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My vote would be Davy Crockett. Here are some interesting facts about him.1. HE RAN AWAY FROM HOME AT AGE 13.“When Davy was 13, his father paid for him to go to a school. But just four days in, Davy was bullied by a bigger and older boy. Never one to back down from a fight, one day Crockett waited in a bush along the road home until evening. When the boy and his gang walked up the road, Crockett leaped from the bush and, as he later wrote in his autobiography, “set on him like a wild cat.” Terrified that the schoolmaster would whip him for beating one of the boys so severely, he decided to start playing hooky.”“His father, John, was furious when a letter inquiring about his son's poor attendance showed up. Grabbing a stick, he chased after Davy, who fled. The teen spent the next few years traveling from his native Tennessee to Maryland, performing odd jobs. When he returned, Crockett’s parents didn’t recognize him at first. Following an emotional reunion, it was agreed that Davy would stick around long enough to help work off some family debts. About a year later, all these were satisfied, and Crockett left for good not long after.”2. HE NEARLY DIED IN A BOATING ACCIDENT.BY G.F. NESBITT & CO., PRINTER - WESTWARD BY SEA: A MARITIME PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN EXPANSION, 1820-1890, PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS“After serving under General Andrew Jackson in the Tennessee militia, Crockett got into politics. Elected as a state legislator, he served two terms between 1821 and 1823. After losing his seat in 1825, Crockett chose an unlikely new profession for himself: barrel manufacturing. The entrepreneur hired a team to cut staves (the boards with which barrels are constructed) that he planned on selling in New Orleans. Once 30,000 were prepared, Crockett and his team loaded the shipment onto a pair of flatboats and traveled down the Mississippi River. There was just one problem: The shoddy vessels proved impossible to steer.”“With no means of redirecting them, the one carrying Crockett ran into a mass of driftwood and began to capsize, with Crockett trapped below deck. Springing to action, his mates on the other boat pulled him out through a small opening. The next day, a traveling merchant rescued them all.”3. HE CLAIMED TO HAVE KILLED 105 BEARS IN ONE YEAR.“If his autobiography can be believed, the expert marksman and his dogs managed to kill 105 bears during a seven-month stretch from 1825 to 1826. Back then, bear flesh and pelts were highly profitable items, as were the oils yielded by their fat—and Crockett’s family often relied on ursid meat to last through the winter.4. A SUCCESSFUL PLAY HELPED MAKE HIM A CELEBRITY.BY PAINTED BY A.L. DE ROSE; ENGRAVED BY ASHER B DURAND - MUSEUM OF FINE ART, BOSTON, PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS“Crockett ran for Congress in 1827, winning the right to represent western Tennessee. Four years later, a new show titled The Lion of the West wowed New York theatergoers. The hit production revolved around a fictitious Kentucky congressman named Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, whose folksy persona was clearly based on Crockett. Before long, the public grew curious about the flesh-and-blood man behind this character. So, in 1833, an unauthorized Crockett biography was published.“Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee became a bestseller—much to its subject’s chagrin. Feeling that Sketches distorted his life’s story (although, to be fair, it began, “No one, at this early age, could have foretold that he was ever to ride upon a streak of lightning, receive a commission to quiet the fears of the world, by wringing off the tail of a comet,” so it's unlikely anyone thought it was a straight biography), the politician retaliated with an even more successful autobiography the very next year.”“When The Lion of the West came to Washington, Crockett finally watched the play that started it all. That night, actor David Hackett was playing Col. Wildfire. As the curtain rose, he locked eyes with Crockett. They ceremoniously bowed to each other and the crowd went wild.”5. HE RECEIVED A FEW RIFLES AS POLITICAL THANK YOU GIFTS.Over the course of his life, Crockett wielded plenty of firearms; two of the most significant were named “Betsy.” Midway through his state assembly career, he received “Old Betsy,” a .40-caliber flintlock presented to him by his Lawrence county constituents in 1822 (today, it can be found at the Alamo Museum in San Antonio). At some point during the 1830s, Crockett’s congressional tenure was rewarded with a gorgeous gold-and-silver-coated gun by the Whig Society of Philadelphia. Her name? “Fancy Betsy.”“If you’re curious, the mysterious woman after whom these weapons were christened was either his oldest sister or his second wife, Elizabeth Patton.