Teejop: The Place Between Four Lakes

Long before there was a capital city on this isthmus, before the grid of streets and the dome visible from half the county, the land between the lakes had a name. The Ho-Chunk people called it Teejop. It means four lakes: Mendota, Monona, Waubesa, and Kegonsa, stretching south along the Yahara River like beads on a string.

The Ho-Chunk had lived here, by their own oral tradition and by the archaeological evidence, since long before European contact. The landscape they inhabited was not empty. Before European settlement arrived, the Madison area held more than fifteen hundred effigy mounds, earthen sculptures shaped into the forms of bears, panthers, water spirits, and birds, built by Late Woodland peoples between roughly seven hundred fifty and twelve hundred years ago. Wisconsin has the largest concentration of effigy mounds in the world. The Madison area may once have had more than any other place in the state.

The effigy mound builders were not a single people, but the Ho-Chunk Nation is among the peoples who consider these mounds their inheritance. To them, the mounds are not archaeological artifacts. They are sacred sites.

European settlement of the capital and the university destroyed approximately sixty-five percent of those mounds. Of the fifteen hundred or more that once stood on this isthmus, roughly two hundred survive. Some are on university land. Some were simply plowed under as lots were platted and buildings went up in the nineteenth century.

The Ho-Chunk did not leave willingly. Through a series of treaties in eighteen twenty-five, eighteen thirty-two, and eighteen thirty-seven, the United States Government extracted cession after cession, with the eighteen thirty-seven treaty taking place, one U.S. official later admitted, under what he called the blended grounds of conquest and contract. Federal removal efforts pushed Ho-Chunk families west of the Mississippi repeatedly throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Many walked home.

By eighteen seventy-five the government had stopped trying to force them out. The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin is based today in Black River Falls, with a community center in Madison that bears the isthmus's original name.