As the city of La Crosse developed,
builders ran into evidence of earlier residents.
- Robert Boszhardt: Almost immediately as people begin
to build buildings and dig into the riverfront,
the soils on the riverfront to build basements,
they begin to find artifacts
from people who have been here before.
They don't really know what they are,
and have no idea how old they are.
- Narrator: Tracings of images from the walls of rock shelters
provide early signs of a people now known as the Oneota,
who made their homes on the river terraces
of the La Crosse area.
- Robert Boszhardt: From 1300 AD 1600 AD,
La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Onalaska, Wisconsin,
was the most densely populated place
on the entire upper Mississippi River.
There were more people here
than anywhere from St. Louis
up to Minneapolis, St. Paul, and beyond.
- Narrator: In the 1920s and 30s,
archaeologists from the Milwaukee Public Museum
explored sites in western Wisconsin,
and found artifacts
that began to define the Oneota culture.
But astounding discoveries about the Oneota
were uncovered in 1978,
with the construction of the Valley View Mall in La Crosse.
The Dayton- Hudson Corporation
agreed to let archaeologists salvage what they could
of a site that local collectors knew to be rich in artifacts.
Round stains indicated the location of pits
used first by the Oneota to store their food,
and afterwards, their garbage.
- Robert Boszhardt: Each pit is like a time capsule.
So it has pottery and stone arrowheads
and charcoal and bone tools, and things like that.
We could do radiocarbon dates from those pits
and begin to reconstruct the lifeways, and the chronology,
and all sorts of things about the Oneota culture
that we never knew before.
- Jim Gallagher: They had a very sophisticated culture.
They were very productive farmers
in the truest sense of the word,
not just having little gardens,
but large agricultural fields.
They were involved in trade networks that stretched
just about all over the continental United States.
Had large populations,
large villages of a hundred, two hundred acres.
- Narrator: The richness of the finds at Valley View
led to the formation
of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at UW-La Crosse,
to document the archaeology of the area
before it was destroyed by development.
- Jim Gallagher: The Oneota, just like us, you know,
knew where our good places are to live.
So that every time a new highway was going in, or a new school,
or any kind of development,
that's where there'd be another site.
- Robert Boszhardt: You put them all together
and you try to trace the boundaries of these things
and they just all tied together.
The Oneota occupy from the south end of La Crosse
all the way up to the city of Onalaska,
which is in the north,
and then extended all the way up to Trempealeau,
which is 15 miles from here.
- Chloris Lowe: These are my ancestors.
These are the people that preceded me.
My family is tied to that area.
I have aunts and uncles and cousins
that still live in La Crosse and in the surrounding area.
And we've had people there for untold generations.
My great-grandfather was with me
until I was a sophomore in high school.
And he related stories that his grandfather had told him
about the La Crosse area,
that as they used to travel in those valleys,
especially in the evenings when they were on the river,
that they would look up the river
and there was smoke coming down
from all of, what we now call Coulees, the valleys.
The reason that smoke was there wasn't fog,
it was actually smoke from all the villages.
That was the concentration that was there of people.
You stand on the bluffs above La Crosse,
hundreds of feet above what is now the city of La Crosse.
That's one of the most beautiful areas in the United States,
I would argue in the world.
It's bountiful; It's rich.
It's green; It's clean.
It just reinforces what has been going on there
for hundreds and thousands of years.
It's not just "Indian" history.
It's not just Ho-Chunk history,
but it becomes a part of who we are as a community.
This is part of the history of the people of La Crosse.
And that the people of La Crosse
are not just the people that are standing vertical today.
The people of La Crosse are the people that
have been there for thousands and thousands of years.
Oneota culture, and yes, even before that.