Book Review: ‘Cahokia’

In an 1813 letter to Thomas Jefferson, Henry Marie Brackenridge— lawyer, fur trader, ­botanist, judge—wrote of his visit to a place in ­southern Illinois just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Brackenridge had ­encountered, he said, a ­"monument of antiquity," a ­series of pyramid-like earthen mounds that turned out to be the ­remnants of a long-ago ­Indian city. "I was struck with a ­degree of astonishment," he wrote, "not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids.