“I am not sorry,” he began, “to have spent twenty years among the native peoples of California before coming to Cahokia. In those tribes is still discernible the pattern—the very recent pattern—of their lives before contact with the white man. Whereas there is little in Cahokia that has not been molded and blended by the long contact, first with Catholic Europe, then with the myriad of displaced peoples forced west by the expansion of the United States and forming so much, in the end, of the human material for this Mississippian fusion.
