The Madison area, known as Dejope in the Ho-Chunk language, was an Indigenous metropolis before the arrival of Europeans, says Bill Quackenbush, tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation, one of Wisconsin’s 11 federally recognized tribes. Dejope was a richly interconnected society. “There’s this misconception that we had temporary villages here and there,” Quackenbush says, “but Madison was one large living community.”
Carving dugout canoes would’ve been a community occasion, Quackenbush explains: Men would work multiple logs while families gathered, ate and prepared for the coming season. The carving process—with shells or stone tools—could take weeks or even months; once complete, a canoe would sit along the shoreline for the whole village to use. Nearly as vital to thriving as fire, a working canoe meant open trade and shipping networks, fishing in deeper waters, and travel to faraway places. In winter, the Ho-Chunk would secure the vessels in shallow water, to prevent them from drying out before spring.
In fact, a map of the found dugouts shows us not just where this community lived, but how it moved and changed in pace with the Earth over millennia: Just 300 yards from where Thomsen found that first canoe in Mendota, she later uncovered a cache of at least ten canoes along an underwater ridge that geologists have identified as a previous, now-lost shoreline, a beach in the savannas of ancient Dejope.
“No one does this,” says Amy Rosebrough, Wisconsin state archaeologist, referring to the relatively new approach of treating small, urban waterways as potential archaeological sites. “The only thing even comparable that I can think of is the mudskippers in London who walk up and down the Thames.”
Like those mudskippers, also known as mudlarks, who scour riverbanks for artifacts from London’s past—Roman pottery, Victorian silverware—everyday citizens report dugout sightings across Wisconsin. The best specimens have wound up at historical societies and museums, including a Menominee canoe currently sitting in Smithsonian Institution storage in Maryland. Some are hung high above supper-club tables or auctioned off to private collectors. A few, miraculously, have managed to stay within their tribes, including the Ho-Chunk, the Menominee and the Lac du Flambeau.
It’s the rumors of still-submerged specimens—mostly anecdotes from hunters, fishers and boaters—that make Thomsen and Schroeder put in serious legwork. Receiving leads via a tipline, the women then go hunting themselves, diving, wading or kayaking in Wisconsin’s bogs and shallow lakes, with little more to guide them than loose coordinates and a snorkel.
The duo has thus far confirmed 79 of 112 reports across the state, and new ones are still popping up with regularity. Most of the finds are in surprisingly good condition—a few have even been accompanied by paddles or tools, like net sinkers and an adz, a wood-cutting implement similar to an ax. Some have turned out to be fragments, which is even more remarkable: The worse the specimen, the more likely it’s deemed kindling and thrown on the fire.