Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (19 page)

Jon Gibson, an archaeologist who has studied the ancient earthworks at Poverty Point eighty miles north, speaks of such constructs as metaphors of creation and the cosmos once helping to link a people — and not just the elite — to their land. He writes:

Mounds . . . manifested one of the strongest emotions shared by individuals and small communities — the sense of place, or home. Mounds turned meadows and woods, lakes and bayous, houses and hunting grounds into centers of the cosmos. . . . Mounds metaphorically expressed the southern native world view in which secular and sacred, home and chapel, corporeal and spiritual, and reality and magic were inseparable. [The principle behind the mounds] gave people common knowledge and feelings of a shared past.

We shall never be able to confirm such ideas, argues the probabilist in me, because what a millennium of fifty-inch-per-annum rainfall (the record there is three feet in a single month) had not wreaked on the Great Mound, Southerners accomplished in seventy years. In America, we like to get things done.

Heavy destruction began during the Civil War when soldiers dug away the top and shoveled it down the slopes to make a rifle pit for shooting at anyone ascending the Black River or perhaps coming along the road out of Natchez, twenty-five direct miles eastward. The ineffectiveness of minié balls or light artillery (who was going to drag a mortar up even that reduced slope?) in stopping ironclad gunboats suggests the military destruction of the upper portion was senseless — sheer and utter waste of a singular American wonderment.

The Great Mound as a Civil War soldier would have seen it in 1864.

Six years after the end of the war, the new village of Jonesville was laid out
exactly
within the hundred acres enclosed by the prehistoric embankments and the two rivers. In spite of open ground running southward for some distance along the west bank of the Black River, a few Louisianians nevertheless chose to set a sixteen-block village squarely atop the ancient site, and that made certain the eventual destruction of several smaller mounds in front of the big one. Yet even then, enough of the Great Mound remained to provide significant knowledge of the ancient place and its peoples
if
an archaeologist had arrived anytime in the subsequent sixty-four years. To the loss of America, one did not.

Troyville, now Jonesville, as laid out in 187 1. The Great Mound (circle within a circle) is at upper left.

In 1931, as part of Governor Huey P. Long’s get-people-back-to-work programs, the Louisiana Highway Department began building a bridge to replace the ferry that was a descendant of the first one of 1796. An approach ramp was necessary to get the span above a potential flood, and what more convenient source for the dirt fill than the Great Mound? One generation’s expedience is the grandchildren’s expense. On came the steam shovels.

By the time archaeologist Walker learned of the devastation — publicly sanctioned vandalism that plundered the future at a time when any notion of stewardship thereabouts was more remote than flights to Pluto — and got to the site that summer, the pyramid and its trove of revealing artifacts had been dug and hauled a few hundred feet south and compacted into the bridge approach. He wrote, “A contract was made with the owners to permit the removal of 21,000 cubic yards of dirt, which resulted in reducing the mound nearly to street level.” If you’ve ever driven U.S. 84 in eastern Louisiana and crossed the Huey Long Bridge, your wheels have rolled directly over the soil of what once was one of the great monuments of ancient America.

Remains of the Great Mound as Winslow Walker first saw them in 1931.

Walker thought the shovels might not have gone below the current surface far enough to reach the original base of the mound, and, surely enough, six feet down he exposed its footprint still intact. He immediately began investigating what little remained, but four days later heavy rains stopped him. Returning in early September 1932, he and his father and a few “Negro laborers” for the next two weeks conducted archaeological excavations of the residuum. Even on such unpromising ground, even in that time, a good scientist could turn up information to assist a hypothetical reconstruction of what once had been.

A citizen to whom historic preservation and its links to economic vitality mean anything at all has to think,
After a thousand years, if only Walker had arrived a few months earlier!
Archaeology could have revealed so much more about the ancient residents and their lives.

Ah, archaeology! There’s the glitch. Walker reported:

Unfortunately, the people on whose land the great mound had stood were at first suspicious of the intentions of the excavators, and knowing little of scientific aims or procedure, believed instead that the real purpose was to search for the “Natchez treasure,” which, according to popular tradition, was buried in this or some other large Indian mound. It was, therefore, with reluctance that they at last consented to any excavation of the site at all, and then only on the stipulation that any such “money” found would belong by right to them. But as the work progressed and this form of remuneration did not materialize, their cupidity led them to formulate other demands, which finally became so unreasonable and so impossible to grant that the excavation of the great mound site had to be summarily stopped.

Walker’s barely checked vexation, unusual in a scientific report, indicates his disappointment and frustrated hopes. A few other towns-people, however, with greater intelligence and foresight, did help by lending him tools.

