Beringia, Cahokia and Quivira [Notes]

Three early settings for the novel spring to mind ranging in time from the last Ice Age to the mid-sixteenth century.

Beringia, the land-bridge that spanned the Bering Straits between eastern-Siberia and Alaska, its connectivity fluctuating with the advance and retreat of the ice mass. Some scientists believe small bands of prehistoric nomads crossed to America 40,000 - 50,000 years ago; this first migration ended when sea levels rose during a period of global warming.

About 12,000 to 15,000 years ago in the last Ice Age, the shallow seas again retreated opening up a thousand mile-wide steppe that linked the continents.

Cahokia, A.D. 1150, citadel of a Mississippian mound-building culture outside present-day St. Louis, Missouri: Already occupied for five hundred years, the mid-twelfth century saw the Golden Age of Cahokia, then larger than London and possessing 20,000 residents. One hundred and twenty mounds surrounded the center's ceremonial plazas, the Temple Mound standing ten-stories high.

Over the centuries, Cahokia's astronomors built a series of circular "Woodhenges,"the largest with sixty posts aligned with the rising sun. A two-mile long palisade fortified the inner court. Trade routes extended in every direction from "Cahokia," a seventeenth century French label derived from a local clan long after America’s first city was abandoned.

Quivira, A.D. 1540, the "El Dorado" sought by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on his expedition from Mexico City north to Tierra Neuva. The report of golden Quivira came from El Turco, "The Turk," as the Spaniards dubbed a "very dark and personable" Indian captive liberated from a pueblo near Zuni. Led on by El Turco, Coronado penetrated the heartland crossing endless plains through Texas, Oklahoma and into Kansas.

Quivira is as elusive as the legendary Golden One, its promoter garroted for his deception. There was no gold but when recalling the great march a decade later, Coronado’s chronicler, Pedro de Castenada knew he had glimpsed "the marrow of the land in these western parts,’ and wished he’d settled in this promised land.

Three places, one a gilded dream of America, each with an epic story played out before the first captain of England made a landfall on these shores.

[Images: Beringia map, courtesy of Illinois State Museum; Cahokia, 1150 A.D. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, artist William R. Iseminger; Coronado by Frederic Remington, Wikipedia Commons]