This is a story about time and how things get buried under other things.
In 1804, the Federal government dispatched William Dunbar and George Hunter westward from Natchez to survey lands acquired during the Louisiana Purchase. Only thirty miles from Natchez, Dunbar and Hunter found a complex of earthen mounds and embankments at the confluence of three rivers. Beyond the dirt embankments, a high mound topped with a conical turret like a witch’s hat surveyed the flat, marshy landscape. Dunbar measured the great mound and determined that it was 82 feet tall, its ramped base occupying an acre of land and overlooking the Black River about a hundred-fifty yards away. (The volume of earth and clay packed together to make the mound was estimated at 626,700 cubic feet.) Eight other mounds rose over the alluvial soils where the rivers came together. A Frenchman named Hebrard was living in a log cabin on one of the terraces of the great mound. The earthworks were good locations on which to build – the area flooded frequently.
Dunbar reported that an unknown tribe of Indians had raised high mounds where the Ouachita, Tensas, and Little Rivers fused into the Black River. No one took much note, however, and a plantation later occupied the site. A couple of churches were built and their cemeteries dug into the higher ground of the Indian mounds. During the Civil War, dirt for house platforms had been excavated from the Great Mound and it was now only 50 feet above the river plain. The Confederates cut deep trenches into the mound for rifle pits. After the war, the sides of the Great Mound (known as Mound #5) were further scraped away. A town, Jonesville, was now growing at the confluence of the rivers. Within the village limits, several deep sumps were gouged into the earth and they filled with noisome water. In fact, these craters were ancient borrow pits from which the hard-tamped clay of the mounds had been dug. This earth was removed from the mound and relocated to the pits from which it had been sourced to fill the sumps.
Photographs taken around the turn of the 20th century show the great mound as a barren shapeless height, a formidable eroded escarpment without trees or, even, much vegetation growing on its flanks. Scale is hard to assess in the picture because there are no people visible and no structures. At that time, the mound was apparently forty feet tall. A later picture taken in the late twenties, shows the mound decorated with military-style tents – people had taken refuge on the height during one of the historic floods of that era. In this picture, the mound seems much diminished with its serrated crown of tents hovering above a grey lagoon.
Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, was famous for his bridge projects. With a local politician, his administration planned a long span over the Black River. The west approach to the span was slated to traverse the area of the Great Mound. Learning that the Mound would surely be destroyed in the erecting the bridge, the Smithsonian Institute sent a young archaeologist, Winslow Walker, to the site. Walker was only 26. His objective was undertake salvage archaeology on the mound before it was leveled. (Walker lived until 1996 and later was curator of a museum in Hawaii.)
When he reached Jonesville, steam shovels were busily scraping away the mound. He had arrived about three days too late. The man who owned the Great Mound had sold it for fill for $100. (The man’s daughter later said that the Mound was a nuisance – it cast a long shadow over the home to the West of the rampart where she was raised and made the place dark and gloomy for half the day.) Walker noted extensive wooden planks and round logs in the fill – apparently parts of the mound had been protected by planking and there may have been log steps leading to its summit. Huge amounts of cane and wicker vegetable debris were clotted together in the blue and red clay. These artifacts were thought to be structural elements of the mound that formed a web over the embankments and protected them from erosion. The mound seemed to have been built around 700 A.D. by people now named for the site – the Troyville culture. (This archaeological site, although badly ravaged, is the so-called “type site” for Troyville – that is, a place where the essential diagnostic features for the culture are assembled in the cultural landscape.) The odd conical turret atop the mound was made like an onion, that is assembled in skins of wicker and cane matting holding together the monument’s steep slopes. The Troyville people had an eye for different hues of river clay and, apparently, the mound was made of alternate layers of greenish-blue and red clay packed into the earthen mass. Evidently, the site was ceremonial. The big embankment (now almost entirely flattened) surrounding the pyramidal mounds delineated some sort of sacred space – the embankment had no palisade and it was too gently sloped to have any defensive potential.
Walker published a 103 page pamphlet on his findings. At that time, people were suspicious of archaeologists and thought that the teams from the Smithsonian were covertly hunting for gold treasure. Walker himself learned of another burial mound, the so-called Magnolia Mound, and discovered that it had contained a dozen or so skeletons. But the bones were missing and the mound had been looted by treasure hunters. (Later, a motel was built on the remains of the Magnolia Mound – the motel was named the “Magnolia Motel.” It’s gone now as well.)
