User:IveGoneAway/sandbox/Burnett’s Mound

Burnett’s Mound, also known as Shunganunga Mound, Webster's Mound, and Knox Knob Top, is a natural landmark in Shawnee County, Kansas, as mentioned in early histories and scientific journals. The site also holds significance to some Indian cultures and is a burial location.

The common name of the landmark came from the mound's one-time owner, Potawatomi Chief Abram Burnett, Nan-Wesh-Mah, who was an important founding businessman of Shawnee County, also referred to as "the biggest man in Kansas".

Today, the landmark is within the incorporated limits of Topeka, recognizable from Interstate 470 by the large water tank that is constructed near its summit. However, in the mid-1800s the Mound was just within the eastern border of the prior Kaw reservation that the Potawatomi settled in 1847.

Tradition held that the mound spiritually, if not physically, protected Topeka from tornados; but when the hill was eventually disturbed by major construction, a strong tornado happened to cross the very summit of Burnett's Mound before rampaging through Topeka to the State House.

Pre-Columbian burial site
The first U.S. settlers well knew that prior settlements used prominent natural mounds for burial or cremation of their dead. A succession of cultures, including Archaic, Woodland, Central Plains, and historic (Pawnee, Kanza, and Potawatomi) components, had used the summits along the Kansas River for worship and burials, with a concordant succession of different traditional forms for those burials.

On June 10th, 1856, Charles B. Lines, correspondent for the Free-Stater Connecticut Company settlers at Wabaunsee, wrote from the summit of Shunganunga within the Indian reservation. Witnessing the passage on the prairie below of Indians trading in Union Town, and the view of a few early settler cabins just east of the reservation border, Lines also mentioned the Indian's burial practice and described their burial mound on top of Shunganunga.

Kansas Glaciation/Shunganunga Lake (proglacial)
Unlike the present planetary warm spell, the Arctic glaciers have reached far down into North America several times in the past millions of years. The greatest advance, 700,000 years ago, has been named the Kansan glacier. This glacier blocked both the Kansas River and the Missouri River. So, for a time, the full, swollen flow of both rivers flowed down Shunganunga valley; never fully topping the peak here, but flowing around all sides. At its greatest extent, the glacier crossed Shunganunga Creek, fully blocking it and forming a proglacial lake the glaciologists have named Shunganunga Lake. Buried moraines of Sioux Quartzite surround the base of Burnett's Mound proving that this was the furthest the south that the glacier reached. The moraines record that the glacier parted here. Passing on both sides of the ridge, the glacier surrounded Bernett's Mound with all of its might, but never touched it.

The Topeka Tornado
Tornado outbreak sequence of June 1966