Sliding between a narrow island and the riverbank, the Ohio grows calmer and darker. The channel smells of mud and leaf-rot.
An exposed sycamore root makes a good canoe tie-off. Up the shore, past floodplain brush, driftwood, and plastic bottles, the ground is a soft wet field. Chief’s Mound comes into view: a long grass-covered platform with steep rectangular sides and a conical offset.
Here the high speech of the place is a lull — cicadas, a heron lifting from the slough.
The site shares a latitude with the Ephesian temple of Artemis. Across that line a mattress of charcoal and fleeces was packed into a wet basin. The harbor filled with silt. The sea crept away. One marble column is left in the marsh.
At Angel they dug out the earth to heap it. Great heights require plumbing the depths.
From atop Chief’s Mound an inventory of things to see comes into partial view: the visitor center, reconstructed huts, a palisade. Across a prairie that was once a plaza sits Temple Mound, a floor raised so a fire could stand above the damp.
The Evansville skyline is not visible from this secluded place. A distant barge sounds its horn as a little more ground leaves the site, down the Ohio toward Little Egypt.
Check out “A short periplus of central Kentucky.”
Rob Robill 