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.