HISTORY OF HERE P a r t 172 History, Before There Was Any History Part Six BY JAMES F. BARRETT        Well, my dear reader friends, I now know why I'd never make it as a politician or any other public figure. In the four or five years since I've gone back to writing for the good old Gazette I've had nothing but compliments from my readers. Thank you, thank you, thank you, one and all, dear readers! Oh, sure, sometimes Editor Pam would sternly tell me to get back on the "history" track, instead of telling about my trip with Vicki to relive our youth out in the badlands and the Wild West. And then Aunty Fern scowled and said she'd have to see where my last series of articles was going before she commented, good or bad. I don't think she much cared for the pre-history tales, but she didn't really knock them. However, now I've had a reader friend tell me bluntly that he felt the Gazette and I had gone to publishing BS. Well, my word! Didn't roll off me like water from a duck's back, either. So, I'll have to avoid taking a public office, for there's no oil in my feathers. I'm way too easily shot down it seems.        But I'm undeterred and unbowed. I still want to go through "The History of Here," starting with our friends from 1000BC pre-history (as we just did) and bringing you forward to "The Coming of Table Rock Lake," 1958AD. I promise you, the adventure will be interesting. For instance, did you know that certain Indian tribes in the Ozarks actually established a sort of "empire" with an assortment of priests, overlords, merchants, manufacturers and, of course, workers by the drove to work very hard to support all the other non-workers? (Sounds kind of like Wal-Mart or some other big corporation or the government, doesn't it?)        Well, they did, and long before the white man came to show them the benefits of industrialization, commerce, welfare or political voting. They built gigantic mounds of earth upon which they constructed their villages. Why? No one today is actually certain, maybe to avoid the anticipated 1,000 year floods, or as a defense against enemy attack, or to be above the pesky mosquitoes. Who knows, but up there on unbelievable dirt mounds they lived. Their towns or villages were apportioned out to people by class, status, and so on, all very formal, all well planned and enacted. Pre-history zoning, all neat and tidy. Some of the mounds were used only for places of worship. There were, so I'm told, stepped pyramids with buildings for worship at the top. Even ramps and/or stairways leading up to those places. (Shades of the Incas, Aztecs and Toltecs, and others.)        These Indians of the time traded commercially far and wide, they really did. Archeologists have found positive evidence that they traded with other tribes on the Great Lakes and upon the Gulf Coast. Also with tribes from the Appalachian Region and the Smokey Mountains. There's even evidence that they traded with Indians from the West Coast. No, the scientists didn't find primitive surfboards, thongs or Bikinis. But they did find shell tools and jewelry, stone jewelry and other implements that could have come only from those far away places. They have also found caches of hand made and ready to go trade items that WERE made with local materials. So it is quite evident that a thriving commerce existed between our Ozarks and those coastal places. All this happened many hundreds of years before the white people came to educate the backward natives.        Now this type of situation can only occur when a group of people, Indian tribe or white clan, has enough food and supplies, easily obtained, to give them ample free time to create such things as non-working officials, priests, taxes and trade goods. All of which existed and was running well in parts of our Ozarks long before white people ever came to this land, let alone showed the poor ignorant Indian the benefits of such things. And they (the Indians) did it all without guns, whiskey or Indian Agents telling them what they could and couldn't do.        These particular Indians, however, lived along the perimeter of our Ozarks. The bulk of these mounds and artifacts have been discovered primarily along the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. But small quantities of the jewelry, tools, trinkets and artifacts have been found deeper within our Ozarks of today, indicating that our particular pre-history Indians traded with these mound builders and dwellers. Thus, we found Vog, Ooma and their clan making their annual trek to the Missouri to live for the summer where food was plentiful and where they could obtain the artifacts and knowledge that these more skilled and sophisticated Indians had to offer.        Perhaps, if we are going to chat in this and a few following articles about the people who lived in our Ozarks before and after our friends Vog and Ooma, we should take a look at some historical and pre-historical facts and figures. Now don't get all bummed out, dear reader friends! I don't intend to go scholastic on you and start lecturing in depth on the various epochs of the Ozarks with a bunch of dull dry facts, dates and so on. No, but I do believe we need to have a grasp of the areas and times about which we will be chatting together here in the great old Gazette. In that regard, I'm going to see if Editor Sam will publish a few really fun and interesting maps for you to consider, and possibly save for later reference.        