Begin Trek

Shiloh Battlefield Automobile Tour

If you are taking the Shiloh Battlefield Trek also then stop at Hornets' Nest for that 2-mile hike. Park your cars in the road near Bloody Pond. Observe Bloody Pond. Listen to the audio story there (in season). Read the plaque about Bloody Pond. 

Note - U.S. Army Artillery Monument Nearby (north)

Hike north along Hamburg - Savannah Road -single file- on your left shoulder on the road past Wicker Field on your left until you see the MISSOURI STATE MONUMENT on your right. Visit this monument. (It was erected here in 1982 partly as a result of efforts by a St. Louis Boy Scout Troop.)

Continue hiking north and note the Wheeler Monument and ALABAMA STATE MONUMENT on you left.

Now turn right and hike east along Riverside Drive (single file on the left shoulder of the road). After passing Cloud Field and entering the wooded area you will soon see the KENTUCKY STATE MONUMENT on you left. This was erected in 1974 partially due to efforts on a Murray, Ky. Girl Scout Troop.

Shiloh Indian Story - Part 1

Continue hiking east down Riverside Drive until you see the sign INDIAN MOUNDS TRAIL. Here assemble all of your hikers and read aloud to all the Shiloh Indian Story (Part 1. Answer questions 8 through 11 as you do so.)

Shhhhhhhh!!!!! We must be very quiet and very alert. We have a hard job before us right now. We must pretend that we are following the trail of Indians. We must pretend that these Indians lived nearby where we are right now.     

The land about us is very similar to the way it was when the Indians were here so this should make our job easier. Way back then, over four hundred years ago, there were deep forests that extended from one river to the next. But rather than be afraid of these huge woods, the Indians liked it because it was easy for them to live here. The woods that had so many useful plants and animals made a very comfortable home for the Indians.     

Listen to the life of this forest. Can you hear the living things? The mockingbirds, and woodpeckers, like the Yellow Bellied Sapsucker, or the fox squirrel, even a cricket, and the rustling of leaves in every bush ant tree. These few things that you can hear are signs. They told the Indians many things.     

The chatter of a fox squirrel would be of great interest to an Indian brave as he and the other members of a hunting party looked for game. It might mean that they were not alone and that someone was watching them. It might mean that they need more practice in walking quietly through the woods, in stalking. Mostly, it would mean that there was food nearby, because way back then, where there was one kind of animal there would always be many other kinds because man had not unbalanced the wildlife communities. Besides the animal life that meant food, the fox squirrel would signify that there was plant food nearby, that would be valuable to the Indian: such plant foods as nuts and acorns.     

Now, before we move on along the trail, let's all find a nice place to sit down and make ourselves comfortable. Lean back against a tree trunk and let's close our eyes and listen to determine if there is anything special that we can hear.     

Now, let's sit still for another couple of minutes and find out what the woods smell like. To help us concentrate, let's close our eyes again and also put our hands over our ears.     

What would you think if you were an Indian? In the numbered spaces on your card write down what you thought.

I wonder what it would have been like to be an Indian boy or girl? Their home was the forest and they lived out-of-doors most of the time. I bet that it would have been tough living in a thin-walled wicker lean-to, especially in the winter. Usually, though, we don't thing about that; what we think about is playing in the forest all day long. Wouldn't that be fun? We could have had a pet animal, probably a dog. We would have gone swimming at least one time every day in the summer time. It would have been really fun to be an Indian.     

One thing about the Indian boys and girls though, they were very obedient children. They knew what was right and what was wrong, and they had great respect for their parents and the elders in the tribe. In the Chickasaw tribe children were related to their Mother's family or clan, not their Father's, but women had authority only over the girls. A disobedient son was sent to the eldest uncle of the Mother's clan. For punishment, the uncle might just scold the offender, make him do a small amount of distasteful work, or appeal to the boy's feelings of honor or shame. If all of these things did not work, the boy might be required to sit still while the uncle poured ice cold water over his head and all over his body. In the case where the elders believed that a boy was not acting according to the customs of the tribe or note behaving like a future warrior he would be lashed with a whip of woven grass. The worst thing an Indian boy or girl could do was steal. Honest and truthfulness were the main laws of the tribe. If one became a thief and stole from his friends or neighbors he could be sure that the punishment would be severe. The Chickasaw's custom was to punish thievery by scratching the back of the guilty person with the dried teeth of a snake.

(PAUSE!)     

What kind of meat did the Chickasaw Indian eat? Deer? Bear?     

Next to being a fighting man, the Chickasaw was a hunter and her practiced such nature skills as tracking, trapping, and using decoys and calls. Chickasaw Indian boys learned and practiced these nature crafts when they hunted wild turkeys and other small game near their villages.     

