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I’ve never thought of toads are being particularly sympathetic creatures, but when I began studying them for the novel, I was surprised at how sympathetic they became. Something about the eyes, maybe?
More childhood misinformation: the native american tribes east of the Mississippi were almost entirely nomadic, lacking sufficient engineering or agricultural skills to sustain large fixed populations.
The Cahokia Mounds in St. Louis, Missouri testify otherwise. More on Cahokia in a later post. What recently caught my attention was the existence of a large historic site in Wisconsin dating back the 11th century. The two didn’t exist independently:
“The inhabitants of the new settlement imported ritual objects and luxury goods from Cahokia, and probably from the Middle Mississippian settlements in central and Northern Illinois.”
Densely-populated settlements, agricultural expertise, and trade routes stretching from present-day Wisconsin to Missouri… the New World prior to the 18th century is starting to sound like the Old World.
Well, except for the people from the Old World having guns and horses.
As recently as 1934, sophisticated American citizens still had the capacity to believe in something as marvelous as…
“(S)ecret caves, a lost civilisation and above all, a treasure trove of gold in unimaginable quantities. And all this in the ground below the present-day metropolis of Los Angeles.”
The full article (originally published in the LA Times) detailing the lizard man find is worth a read. The maps of the tunnels are fun, too. Please do note there are no lizard people in Northern Arcadia. There are, of course, toad people. And caves. Also, possibly, cities hidden in the ground long before the arrival of the men from the East.
One of the things I wanted to explore in the Northern Arcadia books was the notion of a uniquely American fantasy setting. I love me a good castle, and I was raised on the Arthurian legends and Tolkein’s stuff, but there’s plenty of the fantastic on these shores. The mound city of Cahokia, the Roanoke Dare stones, the ruins in the Pueblo Canyon and the traces of large urban structures in the Amazon all served to inspire various threads and strands of Northern Arcadian lore. As a new feature, and to help break the monotony of me announcing the receipt of new rejection letters, I thought I’d share links to New World stuff I think is fantastic and inspirational, both.
The narrator for the History channel show “America Unearthed” is, like so many of his fellow travelers, a little breathless for my taste. But a recent episode on the American Stonehenge was provocative. When I was a kid, I left school with the impression the New World, prior to the arrival of Europeans, was empty of everything except wildlife and a few scattered tribes of Native Americans. This episode is a nice reminder of the extent to which that particular narrative is wrong.