One of the many unexplained facts of the Troyville Mounds has to do not with residents or even the structures themselves but with an earlier archaeologist, Philadelphian Clarence Moore, who, over thirty years, discovered and excavated mounds across the South as if they were as common as clods of dirt. (You’ll recall the decorated Glendora pot shown in chapter 15.) From 1891 to 1918, he steamed up rivers and bayous and coastlines in his own small shallow-draft stern-wheeler,
Gopher,
to dig indigenous earthworks and amass a collection of prehistoric, Southern artifacts paramount in number, quality, and range.

The
Gopher
and its crew came to Jonesville in November 1908, and Moore disembarked. A mere two hours later, he headed on up the Ouachita, recording in his log no reason for shrugging off the Great Mound; reduced though it was, it was still bigger than all but a few he’d excavated elsewhere. His overlooking the smaller mounds at Jonesville may reflect their degradation by the current inhabitants as well as his awareness of hundreds of other sites lying less molested elsewhere.

But how, of all people, could Clarence Moore steam away from something like the Great Mound, even then the tallest structure for many miles? My guess is that he met with venality, as would Walker twenty-four years later; perhaps the demands asked of Moore were even larger, since he was known to pay landowners for digging rights. I think his unnatural silence about neglecting the Troyville site indicates his disgust with a property owner he encountered there, perhaps the same family Walker later dealt with. Although the speed of Moore’s excavations in other locations has raised questions about his scientific procedure, even a hurried dig at Troyville would have yielded knowledge we lack today: better Moore’s quick spade and trowel than highway department steam shovels. And what if he had found a vessel or two even half the significance of those in the splendid cache of ceramics he came up with only sixty-five miles north at Glendora? The number of pottery sherds that Walker and others have excavated since the leveling prove the soil in and around Jonesville was far from culturally sterile.

Winslow Walker’s highly limited, salvage archaeology in 1932 is the fullest we will ever likely have of the grand pyramid. Most artifacts and skeletal remains he excavated were crushed almost beyond recognition, and many other finds were too fragile under the difficult conditions to be preserved. Still, his work would have revealed even more had not — once again — some residents, unwilling to recognize the difference between a souvenir and a scientifically interpretable artifact, interfered. Walker said about his excavation of a mound at the mouth of the Catahoula River where he unearthed a few human burials:

Unfortunately it was not possible to remove any of the bones for study, owing to the intense and insatiable curiosity aroused in the local populace by the discovery. Not content with flocking around the site in such numbers during the day that they seriously interfered with the work of the excavators, they returned to the scene under cover of nightfall, tore off the coverings placed to protect the skeletons, and committed such acts of vandalism that the owners of the ground felt obliged to put a stop to the nuisance by requiring all work to be stopped immediately and the bones to be covered over as before. Time was allowed only to take a few photographs of the burials.

Henceforth, artifacts reburied or not, plunderers knew where to dig for a piece of broken pottery or a crumbling tibia to set up on a windowsill or to keep in a bean sack under the bed. Today, the situation has changed little: current reports of one recent scientific dig are classified to keep looters from using them.

When Q and I began walking Jonesville, all we could see of the vanished prehistoric settlement lay at the foot of Front Street above the Black River; there, a grassy mound with a height on its western edge that failed to rise above my eyebrows had been shaved and half-squared by two streets. The evening view eastward over the slope and across the flood wall, and on to the river, and on beyond the flatlands, was pleasing, but from eighty feet higher, what must it have been like to see first light of day? Archaeologist Gibson believes the early inhabitants considered “unblocked vistas provided an entry portal for good spirits, which originated in the beneficent east, and an exit portal for disharmonious spirits which built up inside enclosed spaces.”

Atop the remaining, mutilated mound was an Anglo cemetery of about forty broken tombstones and two big, concrete vaults like septic tanks, half-sunken boxes built to slow some future power shovel from dislodging their contents. Standing in the middle of the cemetery, Q said, “The message here is that it’s okay to desecrate the grave of a heathen savage, but curst be he that moves my sacred white bones.” Indeed, Cyrus Thomas, another of the great names in American earthworks archaeology, wrote that in the digging of modern graves at Jonesville, “skeletons and pottery are frequently thrown out.” But then, those Anglo bones kept that small mound from being entirely obliterated.

Under the lowering sky in an eerie dusk, I walked the grassy hump to read the markers — one name was Hobgood — and Q stared for some time at crypts under a big dead tree well on its way toward stumpdom. She said, “This place is out of Edgar Allan Poe.” Looking at the disgraced ancient mound, I said I wished I could quote the raven.

We walked on two blocks west to where the Great Mound had stood for a millennium. I imagined the view without the five houses and a Catholic chapel sitting on a corner of the site. At the same scale as the other drawings and with modern structures removed, here’s what I saw: