80 THE WINNEBAGO TRIBE [eth. ann. 37 



the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, a territory in which the Winne- 

 bago have no recollection of ever having lived. The first question 

 is very difficult to answer. There is always the possibility that some 

 mounds may yet be discovered and again it is possible that all have 

 been leveled considerably. The apparent persistency with which the 

 Winnebago held to the custom of mound building during their forced 

 migration since the eighteenth century, even when they lived in 

 places for only a short time, and the absence of any mounds in their 

 legendary home, suggest the possil)ility that they never lived per- 

 manently near Green Bay.^ This inference has not been drawn from 

 a study of the archeological but from a study of the historical sources, 

 by Mr. P. V. Lawson." In this paper the writer tries to prove that 

 all the old sources point to Doty Island situated in Fox River, at the 

 foot of Lake Winnebago, as the place where Nicollet first met the 

 Winnebago. Whatever the merits of the case may be, it is certain 

 that, according to the Winnebago themselves, their original home was 

 Green Bay. Into this tradition many legendary details have, of 

 course, been woven, and it seems to us that the presumption of evi- 

 dence favors Green Bay, although the complete absence of what seems 

 to have been such a characteristic feature of Winnebago culture as 

 effigy mounds suggests a possibility that the Green Bay settlement 

 represented just the northernmost extension of the tribe. The large 

 settlements found along Lake Wimiebago so soon after Nicollet's land- 

 ing make it reasonably certain that the Winnebago had been there 

 before his arrival in Wisconsin. 



We will also have to assume that the Winnebago erected the effigy 

 mounds along the western shore of Lake Michigan, in an area that, 

 since the coming of the whites, has been occupied successively by the 

 Miami and Potawatomi. This would indicate that the Wiimebago 

 originally came in a compact mass from the south. They, however, 

 have no recollection of this fact and it must indeed have taken place 

 a long time ago. This is, of course, only an hypothesis. 



The effigy mounds are imquestionably supposed to represent the 

 eponymous clan animals of the Winnebago. It seems, however, as 

 if tliree clan animals were never represented — namely, the wolf, the 

 buffalo, and the fish. It is possible that the mound found near the 

 asylum grounds at Madison, Wis., is intended to represent a wolf, but, 

 even if this could be established, it would not explain the apparent 

 absence of any more examples of one of the most important Winnebago 

 clans. 



'The absence of any mention of them in early records has no significance, for even in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, in regions where it seems incredible that they should have escaped notice, no mention is ever made 

 of them by travelers. 



• " The Habitat of the Winnebago," in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1906. 

 Mr. A. C. Neville in a previous paper published in the Proceedings of 1905, sought to establish the thesisol 

 a Green Bay home from the same data. 



