At Home In The Little Miami River Valley

To call this blog "The Valley of the Mound Builders" is possibly unfair, as the groups of people who built mounds and earthworks in ancient times did so in many places across the Midwest and the South. But I can't get into all of that- it would take forever and it would be really boring to read through it all so for the sake of this blog, when I say "Mound Builders" I am talking about the people that thrived in present day Ohio during what is known as the "Woodland Period", roughly about 1000BCE-500CE and these cultures included the Fort Ancient, the Adena and the Hopewell.

I am fortunate enough to live in the valley of the Little Miami River which is the ancient homeland of the people we call the Hopewell. If you look at the map in the photo, the Little Miami River is the tributary of the Ohio River highlighted in black in the middle of the purple zone.

So yeah, pretty much Ground Zero for the Hopewell. The vast majority of mounds and earthworks along this river have been destroyed over the years, mostly plowed through to accommodate farming, but not all of them. Today there are more existing mounds and earthworks visible along the Scioto River, but the Little Miami was a favorite and some of the most spectacular clues about these people and their cultures were found in sites along this beautiful valley. It was their main source of water, transportation, and sometimes food. The river contains many species of freshwater mussels, some of them endangered, and these could sustain the people even when game and fish could not be found. I will research and visit these places and try to document what I can about what is left. I will also try to give more information about these cultures, the river valley itself, and anything else that I personally think is interesting.

The river itself was created during the last ice age and spans over 100 miles from its headwaters in Clark County to California, Ohio, where it drains into the Ohio River. The body of water itself was named for the Miami- Native Americans who lived in this area when the first white people arrived. The word "Miami" is Algonquin and means "land between the two rivers". Today those rivers are known as the Great Miami and the Little Miami. The Miami and Shawnee could tell the white settlers nothing about the many mounds and earthworks that dotted the valley. The earthworks were here long before those tribes had flourished in the region and they knew nothing of the people who had created them.

The last thing I should say before I get into the sites themselves is that we basically know very little about these people and what we do know is fairly speculative at best. This is mainly because they had no written language and lived a stone-age existence, so we have no historical records to uncover, no "Rosetta Stone" to decipher, and no inscriptions on anything. We don't even know what they called themselves. "Hopewell" is the name the culture was arbitrarily given in 1891 after Captain Mordecai Hopewell, who's farm in Ross County contained the mounds and earthworks that became the archetype for the culture.

 I hope you enjoy this blog. For me an interest in the Mound Builders is intertwined with a love of the Little Miami itself. Some stretches of it are as untouched and wild as they have always been, without the sounds of traffic or people or problems. When you move through these stretches, with nothing but the white bark of the sycamores in the sun and the Great Blue Herron sailing over the water, you really can picture the way their villages might have looked, the smoke from their fires, even the people themselves along the ancient bluffs. I am fascinated by the echoes of these cultures and I think of them every time I paddle down this quiet river.

Sunrise on the Little Miami River near the mouth of the East Fork, 2014