This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

M/SS/SS/PPf .1RC! I A l:( )/.()(,' V
thing ?dead? in his beloved Warren County, so he was constantly checking out our excavations north of town. Cordon was (and still is) my Vicksburg mentor, and he often invited me out to his home on Campbell Swamp Road in southern Warren County for food and conversation. At one time during that blisteringly hot summer he mentioned that there was a mound site nearbv that might prove to be of interest. He said that a man named B. L. C. Wailes had visited it, described it, and even drawn it in the midnineteenth century. We examined my quad map at the place he indicated, but found nothing to indicate the existence of a site. Consequently, I was prepared for a wild goose chase. I can still remember how flabbergasted I was when, after tromping through woods on what seemed like an endless journey, a 25 foot tall, perfectly preserved mound suddenly loomed before me. This I had not expected. Had I actually gone back to the Sydnor volume prior to my visit, though, I would have seen that the site was described on page 182! For some reason, it had missed being recorded by the state, so I christened it the Cotton Mounds (22-Wr-614) in honor of my good friend from ?Campbell Swamp College? in Redbone, Mississippi.
Two decades later, in the summer of 1996, two of my graduate students at the University of Alabama excavated the Cotton Mounds and wrote Masters theses based on this site and a survey of the surrounding region (Boudreaux 1997; Johnson 1997). While I was helping them in the initial weeks of their fieldwork, Gordon Cotton happened to show me some binders at the Old Courthouse Museum. They contained all the entries from B. L. C. Wailes? journals, transcribed by Nell Wailes Brandon, a direct descen-dent of the old ?Gentleman? (Brown 1996). I at first read for amusement, but when I began to read passages about sites with which I was familiar (and many with which I was not), I started to appreciate just how much Wailes knew about the antiquities of Mississippi. It was certainly time for me to do a more intensive study of this nineteenth-century scholar. This article is only a beginning. Hopefully, it provides a sense of the important contributions Wailes has made to the growth and development of archaeology in the state. He would have been a national figure had more of his writings been published, but at least they are still preserved.