As we tried to reach the heart of Jonesville, population 2,700, my usually reliable seat-of-the-pants compass somehow went awry and caused me to misguess enough directions to create a tour of the village and its de facto, semisegregation. In the Negro section (we were soon to hear it called “Over the Tracks”), the citizens were outside in the mild air, gadding about, jollifying, getting ready for Saturday night; barbecue smokers scented the afternoon, voices called from porch to porch, coolers got stocked with ice and beverages. But in the white section, the doors were closed, shades drawn, stoops empty, and gadding about was nil; it could have been a January afternoon in northern Michigan.
By eliminating one direction after another, a brief task in such a small place, I eventually fumbled us into the historic center of Jonesville, the spot where it began. I am obligated to report what we saw, and that was considerable evidence of one of the poorest parishes in one of the poorest states. It reminded me of Gus Kubitzki’s description of another town to be unnamed here, “an agreeable place once it’s well behind you.”
The impoverished commercial buildings had a lone saving grace: there weren’t many of them. But those yet standing ranged from the crumbling, collapsing, and crippled to the decaying, deteriorated, and derelict. Remodeling meant boarding up a window and painting KEEP OUT across it. Here was another wreckage of that ship of state, the U.S. American Dream, that merchantman which founders and comes to grief whenever the winds in its sails — voracity without limits, profit without responsibility — inevitably slacken. Of the endeavors an impartial observer might honestly term “prosperous,” I saw only two: Catahoula Bank and, behind it, the Addictive Disorder Clinic, a proximity a novelist of Main Street America would have to avoid to keep from being accused of clangingly obvious symbolism.
As we walked, neither Q nor I said anything for some time. At last she broke the numbed silence. “It looks like a place that lost its soul.” Catahoula perish.
[READER ALERT: Although there is no bloodshed or vileness in it, this Huey Long Bridge story is only going to get darker, so I pause here for readers with heartstrings easily tightened to seek the refuge of chapter 20.]
18
A Grave History
THE DILAPIDATIONS in the old mercantile heart of Jonesville could not entirely overcome — I don’t know how else to term it — an aura. Over several hours of trying to define it, I finally realized it arose from what had been — I don’t mean crumbling bricks and decaying wood; rather it came from something much older, something not yet fully eradicated. A long and deep human past will stain the land in ways beyond discolorations of soil and will leave a scent perceptible not to the nose but to the imagination.
My interest in Jonesville may have been similar to John Milton’s indubitable absorption with powers of destruction and evil in the face of salvation, an interest fully evident in his great, paired epic poems: not only is Paradise Lost a greater work, it’s five times longer than Paradise Regained. Or consider Dante’s unmistakable captivation not with the beatific souls in his Paradiso but with the tormented dead whirling in the Inferno.
I hope you will tolerate — those of you who have not gone on to chapter 20 — my use here of the word evil, because what happened in Jonesville was wrong, although it was a wickedness having nothing to do with the more usual — to judge from our popular entertainments — murder and mayhem, knives and napalm. It was not an evil of weapons but of tools: spades, scoops, scrapers, steam shovels. It’s a tale of a past and a future that got, you could say, abridged.
On its ascent of the Ouachita in 1804, the Forgotten Expedition passed by what is today the historic center of Jonesville, and William Dunbar wrote in his log about a lone resident, a Frenchman whose “house is placed upon an Indian mount with several others in view: There is also a species of rampart surrounding this place and one very elevated mount, all of which I propose to view and describe on my return, our situation not now admitting delay.” In late January 1805, Dunbar did return to make the first record of one of the most spectacular constructions in the entire region of Mississippi Valley aboriginal earthworks. Even Hunter, usually attracted more to resources of future profit, said, “If one may judge from the immense labor necessary to erect those Indian monuments to be seen here, this place must have once been very populous.”
