near Fort Blue Mounds. In fact, just for those of you who are interested in effigy mounds, they said in a place where there is a lot of animals made of dirt near the fort. So we can pinpoint this. This is just east of Mount Horeb. We can pinpoint the place where these girls were actually released. And so the girls were released. They were healthy, ragged but healthy. Esau Johnson, of course, said his wife personally took care of them. [LAUGHTER] And gave them food and so on. 

The girls were later released to their families. But then Dodge did something really tragic in a way in that he and others got worried that the Ho-Chunk knew too much. They had gotten release of these girls within a very short time so they must know where Black Hawk is. And so he took the hostage release party, which consisted of the major chiefs of four lakes area here, hostage. He captured them and held them for weeks for a promise that they would not raise the ax against the Americans and so on. Incredibly misguided. And following that, we find the first death happening at Fort Blue Mounds with some Ho-Chunk. So that might have been another motivation. The chiefs were incredibly insulted that this took place. And many other things happened. 

>> We've got a question. >> Yeah. >> What was the Indian agent at Fort Blue Mounds? >> The Indian agent. It just flew out of my head here. >> Was it Henry Gratiot? >> Gratiot. I'm sorry. Thank you very much. Gratiot. He was the Indian agent, and he stayed at Fort Blue Mounds quite a bit. And when he was away, a guy named Bouchard acted in his. 

>> How effective was communication among the white people, do different tribes and different Native American groups speak their own language? >> Yes. >> So then language was an issue? >> Well, it was an issue, but there were terra francas, lingua francas. Everybody spoke French and so on. But it did turn out to be an issue at Wisconsin Heights because one of the individuals wanted to deliver a message to the militia that we could stop fighting and that Black Hawk will go back, but, at that point, there was no translators. So his message was never heard that they basically wanted to surrender. The whole thing could have stopped at that point had they had a translator. So it was still an issue, but the native people, especially, usually knew several languages. It was the Americans who had to be specially trained. Brigham had, in his account books, words in Ho-Chunk for trade, how to say this and how to say that. So it was Americans themselves that did not understand native languages, but the natives could speak French and English and whatever language they needed to, as well as other native languages. 

So we set out to find Fort Blue Mounds, as I mentioned. We spent many years in the summers excavating. Many people bringing their own expertise. This is how we found the site. You can see the historic marker there with pillars piled up right next to it. And so we used a historic marker as our point zero and began excavations and right away started coming up with some very interesting items. Bottles, pieces of bone, clay pipe fragments, shot, indicating that we're certainly on the right spot. And fortuitously, we also came right down, in the early part of the excavations, with the wall of the fort itself. Can you see that stockade trench? And we thought, oh, boy, this is going to be easy. And so nine years later... 

[LAUGHTER] We found the final corner. But again, we were sort of misled by the fact that we kept looking for a bigger fort. We came to a point where this stockade trench ended. Just ended. And then it went out about 40 feet, and then we excavated beyond there and we couldn't find the trench. As it turns out, the fort had turned a corner, and the blank spot here was one of the blockhouses. It was blank because the blockhouse was made of horizontal logs and left no imprints. So we had to kind of learn the site as we went along in order to start projecting where other features had to be. And after a time, it really did make a whole lot of sense, and that was thrilling. I'll mention a couple of my favorite items from our excavations. 

One is a metal brace for a wooden handle pick or shovel. And it was broken and it was found right in that trench I just showed you. As the trench came to a part where there were shallow bedrock, so they started to get hard. So some worker, at this point, native people are coming to kill you, dig a fort quick, quick quick, and he breaks his tool. And so, as I mentioned, you could almost still hear expletives.. [LAUGHTER] Hovering over the site. This is a moment in history, and that's what archeology really allows you to see sometimes is these special moments. And the second one is actually a fob, like a watch fob, but it had a stamp, a wax stamp with the letter J. It's the kind of thing that is very rare out here, but in Europe and out east, this would be a gentleman's fob for stamping letters and so on with wax stamp. Kind of unexpected here but indicates someone of importance or someone of perceived importance. 

>> Esau Johnson no doubt. [LAUGHTER] >> You got it. [LAUGHTER] We went to the master list of everyone we knew was at the fort, and the only last name was Johnson. [LAUGHTER] Further, we found it in the blockhouse area and we know there were two blockhouses at the site. One was occupied by Brigham and the other one was occupied by Johnson. And I thought, here we're sort of reaping scorn on Johnson, but he actually did leave his place in history, possibly, in the form of this fob. Whether he intentionally buried it so that we could find it... [LAUGHTER] Is unknown, but this was one of the great ironies. We can never know positively if that is the case, but it's still very amusing to think of. >> What material is it made out of? >> It was brass. 

It was mostly brass, and then where the J is, that's actually wax. That is actually wax. And I'll tell you a sad story is that we could not get that into conservation fast enough. We took pictures. And that wax dried out and cracked very quickly which is always a danger in digging archeological sites in that conservation is always an issue. We had some conservatives waiting, but in this case, we just waited a little bit too long and so lost that inter J.  Other objects. Dominoes. A piece of a plate that was like this. We identified the pattern, and the interesting thing about this is that this is a commemorative plate from England. 

Most of the ceramics, almost all ceramics at the time were English ceramics. Americans didn't start making their own ceramics until the late part of the 19th century. And one of the reasons, I believe, is they still identify with the old world. Ceramics were very important. It's like dinner at Sunday. You bring out the nice ceramics, you know? Ceramics were one thing that connected you with civilization. So no matter where you were, isolated as you were, every one had up to date English ceramics on their table. I just came from research on Madeline Island, remote. Same pottery that's at Fort Blue Mounds or Boston or Chicago or New York. Same pottery. 

Now, this is a commemorative commemorating the Texian Campaign, the fight with Mexico and so on. And it was found in a feature next to a blockhouse. Now, the trouble with the Texian Campaign commemorative plate made by England, obviously marketing to Americans, is that you're shaking your head. You know why? What's that? Go ahead. >> It's later in time. >> It's later in time. Yeah. It was not 1832. We're talking about in the late 1830s and early 1840s. So this plate could not be from the Black Hawk War, but that gave us a real insight in that, in fact, the miners came back to the site and actually used the cabins that had been built for the fort. 

So we identify a second occupation, a second part of history through objects like this. And that was supported by other artifacts that we found and even some historical records. We found areas of the blockhouse, as I mentioned before. I'll just show you that quickly. And this is one of the corners of the fort. After we finally figured out that we're dealing with a small fort, we knew where to excavate. Isn't that beautiful? It's in sand. This is an archeologist's dream. [LAUGHTER] I could look at this picture for hours. [LAUGHTER] This is more important than King Tut's tomb, to me. 

[LAUGHTER] A corner. You could see it in the dirt itself. Breathtaking. >> How many archeologists started at the university after that? >> Quite a few. We found a number of features, by the way, also. One great feature was we found that the fort had a defensive ditch around it that had not been described, and we found portions of that defensive ditch. This was along the east side, southeast side defensive ditch running along the wall, and it had been filled with garbage because it had been a depression. Some of the garbage actually dated to the war itself or just right after. In fact, much of it. So this had been filled in right after the war, and when the miners first came back and they probably cleaned the place up and they buried and burned some of the remains and threw them into this ditch for us to find. 

Most of this, we only excavated the top surface, so most of this is unexcavated. In fact, most of Fort Blue Mounds is unexcavated. We got enough information for what we needed to have, but this plate, we found fragments of this plate. And this plate is a pattern called Region on the Park, London. And we know all about this plate through historical documents. It turns out it's a huge collector's plate. If you can get one. In fact, this is mine. [LAUGHTER] I found the pattern and I thought, oh, I got to get me one of these. [LAUGHTER] And I did. 

This is the pattern that was found at Fort Blue Mounds, and it was, however, this pattern dated to the late 1820s and early 1830s. So this could literally be one of the plates that perhaps Brigham brought. He was a person that had a little bit more money than anybody else in the community. And we found other objects in this that kind of indicates somebody of status was also living there. I found this and I'm going to go just end up this in a few minutes. I'll just show you some more pictures of artifacts. 1837 dime. Again, 1837, indicating reuse. That's cool, again, to have something with a date on it. But we found then that the site had been occupied twice, and we found that the site was much smaller than we had originally supposed. 

And that it was completely contained within the quarter acre. This is what we believe the site looked like. And we found two blank areas. We found the corners, as I showed you, and then two blank areas at the corners where these blockhouses would have been. We didn't spend much time excavating in the interior, only to substantiate that there are things there. There are posts and so on. But we really wanted to find the site and to find out where it was and to get it preserved. So excavating a site like this would take decades and decades and will probably sometime. But we know from historical accounts that it had a central building where most of the people lived. This is probably Esau Johnson's, and this is probably Ebenezer Brigham's. 

And, interestingly, in and around this blockhouse area is where we got more high status things, including the plates and the dime and so on. And that blockhouse is where we found that stamp with the J on it. So, we have this, we know what the fort looked like, we corrected the historic record, like is said, we put a National Register of Historic Places, and, as I began the lecture pointed out that this has really fueled a lot of great interest in this site. The Blue Mounds Historical Society now has vision and plans of making a large park around the site itself with interpretive signs. And, of course, in the back of everybody's mind is, wow, maybe this could be reconstructed some day. In Illinois, at Elizabeth, Illinois, there is a reconstructed Black Hawk fort. The only one that's authentically reconstructed. One that had been, in fact, attacked by Black Hawk. Elizabeth, Illinois, and it draws quite a few people, but I think that would probably be a good idea some day to do that. Do some more archeology, of course. 

And the location is right off of 18/151. So it's a natural for stopping by and learning more about this really, really interesting and tragic part of American history which Fort Blue Mounds is sort of a great example. Well, with that, I should end there, and I'll consider any questions at this time. We have books. [APPLAUSE]