Looting in the area, Catahoula Parish, was rife because of legends relating to buried gold. In historic times, the Natchez Indians controlled the area. The Natchez, who were populous and powerful, had many villages in the vicinity. They were exogamous, with matrilineal descent, and lived in towns fortified by palisades. The Indians had elaborate political and religious institutions, practiced human sacrifice when chieftains died on an exorbitant scale, and built their own mounds. The leader of their confederation was called the Great Sun. At the time of the wars with the French, the Great Sun’s lieutenant was a war chief named Tattooed Serpent. The French wanted to grow tobacco on a well-watered Natchez village site, the White Apple Village. When the Europeans tried to expropriate the land for their tobacco, the Natchez revolted. They destroyed the French fort at Natchez (Fort Rosalie), killed two-hundred French soldiers garrisoned there, and captured another 200 women and children. The Choctaw were ancestral enemies of the Natchez and they intervened, massacring the Natchez war party and seizing their hostages. (The French were disgruntled that the Choctaw, who they regarded as allies, sold them back the captives at high prices.) After a desultory war lasting from 1729 to 1731, the Natchez were defeated and, largely, sold into slavery in the West Indies. (As one might suspect, things didn’t go well with the friendly, if opportunistic, Choctaw – although being allied with the United States both in the Revolutionary and 1812 wars, their territories were seized and they were forcibly deported to Oklahoma in the 1830's.)
According to local legend, the Natchez seized a large amount of French gold during the rebellion. From time to time, people claimed to have discovered Indian skeletons bedecked in gold. As a result, all Indian mounds in the area were riddled with the trenches and shafts dug by looters. People said that the 12 bodies in the Magnolia Mound were adorned with gold – this seems to be nothing more than local mythology. But, in any case, Winslow Walker couldn’t retrieve any of the skeletons unearthed under the Magnolia Mound because the bones were stolen under the cover of darkness. As late as the first decade of this millenium, between 2003 and 2010, grants of land to the Archaeological Conservancy (which preserves the sites at Jonesville) including clauses providing that any gold discovered on the premises would revert to the owners of the property ceded to the non-profit for protection.
The Great Mound survived hundreds of years longer that Governor Huey Long’s bridge. The bridge was considered obsolescent in 2003 and was later dynamited. (There are some impressive You-Tube videos on the internet showing the destruction of the span.) A new bridge had to be erected and, so, the State of Louisiana dispatched salvage archaeologists to the site to watch as the old fill in the approach to the bridge was removed. Once again, large quantities of wood and cane matting were uncovered. Some of lots near the river-front, tracts where the highway approaches were to be routed, were also excavated. Within the foundation of one of the bulldozed mounds, three burials totaling twelve sets of skeletal remains were unearthed. The dead seemed to have been strangers to the area – their mortuary customs didn’t match the paradigms for the Troyville culture. They were people “who seemed to have got lost” in the words of the Archaeological Conservancy supervisor responsible for the site. A pit in another mound revealed the shattered shards of, at least, 61 vessels, together with turtle and deer bones. “Ceremonial feasting,” the Conservancy archaeologist said, noting, however, that “ceremonial feasting” is a “go to” hypothesis when nothing else really fits the evidence. Someone seems to have intentionally broken the pots 1500 years ago. But we don’t really know why.
The lane in Jonesville that runs parallel to the Black River is Front Street. During some road work in 2004, a tiny casket was discovered under the street. No historic cemeteries were nearby – in Jonesville, church cemeteries had inadvertently preserved some remnants of the Indian mounds. (People buried their dead on higher ground so that the endemic flooding wouldn’t unearth the graves.) The lonely casket contained the bones of an infant. No one knows why the baby was buried under Front Street apart from other graveyards in the town. And, of course, the identity of the child is unknown.
Jonesville is dying. In the early years of the 20th century, the town was the site of a fishery that provided river-catch to restaurants as far north as New York. But the fishing operation closed thirty years ago. Another blow to the town was the shuttering of a large textile mill. Images of the village posted on the Internet show an impoverished-looking place. Where Highway 84 enters the town, there is a single traffic light suspended over the intersection that leads into the residential neighborhood. On the northwest corner of the intersection, the villagers have built a twelve-foot high scale replica of the Great Mound. But, unlike the Indians, they haven’t properly controlled erosion and the grassy pile of dirt is riven by tiny ravines and gullies. The road passes through the embankment, briefly visible as a green grass hillock on both sides of the highway. The remnants of the Indian mounds, such as they are, remain mostly protected by the Archaeological Conservancy. They will probably outlast the town which is now moribund.
On Highway 84, there’s a marker describing the Great Mound of Troyville, the second largest Indian mound in the United States. (Cahokia’s Monk’s Mound in East Saint Louis is bigger.) Another marker says that Hernando de Soto passed through this area searching for the Fountain of Youth. The marker is wrong – de Soto never came near the place.
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