The story of how Cahokia disappeared from the American historical consciousness — or perhaps more accurately, how it was never fully incorporated into that consciousness — is as interesting and as instructive as the story of the city itself.

The mounds were visible and recognized from the earliest period of European exploration and settlement in the region.

French explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries noted them.

Early American settlers of the nineteenth century wrote about them, and some of the mounds — Monks Mound in particular — attracted curious visitors from distant areas.

The American Bottom was one of the most thoroughly settled agricultural regions in the early United States, and the mounds were physical features that everyone in the region knew about.

But knowing about the mounds and understanding what they represented were two different things.