Today you might call St.

Louis the gateway to the West or even The Lou.

But one of the city's earliest nicknames was Mound City.

St.

Louis was known as Mound City because of the dozens and dozens of earthenwork mounds that existed here from approximately 800 CE to 1869.

Brady Wolf is the curator of indigenous collections at the Missouri Historical Society.

They were an object of fascination for European colonizers.

They were a point of pride for many St.

Louis citizens who used them as meeting places, as places of enjoyment, and most importantly, they were sacred spaces and often burial spaces for the indigenous communities that constructed them centuries ago.

Only one mound remains in St.

Louis City, as they were systematically leveled throughout the 1800s.

But many mounds still exist on the Illinois side, at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

Cahokia Mounds Archeological Site is the largest archeological site north of Mexico in terms of size and population.

It originally had 120 mounds and the population size was estimated at the height of around 1050 AD to be 10,000 to 20,000 people.

That's Angela Cooper, a site interpreter and archeologist at Cahokia Mounds.

Cooper says the mounds on the Missouri side were probably a bit smaller than the ones at Cahokia, but they would have looked similar to the mounds you still can see today.

It was probably a satellite community.

It was probably like a suburb, subdivision, right?

The groups on the Missouri side also would have had strong ties to Cahokia.

But they also would have had, you know, different daily rituals and customs and their own ways of living and senses of humor and ways of talking with each other and things like that.

But before many were leveled, the St.

Louis Mound Group around downtown had about 25 mounds.

There were an additional dozen or so in Forest Park and then another untold amount that were poorly documented, perhaps another couple dozen in South City and along the River De Peres.

So anywhere from 50 to 100 mounds across all of St.

Louis, depending on who you ask.

One of the most notable mounds in the city was Big Mound.

It was the largest in the St.

Louis Mound Group and was located near North Broadway and Mound Street.

A monument for Big Mound stands in its former location today, but when we went to see it, its plaque was missing and the area was covered in litter.

The Native American groups who built the mounds are known as the Mississippians.

That was a huge sprawling society that covered most of the Eastern United States from the Great Lakes to the Southeast and all along the Mississippi Corridor.

They had trade routes to the Southwest for obsidian, to the Great Lakes for copper, to the Gulf of Mexico for shells.

They were a truly expansive, enormous metropolitan society.

Cahokia was America's first city and the largest city north of Mexico.

- But around the 1350s, the Mississippian culture declined.

- There was some sort of event, whether it was disease or resource depletion or martial conflict.

There's a lot of debates on that.

But we do know that people went elsewhere.

And by 1500, many of the mounds were abandoned.

But many modern Native American groups can trace their lineage to the Mississippians.

In St.

Louis, the Osage Nation has the strongest, noted, and longest-running occupation in the St.

Louis area.

Because of that, it is safe to say they have a unique and significant connection to the St.

Louis Mound Group.

There were three types of mounds in what Angela Cooper calls the "Cahokia Metro Area."

Other Mississippian sites only have two.

There's platform mound or flat top, and that had structures on top, probably priests and leaders doing sacred ceremonial things inside.

Conical mounds, which often are viewed as burial mounds or cemeteries.

And then in the Coquia Metro area is ridgetop mounds, which seem to have mortuary components to them, and also multiple mounds that were then capped off together to create one mound.

- And white settlers later had their own uses for the mounds.

- In 1844, there was actually a pavilion constructed on top of Big Mound, which was quite a hotspot, a gathering place.

It burned down several years later, and then unfortunately by 1869, it was completely leveled.

- And though many people enjoyed the mounds and viewed them as landmarks or gathering places, some St.

Louisans had little appreciation for the historic structures.

An 1869 article about Big Mound in the Missouri Republic stated, "The insignificance of the artistic thought, if there is any at all connected with the mound, evidently is the cause of the indifference of our scientific institutions during the removal of this immense monument of American antiquity.

Widespread destruction of St.

Louis's mounds began in the 1830s.

The Indian Removal Act was published by the federal government in 1830.

So I think it is fair to say that having that sort of removal vindicated by the federal government allowed St.

Louisans to justify the removal of indigenous landmarks in our city.

So street grading processes took a lot of the mounds down and they were used for railroad fill and other backfilling operations.

They were looted intentionally and aggressively.

A lot of the cultural heritage was taken from them and many folks are still working on recovering that.

The only mound remaining in the downtown area is Sugarloaf Mound on Ohio Avenue.

Though many mounds still stand in Cahokia today, the site wasn't spared from destruction either.

So 120 mounds and today there's 80 left.

So 40 were destroyed.

East St.

Louis had 45 and I believe there's only two, just like a few of the bases of the mounds remaining.

So that's the entire mound group.

Now that most of the Missouri side mounds are gone, St.

Louis' nickname as the Mound City seems to be disappearing too.

People were much more aware of the mounds as they were declining and used that as sort of a branding opportunity.

And then all of a sudden it didn't make sense because they were gone.

Cooper says the mounds that remain in our region deserve just as much attention as the arch or other landmarks.

We'll also come to the mound, see this other monumental structures out here that was made with 40 to 50 pound baskets filled with earth and stone tools and no heavy machinery, no beasts of burden, like seeing that influence is a reminder of the people who've been before us and will still be here when there's people after us.

So I think the legacy of it is important.

Brady Wolf says a good way to honor the destroyed mounds is to learn as much as you can about them.

We do have but one left, so it's a very good opportunity to start really thinking about how we can take care of it.

Luckily, the Osage Nations are very good and rightful stewards of Sugarloaf Mound, but we should think about ways where we can take care of the land where the mounds were as a show of respect.

If we are gonna firmly declare that this place is our home, we should treat it as such.

And an acknowledgement that it was someone else's home before us and that it was taken.

We cannot rebuild them, they are gone.

And so to avoid repeating that history, we have to start taking care of what we have.

And in many ways, I think it could help us take care of each other too.