“6. HE PUT A LOT OF EFFORT INTO MAINTAINING HIS WILD IMAGE.BY JOHN GADSBY CHAPMAN - ART COLLECTION, HARRY RANSOM HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTER, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN., PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS“For somebody who once called fashion “a thing I care mighty little about,” Crockett gave really detailed instructions to portraitists. Most likenesses, the politician complained, made him look like “a sort of cross between a clean-shirted Member of Congress and a Methodist preacher.” For the portrait above—arguably the world’s most dynamic painting of Crockett, as rendered by the esteemed John Gadsby Chapman—Crockett askedthe artist to portray him rallying dogs during a bear hunt. Crockett purchased all manner of outdoorsy props and insisted that he be shown holding up his cap, ready to give “a shout that raised the whole neighborhood.”7. HE COMMITTED POLITICAL SUICIDE BY SPEAKING OUT AGAINST ANDREW JACKSON'S NATIVE AMERICAN POLICY.“Andrew Jackson was a beloved figure in Tennessee, and Crockett’s vocal condemnation of the President’s 1830 Indian Removal Act didn’t win him many friends back home. “I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure,” the congressman later asserted, “and that I should go against it, let the cost against me be what it might.” He then narrowly lost his 1831 reelection bid to William Fitzgerald, who was supported by Jackson. In 1833, Crockett secured a one-term congressional stint as an anti-Jacksonian, after which he bidTennessee farewell, famously saying, “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”8. HE REALLY DID WEAR A COONSKIN HAT (SOMETIMES).HARRY KERR/BIPS/GETTY IMAGES“Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett TV serialtriggered a national coonskin hat craze in the 1950s. Suiting up for the title role was square-jawed Fess Parker, who was seldom seen on-camera without his trusty coonskin cap. Children adored Davy’s rustic hat and, at the peak of the show's popularity, an average of 5000 replicas were sold every day.”“But did the historical Crockett own one? Yes, although we don’t know how often he actually wore it. Some historians argue that, later in life, he started donning the accessory more often so as to capitalize on The Lion of the West (Col. Wildfire rocked this kind of headgear). One autumn morning in 1835, the frontiersman embarked upon his journey to Texas, confident that the whole Crockett clan would reunite there soon. As his daughter Matilda later recalled, he rode off while “wearing a coonskin cap.” She’d never see him again.”9. THERE'S SOME DEBATE ABOUT HIS FALL AT THE ALAMO.“It's clear that Crockett was killed during or just after the Battle of the Alamo in 1836—but the details surrounding his death are both murky and hotly-contested. A slave named Joe claimed to have spotted Crockett’s body lying among a pile of deceased Mexican soldiers. Mrs. Suzannah Dickinson (whose husband had also been slain in the melee) told a similar story, as did San Antonio mayor Francisco Ruiz.”“On the flip side, The New Orleans True American and a few other newspapers reported that Crockett was actually captured and—once the fighting stopped—executed by General Santa Anna’s men. In 1955, more evidence apparently surfaced when a long-lost diary written by Lieutenant Colonel José Enrique de la Peña saw publication. The author writes of witnessing “the naturalist David Crockett” and six other Americans being presented to Santa Anna, who promptly had them killed.”“Some historians dismiss the document as a forgery, but others claim that it’s authentic. Since 2000, two separate forensics teams have taken the latter position. However, even if de la Peña really did write this account, the famous Tennessean still might have died in combat beforehand—perhaps the Mexican officer mistook a random prisoner for Crockett on the day in question.“10. DURING SPORTING EVENTS, A STUDENT DRESSED LIKE CROCKETT RALLIES UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE FANS.DOUG PENSINGER/GETTY IMAGES“Smokey the hound dog might get all the attention, but the school has another mascot up its sleeve. On game days, a student known simply as “the Volunteer” charges out in Crockett-esque regalia, complete with buck leather clothes, a coonskin cap, and—occasionally—a prop musket.”Postscript:Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of Crockett in The Alamo was superbAttribution:10 Fascinating Facts About Davy Crockett

That depends on where you are located and what laws they have governing the licensing of trailers. In the US those requirements vary state to state. Some states, like Colorado, do not require a title for a boat (they register them), but do require a title for the trailer. Other states, like South Carolina, do not title or license trailers of any kind, but do title boats. Other states, like Tennessee, don’t title boats or trailers of any kind. Other states, like Washington, title both boats and trailers. Other states, like Ohio, will require you to title an outboard motor separately from your boat and trailer.So, to make a short answer long, you need to check with your local authorities on what is required for titling a boat trailer in that area. I would check with the DMV or equivalent. If you are purchasing a boat in a different area that does not title the boat or trailer (I know all the rules for those states above because I have purchased or owned a boat in all of those states) there are processes in place to get a title in the state you will be moving it to.I had to fill out a title application for my boat from Colorado when I brought it to Washington. If I had a previous registration history, they would have been able to issue a title on the spot, but it was a “project” boat and hadn’t been registered since 1985 and the previous owner had no clue where that registration was. Washington issued me a Ownership In Doubt Registration Certificate and after three years of registration without issue (i.e. no one reports it stolen) they’ll issued a title. Again, check with your local titling authority.

Exsqueeze me?It really is a pity that today, despite all the literature, museums and outreach, even the average citizen of the eastern United States is still blissfully unaware of the complex societies whose remnants they often walk or drive right over.Story time!The Eastern Woodlands of the United States has been a nexus for stratified civilization since 3500 B.C. The Mississippi River area was even home to its own independent cradle of agriculture known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex, from which we still have popular vegetables like squash and sunflower. The peoples that farmed these crops have been traditionally termed the “Mound Builders”, so named for their apparent proclivity towards earthworks. The term is a bit dated now, and archaeologists today are able to differentiate specific cultures, but “mound-building peoples” is often still used to describe the cultures in general.There have been many mound-building societies over the course of North American history. We’ll probably never know the exact political relationships, but we can identify consistencies in material culture and living patterns. The first one that really seems to take off across the board is the Hopewell:Starting around 100 B.C., sites all around the Mississippi start adopting a similar set of traits such as pottery styles, arrowhead techniques and artistic motifs, along with a much more pronounced sense of social stratification. The Hopewell appear to have begun with the Ohio Hopewell, which built upon the stratified Adena culture that existed since 1000 B.C. on the Ohio River valley, which connects to the Mississippi. The Hopewell greatly proliferate the number of mounds constructed in the Eastern Woodlands and diversify their uses.Hopewell “serpent” copper effigyReplica of a copper headdress recovered from Posey County, IndianaOne of the most iconic examples of the Hopewell are the Newark Earthworks: a series of interconnected circles, walls and moats that appear to serve as a massive lunar observatory. The Moon’s orbit ‘wobbles’ in relation to the Earth: at one extreme the orbit is rotated one way, and rotated the other way at the other extreme. The point in this cycle where the Moon’s orbital plane reaches its northernmost or southernmost extent before going back to the other is termed the lunar standstill, which produces an effect not unlike the Sun’s solstices. This happens every 18 years, 7 months and almost 10 days. The Newark Earthworks are able to track the Moon’s declination until the next standstill with remarkable precision.Newark today. A country club still owns parts of the earthworks.It’s possible that the Ohio Hopewell had such influence over the Eastern Woodlands that they may have started a new religious movement, or perhaps their influence was economical and assimilating their culture was better for business, or people may have simply admired parts of their culture enough to replicate it. A mix of the three may have happened, but we might never know specifically why people wanted to copy them.What we do know was that their influence was phenomenal. The Hopewell had access to a trade network that extended all the way to the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico and the Rockies, with artifacts from these regions showing up in Ohio:In the year 500 A.D., the bow and arrow trickled southward after being introduced by Arctic and Subarctic peoples. This makes hunting (and fighting) much more accessible, freeing people up from their dependencies on crops and some hierarchical control.From there the magic begins to die for the Hopewell and the societies within its sphere fall into the geographically broader-ranging Woodland period. The 500 years of the Late Woodland period saw a great intensity in fortification, a significant reduction in mound-building (though some are still built) and more numerous, smaller walled villages instead of the somewhat larger settlements of the Middle Woodland’s Hopewell. This lifestyle, in some form, actually lasted in the periphery of the Eastern Woodlands until the arrival of Europeans.By the year 1000, however, something new appears in the heart of the Mississippi. People are once again gathering in large towns, larger than ever before, and forming wealthy elites under the control of powerful rulers who began using earthworks to proclaim their legitimacy. Corn (maize) was introduced to the Eastern Woodlands in 200 B.C., but had a hard time dealing with the colder climates. However, new cold-hardy cultivars had finally been developed and were taking the Eastern Woodlands by storm into a new agricultural revolution. Things were about to get corny.Archaeologists have given these maize-crazy, mound-building chiefdoms the aptly-named title of the Mississippians:This is where things really start getting big. The power and influence of chiefs have increased drastically into large, multi-town paramount chiefdoms, though if we’re being completely honest some of these really resemble early kingdoms and the difference is largely semantic. The massive trade networks have fired back up and are bringing in more goods than ever before. They especially love Great Lakes copper. Art, culture and religious expression have also greatly expanded and this cultural movement reaches nearly every corner of the Mississippi River watershed:The “Sponemann Figurine” from Cahokia. The headwrap seen on her head has been documented in historical Native American tribes.Copper plate of a falcon-eyed man from Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma.“Crouching Man” effigy pipe from Shiloh Indian Mounds, Tennessee.More Spiro copper plate art, including a falcon dancer (or warrior) to the left. These are replicas for Spiro’s museum exhibit.Ceremonial copper axes from Etowah, Georgia.“Conquering Warrior” effigy pipe from Spiro. The wooden slat backshield he is wearing has similarities to the armor worn by Great Lakes tribes, which also protected the head and neck in this way.Wood duck effigy bowl, diorite. Moundville, Alabama.Shell gorget of two dancers from the McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture in Tennessee.Shell forget from Texas depicting a falcon and feline figure in combat. From the Werner Forman Archive at the National Museum of the American Indian.But one of the most profound examples of Mississippian culture, and what everybody wants to see when they visit the sites, are of course the mounds.These are no mere piles of dirt either, but alternating layers of various clays and particulates that each have their own physical properties and ostensibly spiritual meanings to ensure the greatest structural stability and proper religious status. Most of these clays were sourced from many miles out, even when a more convenient source was nearby. Most of these mounds were built to house a temple or chief, and the larger mounds served as residential-religious complexes for the elites. When the person living on the mound died, his house was burnt with any of his belongings and a new mound was constructed atop.The most impressive of these Mississippian mounds, still standing today (in somewhat eroded form) is Monks Mound in the archaeological site of Cahokia:This terraced platform mound is 100 feet high, 775 feet wide, and 955 feet long; slightly larger at the base than the largest Egyptian pyramid.The mound held multiple large buildings, including that of the paramount chief who overlooked a city we call Cahokia, the largest in pre-Columbian North America north of the Rio Grande, existing from A.D. 1050 to 1350.And there’s a highway right through it…(A little outdated: there is evidence of clay caps on many Mississippian mounds, which means these mounds would have been a bright yellow or red instead of turf green. This illustration also shows mainly the “downtown” area - other precincts of the city such as the East St. Louis group are not shown.)The safe estimate for Cahokia’s population is around 20,000 people, but it has sometimes been given twice that. Either way, it’s reasonably impressive for the area and historical context. Our modern life has made us used to megacities spanning hundreds of thousands or millions of people, but to put 20,000 souls into perspective: This is close to the same size as London in 1200. Berlin was a quaint village of barely over a thousand at this time. Paris had very recently become a medieval metropolis at a hundred thousand people, but had floated at around 35,000 for about a millennium. The modern city of Ithaca, New York is around 30,000.This city was America’s first melting pot, bringing in peoples from very distant regions who came for trade, religion and safety. The city was organized into districts according to class and sometimes function, including ‘industrial zones’ for production of things like beads, tools, pottery and copper art.Outside the walled ceremonial district was a “Woodhenge”; a circular arrangement of poles that track the position of the sun like a giant solar calendar. Nearly all of the buildings are aligned to the four cardinal directions; the four directions to this day are important to many Native American tribes. Some pits within the city were dug as a source of clay and, if we can glean from historical accounts of native towns, were likely flooded and stocked with fish.Aztalan, Wisconsin, a probable colony of CahokiaCahokia faced many typical issues of a large early city: social order, sanitation, dietary deficiencies, and especially resource exhaustion (good timber had to be brought in from upriver). In finding a reason for Cahokia’s fall, it seems to have dealt with these okay enough. But some time after 1200 A.D. came an unusually wet era for the Mississippians, and all that extra rainfall drained into and rushed down the Mississippi, which would have drenched all of Cahokia but the tops of its mounds.Interestingly, the Osage tribe, a Dhegihan-Siouan people that have one of the closest cultural similarities with the archaeological findings of Cahokia, have an origin story that draws many parallels (from Willard H. Rollings’ The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains):. . . in the beginning all of the Osage lived in a single village located along a river. One day the river flooded, and the Osage fled the rising waters. One group made it to the top of a hill, while others fled a nearby timbered ridge. A third group escaped to higher ground and sought shelter in a dense thicket, while a fourth group found refuge at the base of [a] hill just above the floodwaters. Some of the Osage, unable to escape, remained in the flooded village. After the floodwaters receded, the Non-hon-zhin-ga [council] insisted that the people remain in the groups they had formed during the flood. They claimed that Wa-kon-da [the Great Spirit/Mystery] wanted the people to live apart and to establish five villages . . .After the flooding, Cahokia was still inhabited, but was a shadow of its former self. The people that lived there in the roughly 200 years until its final abandonment seem to have lived without a major elite class and used parts of Monks Mound as a garbage midden. Cahokia, once at the forefront of the Mississippian trade network, seems to have taken the long distance trade with it.…but that’s not the end!Mississippian culture was still alive and vibrant in the Lower Mississippi and Southeastern Woodlands (and the Middle Mississippi and Ohio River too, but the other places are more intense). However, times have changed. The lack of the Cahokian trade nexus has wrecked regional economies. Influence vacuums have formed and the world seems just a bit more dangerous. This is where history begins to rhyme a bit: there is an increase in fortification and town splitting, though not quite to the same degree. Towns are typically surrounded by a defensive wall and people move if the population gets too big, but complex hierarchies and earthworks are more active than ever. The political climate of the Southeast leads to the creation of vast open territories, with areas of dense wilderness serving to buffer the territories from large military campaigns (though light travel is still possible on trails). These territories, of course, had to be managed. And it’s during this era that we are finally able to know how the Mississippians governed themselves, at least in some parts, due to the accounts from Hernando de Soto’s entrada. In the Southeast among Muskogean (Creek) towns, the major town leader (potentially the paramount as well) was the mico/micco. Subordinate to the mico are the orata, which governed satellite towns. The iniha/heniha was an administrator served along the mico as a kind of magistrate and the yatika was the official translator. Each of these large territories was an italwa, and this word was also used to describe the largest towns ruled by micos, talofa being the smaller towns. The Caddo Mississippians in Texas and Oklahoma had the same structure, despite being on the other side of the Mississippian sphere.Hernando de Soto’s route through areas that are known Mississippian polities. There are more archaeological sites than shown here which could possibly represent other polities.Starting from Florida, Hernando de Soto and his entrada entered Mississippian civilization, starting with the Appalachee (to the south, off-screen of the map) and into the Mississippi River proper. There they found large capitals with their mounds and walls, and many towns had other features such as moats and levies. Some of these moats seem to have doubled as fish traps, according to de Soto’s secretary Rodrigo Ranjel who described Pacaha’s (probably the Nodena site in Arkansas) moat as ”full of excellent fish of divers kinds”.The Parkin site in eastern Arkansas, one of the places visited by Hernando de SotoEtowah, a Late Mississippian town that may have also been visited by the entradaYou will often hear that from here, Hernando de Soto’s very existence caused 90% of the natives to keel over from European diseases. However, there is actually no evidence of such mass deaths, even in towns that had Spanish artifacts. To make matters even more interesting, de Soto and some other Spaniards actually fell ill and died on this journey, at a point in the journey longer than the incubation period of known European diseases, with the natives unaffected!But the entrada still had a devastating effect on the political atmosphere. In his search for gold and the desire to continue such a journey, de Soto raided and burned towns, forcibly occupied capitals and even kidnapped paramount chiefs — people who were supposedly of heavenly descent, reduced to being bound and caged for ransom. He used his influence to alter Mississippian political relationships to his benefit and this wrecked the status quo. The paramountcies of Coosa and Cofitachequi no longer had the same kind of respect, influence and control over their territories as they once had. Political cohesion was now much more tenuous.The fortress village of Mabila burning after a failed ambush.The entrada would not be able to walk away from the Eastern Woodlands so easily, however. Shortly before he died, de Soto tried to use his claim as son of the Sun to force the chiefdom of Quigualtam, the largest and most powerful polity of the lower Mississippi, to give them safe passage down the Mississippi … and some tribute for the road, of course. Quigualtam wasn’t buying it. After a failed overland route near Texas, de Soto’s entrada (now led by Luis de Moscoso) built some ships and tried to sail down the Mississippi as quick as humanly possible.Quigualtam, of course, caught up with them. The small Spanish river fleet was met by Quigualtam’s fleet of nearly a hundred canoes, many of which held up to 70 people. These large canoes had awnings in the back housing the commanders; the awnings, paddles, weapons, and the boats themselves were all one color, with a different color for each boat. They sang and drummed in unison to pace their paddling; most of the songs could be summed up as “You Spaniards sure are in for it now!”. There was, naturally, a very loud scream at the end of each song.Once the boats got close, teams of divers jumped off the boats and into the water to board the Spanish’s pinnace boats. Other paddlers stood up and began firing volleys. They managed to kill, wound and capture some people, but made the decision not to engulf them entirely — Quigualtam’s plan was not to annihilate the Spaniards, but to harass, exhaust and terrify them enough that they understood who had the real power in the Mississippi, and would tell all of their countrymen back home. Which of course succeeded: every time the Spanish thought they out-sailed Quigualtam, they would hear the shouting again and the terror would start back up.Quigualtam’s cultural descendants are the Natchez, whose society remained strongly Mississippian well into the historic period, interacting diplomatically with the United States.Despite this successful expulsion of the Spaniards, it was only the beginning of the end for the Mississippian way of life as a whole. European ships were conducting slave raids all around the North American coast, as well as propping up some natives to become slave raiders themselves, which only expanded ever inward. This led to an increase in warfare, famine and mass uncertainty that undermined the political structure of the Eastern Woodlands, leading to the breakup of most Mississippian polities. It was only when the stresses from raids and starvation was at its peak that the first epidemics begin to sweep through; these events had lowered the immune system of natives. The Native American slave trade continued well into the age of the British colonies and early U.S., where Savannah, Georgia was an important port for the export of Native slaves.De Soto’s accounts were buried in the libraries of New Spain, records of English colonial interactions with remaining Mississippian polities fell into obscurity, and the survivors of the Mississippian breakup had long since adopted new, somewhat more egalitarian lifestyles. Many of the old Mississippian towns and cities were revisited again as abandoned mounds. Rather than believe they were built by the ‘savage’ Indians they were killing and enslaving, people came up with numerous myths of other more prestigious people who came to America before them, only to be killed off by the current inhabitants. The Aztecs. Hindus. Babylonians. The Lost 13th Tribe of Israel. The Welsh. Anyone but the indigenous people. Thomas Jefferson was one of the first, after archaeological digs of his own, to suggest that the mounds were in fact built by Native Americans.But the myth had always persisted. In fact, some pseudoscientific circles to this day still deny the origins of the mounds in favor of their preferred civilization. And the lack of respect Americans have had for the mounds is exhibited by their constant destruction throughout American history. Massive temple platforms were excavated so their clay could be used for road fill or embankments. Some were simply in the way of progress: right across the river from Cahokia was the remains of a smaller city which was nearly completely torn down to make room for St. Louis.“Big Mound” of St. Louis’ Mound City; this mound was first excavated to make way for a street, and later completely demolished to become fill dirt for the North Missouri Railroad.Only one deeply eroded “Sugarloaf Mound” remains in St. Louis. Many Mississippian sites are still on private land, their artifacts routinely dug up by plows while their discoverers don’t think much of it. And when they think they can get away with it, land developers still try to build on native sites and tear down mounds that are “in the way”.Alabama city destroying ancient Indian mound for Sam’s ClubProfessor says 900-year-old Indian mound in Oxford has been destroyedNew St. Louis Rams Stadium May Be Built On Ancient Native American CityThis has been simply another front of a campaign as old as the United States itself to destroy and mask the history and culture of Native Americans, so as to put European-American history and culture at the forefront. Today, we are, comparatively, much more sensitive to the real history before the United States, and also have the power and resources to protect and educate. But the damage inflicted over the centuries has been done, and we are still reeling from its effects. It will take a while before Americans really truly become aware of their country’s pre-European past and realize it’s something to be celebrated, not quietly ignored — or worse, bulldozed. Until then, we should try to educate and raise awareness as much as we can.Winterville Mounds, MississippiAs you can see, the Mississippi River did indeed give birth to some quite complex societies. You might also be wondering: why didn’t all this complexity happen earlier? Or reach the political strength of other river valley civilizations?Well, first off I don’t think you can ever get a detailed answer to that. Many people like to fall on geography as the sole determiner of human society, but humans, as we all know, are complicated and do not like to follow the rules. Nevertheless, while the fertility of the Mississippi watershed can’t be overstated, the region is also perhaps a bit … too fertile. Most other river valley civilizations are in relatively dry areas, with a narrow stretch of fertile floodplain that forces most people to huddle together and submit to a central managing authority. In the Mississippi, you can have great farmland by the river, but you can also go deeper into the many, mazelike tributary rivers into the woods and have almost just as productive a crop. This is harder to keep under control, which narrows the focus of elites for the most part. However, ancient China had much the same layout: a large swath of fertile land under a complex watershed of not one but two giant rivers. Horses, not available to the Mississippians, may have also played a part in such a difference. Or perhaps simply not enough time has passed since the Eastern Woodland’s adoption of agriculture in 1800 B.C. and the introduction of more efficient crops in 900 A.D. If you’re asking me, a historical particularist, I believe that the fate of human societies can ultimately fall on the decisions made by their communities. The ideologies that led to the creation of sprawling, intensely bureaucratic states simply did not come to fruition in the same way they did in China or Mesopotamia. Maybe that was influenced by the factors I mentioned, or the values were simply different.Yet a civilization it definitely was, with its own sophisticated cultures, politics, and artistic expression. Like many civilizations, it had its own peaks and dips, and with every dip rose a peak that was stronger than ever before. The collapse of the trade networks after 1400 was a dip the Mississippians had just begun to recover from. Considering the interruption of Mississippian history with the arrival of the Spanish, one has to wonder: what kind of peak might we have seen next?Further Reading:Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands by William F. RomainAncient Cahokia and the Mississippians by Timothy R. PauketatMedieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World by Timothy R. Pauketat and Susan M. AltMapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall - goes into the political instability caused by European activity that led to the collapse of many Mississippian politiesEpidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 by Paul Kelton - also discusses the shatter zone, but builds upon it by touching on the biological aspect. Particularly, it addresses the myth of the spread of European disease in the EW: rather than the wildfire-like instantaneous transmission many imagine, the worst of the epidemics only came about when the immune systems of the natives were weakened through stresses.The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 by Carmen Tesser and Charles Hudson - very aptly named; in-depth exposition of the often overlooked protohistoric period, inbetween the jurisdictions of archaeologists and historians.Amazon.com: Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms by Charles Hudson and Robbie Ethridge - Contains actual primary sources of de Soto’s journey, augmented and illuminated by the interpretations of modern historical and archaeological data.