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Lin W Brown
In this account, in addition to the three mounds that are recorded in the State files, Wailes mentioned one or two others that were just about destroyed by cultivation. He also described deep borrow pits around the three mounds and detected evidence of occupation on top ot the principal mound where the Lower Mississippi Survey of Harvard University excavated in 1971 (Brain et al. n.d.). The reference to Andrew Jackson occupying the mound adds another historical dimension to the site (Rowland 1925, 1:303?4).
Wailes? description ot the Anna site, known to him as Voucherie, was so detailed that it was not improved upon until Jesse Jennings?, John Cotter?s, and Philip Phillips? visits to the site in the mid-twentieth century (Cotter 1951b; Jennings 1940a; 1991:12). It was on April 18, 1853, that Wailes described this incredible mound center located on the edge of the bluffs north of Natchez:
In company with Mr. Roach visited the Voucherie group of mounds on the _bluff of the Mississippi. The group consists of four mounds immediately on ^Ji?Suff and five or six more remote. The principal and more westerly one is nearly sixty feet high from the top of which the buildings on Dr Duncan?s Istmus plantation on the west bank of the Mississippi below Waterproof can be distincdy seen, distant perhaps four miles. The Mississippi probably washed the foot of the bluff on which the mounds stood at the time they were constructed. It has now receded and is more than a mile distant at the nearest point, Fairchild?s creek intervening. The position, grouping and structure of these mounds is very striking, commanding all the approaches and rendering the enclosed area an almost impregnable citadel. They are surrounded by deep ravines on the precipitous margins of the bluff, which in some places has been cut away and so modified as to form a kind of terrace. The work is admirably adapted for the mounting of cannon, and one can scarcely resist the conclusion that it was planned and constructed with that view. It is an admirable specimen of engineering, superior throughout to any estimates that we can form of the skill and capacity of the rude tribes by whom they were supposed to have been built. Some of the sides and angles of the mounds correspond with the cardinal points of the compass and the principal sides of the large mound very nearly with the length of a four pole chain.
The mounds on the bluff are all covered with large forest trees. Those which have been cleared and cultivated afford quantities of broken pottery and arrow points, stone hatchets, with fragments of galena and some rock chrystal have been plowed up, with the remains of bones about the mounds.
Took the courses around some of the principal mounds, and the bearings and distances with reference to each other.