Indian Mounds Drive
Michigan is a beautiful state. Even though The Castle stands on a busy Rust Belt thoroughfare, it’s possible to escape into the serenity of nature nearby: a turn right onto 28th Street, past Exit 70, underneath I-196, and onto a little one-way street tucked in before the river. Depending on the lights, it might only take two minutes. Unless you know it’s there, you likely won’t notice as you drive past on the way from Grandville to Standale.
That little street is called Indian Mounds Drive.
I discovered it after I graduated college and moved back home to find a job. It hugs the curve of the Grand River for a little under four miles and lets out onto Market Street and Exit 73. Indian Mounds Drive is wedged between the highway and the river. While you can hear the ambient sound of traffic — a noise that’s always present on The Castle’s grounds as well — there are only a few places where you can actually see I-196. Two thick yellow stripes divide the road, as half is reserved for bikes and pedestrians. You can only drive from Grandville to Grand Rapids on Indian Mounds Drive and not the other way around.
That swath of asphalt that snakes up the Grand is a secret emerald on the map of my hometown. Especially since moving to The Castle, it’s been a place of respite — somewhere I can escape to for the soothing environs of woods and water. The ground slopes downward between Indian Mounds Drive and the river, and sometimes people drive their trucks down steep muddy hills to fishing spots along the bank. You can watch the changing of the seasons along the Grand: the swollen brown waters of spring give way to lush, verdant summers, fireworks of yellow and orange slowly fall in autumn, and the water gives off a thick haze in the still silence of winter.
I sometimes take Indian Mounds to get downtown. I sometimes just want to get out of The Castle for a quick loop to clear my head; I drive at a leisurely speed on Indian Mounds, almost always with the windows down while looking left at the river, and I then hop on the highway for a few minutes to get back home. I like to park off the road and walk for a bit, either on the street or on paths closer to the river. About two thirds of the way down Indian Mounds, there’s an old bridge that crosses the river, rusted steel that was built for trains late in the 19th Century and abandoned late in the 20th. It’s now a well-graffitied pathway with baby blue fencing, part of the Kent Trails system that leads into Millennium Park.
On one of our first dates, I went for a walk with my girlfriend across that bridge and into the woods after driving down Indian Mounds. More than a few friends of mine have seen the river from my passenger seat. During the winter, I jogged along atop ice and slush in sweats and gloves. I take my dog for walks along Indian Mounds and let her follow her nose. In late spring, wildflowers in clusters of magenta and white bloom along the entrance to Indian Mounds: glorious proofs of a Moravian monk’s neat theories taught in Grandville’s ninth-grade biology classrooms, genes and alleles plotted on squares, rare mutations that meet somewhere between the bright poles.
Across the street from the rail bridge, there’s a small plot of land hemmed in by the highway. There are a few No Trespassing signs nailed to the trees closest to the road. Behind those signs are the Norton Mounds, named for a man who used to own the land. They’re the most well-preserved Hopewell burial sites in the Great Lakes region, the last vestiges of a forerunner civilization that roamed the area centuries ago.
A Detroit fur trader named Louis Campau, considered to be the father of Grand Rapids, was far from the first person to call the Grand valley home. Downtown, there are statues of some local legends: Roger B. Chafee, an astronaut who perished in a training accident, Stanley Ketchel, a Polish boxer who became a world champion, and former U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg. At the west end of the famous Blue Bridge, there’s a statue of a man named Noahquageshik — a name that English speakers translated to Chief Noonday.
Noonday is a familiar name to me. Down in Barry County, I’ve driven down Chief Noonday Road, kayaked on Chief Noonday Lake, and walked the Chief Noonday Trail. They’re all located just north of Gun Lake, home of a band of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomi natives. Those bands are known as the Council of Three Fires, an ancient alliance of Anishinaabe. An apocryphal tale claims that Gun Lake received its English name after a disarmament agreement between two feuding bands: they supposedly gathered and threw all their guns in the lake together.
Noahquageshik was an important Odawa leader. He fought alongside Tecumseh as part of a confederacy of tribes allied with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812 and led a community called Bowting located near the rapids of the Grand — across the river from where Campau settled his village. Noahquageshik was the first to broker trading with whites in the area, but he opposed the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, which ceded all land south of the Grand to the U.S. Of course, to call it a treaty belies the deceit and coercion that gave a legal justification for conquest. Later in life, Noahquageshik converted to Christianity after befriending a Baptist minister and started a new settlement south of Gun Lake.
Campau and Noahquageshik were contemporaries. During their lifetimes, the terrain looked much different than it does now. For starters, the waterfalls and rapids from which the city got its name were destroyed not long after Grand Rapids was settled; dams and canals were built to tame the water for the lumber industry, and the steady roar of the Grand was silenced.
There was also a vast array of mounds near the rapids. Some of them reached about three stories into the sky, and others were just small mounds that crested at a few feet. They formed geometric shapes, traced the patterns of the stars, and appeared like giant serpents engorged with prey on the forest floor. Before the Anishinaabe called Michigan home, there was another civilization that resided along the banks of the rapids. Early white explorers wrote that the Anishinaabe venerated the mounds, even if they didn’t build them; archaeologists estimate that the Hopewell roamed the Midwest at the time of the Roman Empire.
Much like the pyramids of Egypt, the Hopewell’s great mounds were intricate tombs underneath layers of sod, ash from burnt leaves, and rich black soil. In separate chambers from human remains, the Hopewell buried their earthly possessions: limestone pipes engraved with pictures of animals, dishware and pottery, unique tools and weapons, jewelry, furs, ornaments, and possibly even pets. The mounds contain precious evidence of a vast trading network. There’s copper wrought from the Upper Peninsula, jet-black obsidian from the Rockies, seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, and shark teeth from the Atlantic coast.