The most common and useful natural foods the Chickasaw's used were the deer and bear and in earlier times the buffalo. The deer was most popular and the Indian brave liked this best because it was thought that by eating deer meat he too would be able to run fast and be graceful like the deer. The deer's flesh was eaten fresh or dried and was smoked for use in the winter. Deer shin was the principle material used for clothing. Antler tips were used as arrow points, and the dried sinew and entrails were twisted and used for bow strings and thread for sewing and weaving fishnets. Indian women used deer brains for softening and tanning skins. The tough bear hide was made into strong moccasins and hunting boots, and dried bear gut was a favorite with the warriors as bowstring material. An important item derived from the bear was oil. Slabs of fat taken from the bear carcass were cooked over fires to obtain the oil which was clear and good tasting especially when the usual amount of sassafras and wild cinnamon was added. This oil was used for cooking, for hair groom, and as a body rub for many common body aches and pains.

Just as you all have to go to school to learn things that will be useful to you when you have to provide food and housing for yourselves, so did Indian boys and girls. Although they didn't go to a schoolhouse, they did spend a great deal of time each day learning things from their parents and the other grownups in the tribe. The girls learned from the women and the boys from the men.     

Indian girls had it much tougher than girls do today. Indian women were in charge of the home in every respect from cooking to gardening. Men provided meat and fish and protected the tribe from unfriendly neighbors. The women did the rest including raising the children. They ground corn into meal with crude stone grinders. They tanned animals' skins and then made them into clothing, robes, and blankets. They cooked over open fires and preserved food by smoking and drying it. The Indian women were very busy and worked very hard.     

Indians were concerned with surviving physically from the harshness of living with the raw elements in the out-of-doors. Today we have been able, through science and technology, to create artificial winters by heating our homes with coal, electricity, and oil. In the summer, we air condition our homes. How has survival changed today? Do we worry about it?   

In this fight for survival, the men of the Indian tribe were equally as important as were the women. Most necessary to the welfare of the family and the tribe was the hunting. Nearly every part of the deer and bear obtained by the successful hunting party was used in some way. Next to the hunting the Indian brave was a warrior and his fighting skill was very important to the survival of the tribe. He was required to obtain and protect lands that were well stocked with game so that the hunt could be rewarding. For this reason we can see how important it was for Indian boys to learn the skills of a brave hunter and warrior. Boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen were assigned to men in the village, the elders, who instructed them in the necessary knowledge that would enable them to be successful when their time came to support the tribe. They practiced long hours in the skills of swimming, jumping, running, wrestling, and the use of weapons. Upon being initiated as a warrior, the young men were required to jump into a cold stream in the coldest part of winter and eat special plants called herbs that they thought would increase their strength.

Shiloh Indian Story - Part 3

Now leave this Indian Mound by going down the steps on the south side of this large mound. Follow wood chip path to the sough to reach another Indian Mound; then go right and continue hiking west and following the wood chip path. You will see other Indian mounds in this area. As you hike through the woods you will come to a wooden bridge. Here again assemble all you hikers and read

Shiloh Indian Story - Part 3.

As with their prehistoric ancestors of whom we have been speaking, the Chickasaw Indians relied upon farming as much as they did upon hunting. Their public farms and household gardens were situated near their villages on meadow and prairie plots and cleared tracts in the timber. They cleared forest patches by deadening trees, stripping the bark off all around the trunks so that the trees would bleed the death. The dead trees, saplings, and undergrowth were then burned.   

The Indian's principal food crop was corn. Between the grain hills in the corn patches, Chickasaw farmers planted melons, pumpkins, sunflowers, beans, peas, and tobacco. The women served green corn as roasting ears and processed ripe corn into porridge, grits, gruel, hominy, and meal for bread. They crushed the corn with a long-handled pestle in a mortar made from a chunk of hollowed hickory.   

In season, Chickasaw women and children gathered wild onions, grapes, plums persimmons, mulberries, strawberries, and blackberries, as well as walnuts, chestnuts, pecans, acorns, and hickory nuts. They dried plums and grapes into primitive prunes and raisins and pressed dried persimmons into bricks or cakes. Boiled sassafras roots made a popular tea. Chickasaws gathered salt from local licks and springs and robbed bee trees for honey, used as sweetening for the Indian household. They felled the bee tree and placed the honeycomb and liquid honey in a sewed deerskin container for later use.   

The Chickasaws were inventive in adapting many items in nature to meet their clothing, household, ceremonial, and shelter needs. Their primitive crafts included fashioning local clays into pottery vessels for cooking and for storing food and water. They spun thread and yarn for textiles out of the inner bark of mulberry trees and animal fur. They converted eagle, hawk, and swan feathers into headdresses. They colored textiles and finely tanned deerskins.   

