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Ian W Brown
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is clearly the Haynes Blut! site. There are only four mounds there now, but Wailes recorded seven. The last group on Mrs. Fox?s plantation is questionable. I suspect it is the Blakely site, but there was only one mound there at the time Philip Phillips (1970:434) recorded it. Phillips suspected that it was a much larger enterprise, and Wailes? description of tour mounds would indicate as much. Wailes did not determine the location of Fort St. Pierre, but I suspect he looked at ?Haynes Bluff? in a more expansive way than most people do. By the time of the Civil War, the fort site location was referred to as Snyder?s Bluff (Bowman 1904:440?41; Brown 1975; 1978; 1979a?b; Claiborne 1880:44?45, 535; Deupree 1903:330?32; Lowry and McCardle 1978:79,109-10; Rowland 1907, 1:739-42).
Wailes? description of the Fatherland site along the banks of St. Catherine Creek is also quite illuminating. This site, known as the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians, is located within the city limits of Natchez. It has received considerable archaeological work in the twentieth century, first by Moreau B. Chambers, James A. Ford, and Jesse D. Jennings (Baca 1989:36? 38; Brown 1978b:3; Ford 1936:50?68; Jennings 1940b; Truett 1938), and later by RobertS. Neitzel (1964; 1965; 1978; 1983). Others have used the Fatherland data to assess various matters concerning Natchez Indian history and material culture (Brown 1990; Quimby 1942; Shafer 1972). Neitzel was especially puzzled by an unusual linear embankment that ran in the plaza between Mounds B and C. Based on an analysis of a historic map, made following the Natchez Massacre, he interpreted the earthwork to have been a ramp or causeway for hauling cannons atop the mounds. Wailes, however, offers an alternative function for this raised area as an artificial levee in his March 2, 1853, description of the Fatherland site:
At St. Catherine, near the bridge, up the creek 1 /4 of a mile, is the group of mounds, three in number, the site of an old indian village. The largest is highest up the creek and near the bank. They all seem to have been square or rectangular. The largest is some ten or 15 ft high and seem to have been about one hundred ft square on the top. All have been much modified and dug away, the earth taken to form a levee along the creek from mound to mound to protect the bottom fields from overflow of the creek, but without success; a recent freshet has covered a large portion of the flat and left large quantities of mud or silt spread over it. A few bones and a little pottery were seen on the sides of the mounds where the earth had been dug away, (see