ST. LOUIS — What is now St. Louis was once home to more than 100 mounds built by Native Americans – so many that St. Louis was once known as “Mound City.” Settlers tore down most of them, and only one remains.
Now the last remaining earthen structure, Sugarloaf Mound, is almost back in the hands of the Osage Nation.
The city of St. Louis, the Osage Nation and the nonprofit Counterpublic announced Thursday that an 86-year-old woman who owns a home atop Sugarloaf Mound has agreed to sell it and eventually transfer ownership to the tribe .
Meanwhile, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen plans to adopt a resolution in January recognizing the Osage Nation’s sovereignty, Councilwoman Cara Spencer said. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a cultural and interpretive center on the site that overlooks the Mississippi River a few miles south of downtown.
“One step for our tribal sovereignty is reclaiming the lands we have inhabited for hundreds of years,” said Andrea Hunter, director of the Osage Nation Historic Preservation Office in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. “And to be able to save at least one hill in St. Louis, on the west side of the Mississippi River – it means a lot to us to get our heritage back.”
But a bottleneck remains. A pharmaceutical fraternity owns the only other house on the hill, and it remains unclear whether it is willing to give up the property.
Native Americans built thousands of mounds in the US in the centuries leading up to colonization. All were sacred ceremonial places, but some were also used for housing or trade. Many were cemeteries. Tribalites sometimes made a living from it, Hunter said.
The mounds in the St. Louis area are believed to have been built between approximately 800 and 1450. Even today, there are still many hills in nearby Cahokia, Illinois. Experts believe that Cahokia was home to as many as 20,000 people centuries ago.
Sugarloaf Mound and Big Mound were among the most prominent man-made structures in what is now St. Louis, said James McAnally, executive director of Counterpublic, a St. Louis nonprofit that seeks to effect change through arts-based projects and helps facilitate the purchase of new land.
“They were built on the river specifically as signal hills,” McAnally said. Native Americans on the west side of the Mississippi could send smoke signals visible to those in Cahokia to let them know if people are seen crossing the waterway, Hunter said.
Mounds were still prominent in St. Louis when it was founded in 1764. Visitors — even members of European royalty — made the trip to the young city just to see it, said Patricia Cleary, an American history professor at California State University, Long Beach, and author of the book “Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis.”
Ultimately, removal treaties forced the Native Americans away from St. Louis. Colonists had little use for the hills.
“They used them to build up the banks of the Mississippi River and used them as fill for roads and railroads, with complete disregard for the graves of our ancestors that were in many of them,” Hunter said. “There are even stories that as they were when they knocked down Big Mound, they just threw the bones into the Mississippi River.
Today, monuments in St. Louis stand at locations where mounds once stood, including several places in Forest Park, where mounds were demolished to make way for the 1904 World’s Fair. By the early 20th century, only the Sugarloaf Mound was still left.
In 2009, the Osage Nation purchased the first portion of the hill, dismantled a house and began work to stabilize it. But two houses remained in private hands.
One of those homeowners, 86-year-old Joan Heckenberg, has agreed to transfer ownership to the Osage Nation once she moves or dies.
Heckenberg has lived in the house for 81 years, ever since her grandfather bought it and convinced his skeptical wife to move the family there.
“But they fell in love with it,” Heckenberg said of her grandparents.
The deal with Heckenberg leaves only one other private home on the hill, a building owned by Kappa Psi, a national pharmaceutical fraternity. Heckenberg said students haven’t lived there for years, and homeless people sometimes stay there.
A spokeswoman for the fraternity said a limited liability company manages the house and its sale would be to the LLC. She did not have the name or contact information for the LLC. McAnally said the fraternity has been approached about selling the house, but “so far they have taken no action.”
Spencer said the hills are an important and overlooked part of St. Louis, and preserving Sugarloaf is critical.
“This is a very special place for Osage history and for our Native American heritage in this country, which has been largely erased,” Spencer said.