The thick forests in which the Chickasaws lived yielded many products useful in their crafts. Large logs were hollowed out by the use of fire, the charred insides scraped with clamshells or sharpened stones, and fashioned into dugout canoes. From pines they took material for framing their house and made pitch torches to illuminate the nights. Cane was another important plant in Chickasaw crafts. They wove cane baskets and mats, used woven cane for house siding, constructed cane fish traps, sieves and fences, and made blowguns from hollowed cane pieces. The hickory tree had a number of uses also. Besides using the nuts for food, they split hickory logs into strong resilient withes and wove house walls and heavy containers. Hickory was an important firewood, its bark was used to cover shelters, and craftsmen, respecting its strength, used it to make arrow shafts and bows. White hickory ranked with black locust as the favorite bow wood. Red hickory was used for making the pestle and mortar sets for grinding corn.   

We can see that the Indians' life was nearly as complicated as our own. With all these hand-made crafts the Indian family must have been kept very busy manufacturing the tools and implements they used in their everyday life. I guess they must have had to be self-sufficient, there weren't any dollar stores bank then.    When Indian instructors took groups of young Indian boys into the forest to practice their skills and to test them in the art of silent movement, stalking, and the technique of taking instant and effective cover, they walked in a forest like this one that we are walking through.   

Indian teachers used a game to test young Indian boys when they had begun to learn the tricks of stalking quietly through the woods. This game called "Trail of Silence" was played in the wooded terrain near the village. On a stretch of suitable land, they marked a distance of trail about 60 feet long. There were branches and dry leaves laying on the ground and bushes lining the trail. Picking two conspicuous trees, one at either end, as boundaries, marked the trail. Additional hazards to make it more difficult to stalk silently were sometimes added in the form of light dry twigs and thin branches. During the fall and winter, it was especially difficult for even the most silent Indian, and even wild animals of the fore, to move silently.   

The best hunters among the Indians did not think of crawling on their hand and knees or wiggling on their stomachs because in that way he was too out of touch with what was going on around him. For that reason the Indian brave did his stalking and enemy invasion in an almost erect of slightly stooped position. The skillful brave took the utmost advantage of every tree, bush, shadow, and other piece of cover encountered along his path.

Alternate Indian Game:

YOU THE LEADER CAN BE THE INDIAN CHIEF AND THE ONE WHO SCORES THE GAME. IF THE TRAIL IS TOO BARE AND EASILY WALKED UPON, MAKE THE STALKING COURSE JUST OFF TO THE SIDE OF OUR TRAIL WITH THE RULE BEING THAT NO ONE MAY STEP ONTO THE PREPARED TRAIL WHERE HE COULD BE EASILY SEEN.    Let's spend a little time and you can test yourselves to see if you can walk as quietly as the Indians did. I will be the chief and score the game. Each of you as your turn comes, must stalk in an upright position, not crawling, from one end to the other end of the course we have chosen. I will stand with my bank to the trail and each time I hear you make a noise, snap a twig, or rustle a leaf, you will get a mark.. The Indian with the least marks will be declared the best Indian brave.

TWO RULES THAT YOU MUST FOLLOW;

NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO PICK UP OR SET ASIDE BRANCHES WITH HIS HANDS,

AND THE REST OF THE GROUP THAT IS NOT STALKING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY QUIET

Shiloh Indian Story - Part 4

Continue hiking through the woods on the wood chip path until you again reach Riverside Drive. Here assemble your hikers and read the final paragraph of the Shiloh Indian Story - Part 4.

We have nearly completed the Indian Mounds Loop Trail. When we pass the Bloody Pong we will have walked three miles, and be back to the point where we began, and our cars.   

Now that we have nearly finished walking the Indian Mounds Loop Trail, maybe this a good time to think about what it was really like to have been an Indian. There are two things that we can actually compare to the old time Indian's right now. How do your feet feel? We have just walked nearly three miles. Just try to imagine walking from here back to our homes. An Indian would have had to do that because there were no automobiles or even horses before the white man came. Indians didn't have any of the things we have to make surviving easier.

Then hike west along Riverside Drive and south along Hamburg - Savannah Road to reach Bloody Pond and your cars parked in this area. Now continue the Automobile Battlefield Tour route by car driving north along Hamburg - Savannah Road, then east along Riverside Drive. As you drive through the Indian Mounds area note one plaque about Shiloh Indian Mounds along the road that you did not see as you hiked the Trek. Stop and read the plaque and answer these two questions.