Let's first look at a very brief set of dates. These are reasonably well accepted times for the existence of man in the Ozarks (pre-Hillbilly-Bowl-era). Here we go: The Paleo-Indian Period was from 12M to 8M BC, and they were basically hunters. The Dalton Period ran from 8M to 7M BC, and these were hunters, but they also began foraging. Then came the Archaic Period from 7M to 1M BC, and these folks foraged heavily. Then comes the time of Vog and Ooma, the Woodland Period from 1M BC to 900 AD. These folks, as you've read in past issues, were skilled hunters, great foragers and were beginning to develop some much more sophisticated skills, such as Vog's grain harvesting device. During this same formative period came the atlatl, a very clever device for throwing a 5 to 6 foot spear with great force. (We'll discuss it is some detail another time.) Also, later in these years came a great revolution in hunting and warfare, the bow and arrow. In it's day it was comparable to the invention of the wheel (or the Gameboy). Another major step was the development of pottery. There were some very crude vessels made of baked clay before this particular bit of time, but the craft-like and decorated pottery became perfected during this period.        Then came the Mississippian Period from 900AD to 1700AD, and these were the Indians with which we are much more familiar as the time of the writing and recording of American History approached. The last of these "Indian" periods is the Historic Period from 1700AD to 1835AD when the Indians established contact with the white man (starting with the Spanish Conquistadors, then the French adventurers) and began to lose their olden ways and start to assimilate the ways of the white man (sometimes for the good, frequently for the worse). There now, dear reader friend, that wasn't a bad history pill to swallow, was it? We'll always try to be as painless as we can in our brief, and somewhat less than sophisticated, history lessons.        So, the Vog and Ooma era was the Woodland Period, from the time we've talked about, 1M BC, to a much more recent 900AD, with our friends inhabiting the beginning of this epoch. The more sophisticated Indians we started out discussing in this article were of the Hopewell Culture and later. These were, as we said, pretty much along the Mississippi and the Missouri, but were important to the tribes that lived within the depths of the Ozarks, as well. The Hopewell Culture pooped out toward the end of this era, about 900AD. It was slowly replaced by the even more sophisticated Indians of the Mississippian Culture. These were the true mound builders, with square or rectangular houses and other structures much more permanently constructed. These were also the pyramid builders, so much like the Indians of the Middle and Southern Americas. But these folk built their pyramids using countless bark buckets of dirt, not with the beautifully quarried stone used by the Aztecs, Toltecs and the Mayans.        Curiously, the Mississippian Culture seemed to have little interest in branching out into the interior Ozarks, nor for dealing extensively with the Indian tribes living there. Sometimes they were even battling one another. So, the Ozark areas away from the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers remained relatively pristine and unchanged for hundreds of years. The Indians of our part of the Mid-Ozarks, in Missouri and Arkansas, stayed much as they had been all through the Woodland Period. Undisturbed for some 800 years, the Mid-Ozarks Indians amalgamated, interbred and became the powerful Osage Indian tribe that ruled from the Missouri to the Arkansas Rivers, north to south. And from the Mississippi River well into the regions we now call Oklahoma and Kansas, east to west. That was, relatively speaking, a huge area. But the Osage were a powerful and often warlike tribe who controlled it all.        Keep in mind, dear reader friend, these Indians lived, fought, hunted, bred and died all over the Ozarks, including right here, the very spot where you now do most of these same things. The Osage became so powerful that they often raided east of the Mississippi to the Tennessee River and south of the Red River to the upper Sabine and into Northern Louisiana. These Osage, whom we'll be chatting about in some detail in following articles, were rather unique, differing from our concept of the historic Indian. Few of the Osage warriors were less than six feet tall, with many being much taller. They were (later) described as being well formed, athletic, agile and robust. In earlier times the Osage preferred nakedness, sometimes actually plucking out their eye-brows and shaving their heads, leaving only a scalp lock upon the crown, which was ornamented with wampum and eagle feathers. Later, and in the winter, they wore a breechclout, secured by a girdle, and a pair of leggings made of deerskin. Upon their feet they wore moccasins from deer, elk or bison skin. Also, in their confrontations with white men or in cold weather, they wore a blanket over their shoulders as a sign of wealth, sophistication and tribal status.        In later times many of the Osage let their hair grow to shoulder length, parted in the middle and heavily decorated with wampum and beads. In the summer they were naked from the waist up and were painted in a great variety of picturesque ways. All the Osage bathed frequently in village streams. The women and girls then perfumed themselves with materials made from horsemint, calamus or columbine seeds. These were not only meant to be pleasing but were also believed to do away with evil influences from all about. Ca-he-shin-ga, Little Chief of the Osage, was a young, tall and powerful war chief. We will meet and learn about him and other chiefs and Indian ladies in later articles. (These folks actually did exist, and we will use their real names - no BS.)        Gosh, I hope you dear reader friends enjoy this earlier "History of Here." You need to drop me a line from time to time and let me know what you like and don't like - as well as what you'd really like me to chat with you about in coming issues of my column, here in the old Gazette. See you in a couple of weeks.