A couple of hundred yards below the crotch of the big Y that is the juncture of the Tensas with the Ouachita, at about the place where the little Catahoula River joins, once stood more than a half-dozen (observers gave varying numbers) prehistoric mounds protected on two sides by a large, defensive, L-shaped earthen embankment about a mile long running from the Black River to the Catahoula, with a pair of water gaps allowing dugouts to enter the enclosure. The right-angled rampart inversely reflected the juncture of those two rivers and protected the center. Rising near the middle was, to use a later name, the Great Mound, its height and structural design then unmatched among the large earthworks of the United States.
When the expedition came through, the Indians — both builders and later denizens — were long gone, and the only resident was the Frenchman who operated a ferry across the Black River. At the time, although Dunbar wouldn’t have known, the Great Mound was more than a thousand years old, an age commensurate with the First Crusade. It was also the second-highest native mound in America; only the huge Monk’s Mound at Cahokia, Illinois, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, stood taller, but just by a few feet. Because the Great Mound rose from a far smaller base, its steeply angled upper portion, Dunbar’s “cone,” created steep and high architectural lines probably found nowhere else in the United States. Despite being heavily overgrown with cane, the thing was unique — the Empire State Building of prehistoric America. (Its complex of stacked, geometric shapes makes a single term for it difficult, but the structure was clearly much more than a “mound”; recognizing the simplification, I’ll refer to it now and then as a pyramid.) It was a giant earthen exclamation point, a grand monument fitting to a grand river at its terminus.
I fear my words will fail to show the pyramid precisely, so I’ll resort to a diagram I’ve taken from a theoretical one that Winslow Walker, the archaeologist who conducted the fullest investigation of the Great Mound, made in the early 1930s. The apex of what you see in the figure, all of it made of clay, rose to the height of an eight-storey building; when Dunbar visited, the pyramid was the tallest native structure in the South.
Diagrammatic reconstruction after Winslow Walker of the Great Mound as William Dunbar would have seen it in 1804.
Walker established the footprint of the structure, and then, combining Dunbar’s 1805 vertical measurements with his own horizontal ones, he was able to reveal through geometry the upper portion, the truncated cone, had to rise at a fifty-degree angle from its base atop the double terraces, or tiers, below. The angle of repose (angle of slide) for dry earth is thirty-nine degrees, but for damp clay, of which the mound was made, the angle can decrease to seventeen degrees; with that in mind, you might consider the engineering of the Great Mound in a rockless, fluent land as at least the equal to the stone pyramids in Egypt, Mexico, or Central America.
Referring to the edifice as a “mound” denigrates and did not help its survival. The tenacious soils of what the usually unimpassioned Hunter called a “stupendous turret” were packed down hard and perhaps locked in by buried cane mats. That peerless work stood for more than a thousand years in a climate notorious for hurricanes and for saturating downpours lasting all day. The pyramid would be there now for you to witness had a couple of decisions, otherwise of little significance, turned out differently. Although many archaeologically rich native mounds and middens around the country have been destroyed for simple road fill, nothing as splendid as the Great Mound has fallen for that mundane purpose.
Dunbar wrote that because the “ascent is extremely steep, it is necessary to support one’self by the canes which cover this mount, to be able to get to the top.” (The Indians may have
used a narrow spiral ramp, perhaps one of timbers, but the answer to that mystery is now also lost.) Assuming hundreds of years of erosion must have reduced it, Dunbar thought the tower was originally even higher, although with the diameter of the crest only eight feet, the pyramid could not have held much more packed soil or had space at the top for a large structure.
The Ouachita River in southern Arkansas.
So what was the purpose of that extraordinary quoz at the heart of what may have been the “capital” of a region blessed with the conjoining of three rivers? Dunbar guessed a watchtower, but that function could have been more easily accomplished in a tall cypress. A signal station? A monument to a deity or person? A ceremonial pyramid? A giant gnomon for astronomical observations? Apparently, like most of the truly large Mississippian earthworks, it was not a mortuary, at least not initially. Then what was it?
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 sign
ificance 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.