The Hopewell are lost to history. Nobody even knows what the tribes called themselves. Archaeologists estimate that sometime from 100-400 AD, the people who built the mounds disappeared. No consensus has emerged from various theories as to what happened to the Hopewell; according to fragments of Anishinaabe legend, they perished in a great flood.
In downtown Grand Rapids, there’s a museum dedicated to the city’s most famous son, former president Gerald R. Ford. I remember seeing his funeral procession drive through the city when I was a kid, and the museum grounds are his final resting place. Inside, there’s a history of his life and political career: mementos from his time as a football star at the University of Michigan, documents from his Congressional career, a timeline of the Watergate scandal, and trinkets from the campaign he lost to Jimmy Carter.
Outside, in front of the museum, there’s a park called Ah-Nab-Awen. It was named by tribal elders from the Three Fires Council, and it means “resting place.” Ah-Nab-Awen is a thin strip of land that straddles the Grand River. At the south end of the park, there are three little knolls interwoven with concrete pathways, built to represent the mounds that once sat on the land.
The Norton Mounds south of town weren’t the only mounds in Grand Rapids. Before the pandemic, I worked in the West Side neighborhood and drove past the Ford Museum every day. Not long after Campau staked out the core of downtown, east of the river, development expanded to the west. I knew that the West Side was the longtime home of the city’s Polish community, with their social halls, annual Pulaski Days festival, and enormous Catholic churches.
I didn’t know that dozens of mounds were razed in order to build the neighborhood. Hopewell mounds were once common across a large part of the country, but they were systematically destroyed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as Americans settled the Midwest. Much like the rapids, the mounds downtown were considered by newcomers to be little more than an obstacle — a feature of the landscape that had to be tamed. In order to build roads, homes, and factories, the early residents of Grand Rapids tore down the mounds.
A few decades after the West Side mounds — known as the Converse Mounds — were destroyed, an archaeologist commissioned by the Kent County Scientific Institute excavated the Norton Mounds. W. L. Coffinberry was the first to dig into them, and he didn’t seem to recognize the significance of some of the things he found, namely the complexity of the mound structures themselves. The largest mound was only explored to the surface of the ground, and Coffinberry found few artifacts. H.E. Sargent was the next archaeologist to excavate the mounds, and he carefully catalogued his findings. Sargent was careful not to disturb their structure and sensed a greater richness in the area than Coffinberry did.
The final and most comprehensive excavation was undertaken by a team from the University of Michigan in the sixties. Those archaeologists carefully uncovered the mounds and endeavored to reconstruct them as accurately as possible once they were finished. That expedition refuted Coffinberry’s findings: the mounds were delicately built in stages, and they contained plenty of artifacts. By parsing the structure and content of the mounds, those archaeologists determined that the Hopewell had an elaborate social organization with class hierarchies and skilled trades.
The University’s research journal quoted the anthropologist George Irving Quimby in its conclusion: “Hopewell culture in the Upper Great Lakes region, as well as elsewhere in the eastern United States, represents a climax of culture — a kind of classical period, the like of which was never achieved again.”
Many of those artifacts now reside at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, which grew from the Kent County Scientific Institute and sits across Pearl Street from Ah-Nab-Awen Park. Official archaeologist expeditions weren’t the only times those mounds were disturbed; plenty of amateurs raided them over the years, searching for treasure of their own. Not all of the mounds initially mapped by Coffinberry still stand — a few were destroyed by reckless invaders.
About a third of the Norton Mounds remain. The rest were almost obliterated when the interstate highway system was built, as the original path of I-196 led through the site. Fortunately, local native activists were able to convince the government to reroute the highway in order to preserve the mounds. The highway system that threatened the mounds traces the same pathways used by the Anishinaabe a century ago: I-75 running from the Detroit area to the straits of Mackinac, I-96 and I-94 connecting east and west, even I-131 linking the Kalamazoo and Grand Rivers with Gun Lake in the middle. The Gun Lake Tribe of Pottawatomi is a sovereign nation that still calls Barry County home.
If you’re ever sitting in the passenger seat driving westbound out of Grand Rapids, look carefully out the window once you get past the Market Street exit. You’ll see some of the remaining mounds aligned behind a small pond. In a few miles, to your left, you’ll see a massive concrete castle.
I must confess that I rarely contemplate the Hopewell while on Indian Mounds Drive. I’ve never trod over the patch of woods that the mounds call home, instead occasionally peering through the foliage from the road to catch a glimpse. Along a ridge, there’s a big hill covered in trees and undergrowth, plants that look almost imperceptibly greener than the lower lying areas. It’s hard to see the mounds unless you know to look closely.
Indian Mounds Drive is a quiet, peaceful place. It’s the best place to escape to from my dystopian domicile, but even before I lived at The Castle, I really enjoyed taking a slow cruise down the street to take in the surroundings. The river is beautiful, even if I wouldn’t eat the fish caught in it. The Grand River carries the stench of industrialization, and it’s often the color of mud. Humanity has left its tracks too: broken beer bottles and old cans, bits of plastic that may last as long as the mounds themselves. And yet, that trash does little to diminish how sublime Indian Mounds Drive can be. If you live in the area, I encourage you to take a slow drive down the Grand someday.
The story of Grand Rapids is the story of America. Each civilization is built on the bones of another, but settler colonialism involves the forcible displacement and comprehensive annihilation of indigenous people and their culture. The Anishinaabe respected the Hopewell and the monuments they left behind. The Americans almost destroyed them all. It’s a tremendous blessing that the remaining Hopewell mounds were saved a half century ago by the Council of Three Fires.