The mound builders inspired a life-long curiosity in Thomas Beckwith, born in 1840 on a farm in the Missouri Bootheel. People of his day called the prehistoric people Mound Builders because their villages featured large earthen mounds.
Their villages were found throughout the southeastern United States, and especially in the Mississippi River valley. He seemed to have come by this curiosity honestly; in 1823, his grandfather Newman Beckwith had sent to the American Antiquarian Society in New England a prehistoric pot he had found eroding out of a Mississippi riverbank.
The investigation of these mounds and the people who built them became the younger Beckwith’s passion. He dug into scores of these mounds, mostly in Mississippi County, both on his own extensive land-holdings and on neighboring places. One wonders how he found the time to farm, given the time he devoted to his avocation. Late in life, he even wrote a book outlining his ideas about the origin of these villages and mounds and depicting his huge artifact collection. Unlike many people in those days, Beckwith correctly understood that the mounds had been built by American Indians and not by some mysterious vanished race.
The Native American builders of these mounds were part of what is now known as the Mississippian cultural tradition that had spread up and down the river from its center, the great ceremonial city at Cahokia, in Illinois. These Indians were urban dwellers, and their towns were scattered as far north as Wisconsin and as far south as the mouth of the Arkansas River, also east as far as Georgia and west to Oklahoma. Their villages, frequently surrounded by log palisades, included mounds of various sizes, the largest apparently built as platforms for buildings of ritual significance and perhaps residences for persons of high status. Smaller mounds were built for other purposes, including burials. The economy of these villages was based upon crops of beans, maize (corn), squash, sunflowers, and native grasses with edible seeds grown in fields outside the village walls. To this diet, they added wild game, fish, river mussels, persimmons, wild plums, and a variety of nuts. A trade network gave access to salt, mineral paint, chert for tools, and ceremonial materials. Large dugout canoes provided most of the transportation.
The site of one of the largest of these Mississippian villages in the Bootheel was situated on one of Thomas Beckwith’s farms. Located on a ridge of sand known as Pinhook Ridge, the ancient village was bordered on one side by an extinct channel of the Mississippi River, an oxbow slough at that time, and consisted of seven mounds surrounding a central plaza, all at one time having been enclosed within a palisade and moat wherever not protected by the slough. The large ceremonial mound on the north end of the plaza was over 250 feet long, and still stands to this day a full 16 feet high—built of many tons of soil moved by hand labor from a nearby borrow pit. Arranged around the plaza and among the mounds had once been the many homes of the ordinary people of the village. These small family houses were typically constructed of “wattle and daub”—a lattice of tree branches plastered with clay. Like the rest of the Mississippi Lowlands, the village was surrounded by a primeval swamp forest of sweetgum, cypress, and sycamore, with their crops being grown in the open sand prairies higher on the ridge.
Because of its size and large temple mound, this site attracted early attention from artifact hunters. Beckwith himself had dug extensively on the site, known as Beckwith’s Fort, and in the 1880s, Cyrus Thomas and the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology’s Division of Mound Exploration excavated aggressively there. Ironically, despite these previous excavations and considerable illegal pot hunting over the years, by the mid-twentieth century, Beckwith’s Fort had become the best preserved and last relatively intact Mississippian village left in the state of Missouri. Other sites, especially in the Bootheel, had been destroyed by intensive agricultural practices such as land-leveling and subsoiling, while the many mounds in St. Louis, once known as Mound City, had long since been flattened and paved over.
At the urging of Dr. Carl Chapman of the University of Missouri, the State Park Board purchased the site in 1967, with grant assistance from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The sixty acres acquired encompassed the central area of the village, including the mounds and the visually apparent peripheral stockade line. At Chapman’s suggestion, the park was named Towosahgy, a word borrowed from the Osage language meaning “old village.”
A facility master plan was developed calling for a museum and visitor center with offices and a laboratory, a service area with garage and workshop, and residential quarters for a site administrator and archaeological staff. As required by LWCF funding, a recreational walking trail around the site would lead to the mounds and various features reconstructed through archaeological exploration. Park officials envisioned a major presentation of Missouri’s prehistory and ongoing collaboration with the University of Missouri’s Division of American Archaeology. They selected a PhD archaeologist as administrator and formulated a policy of basic preservation, permitting only limited excavation necessary to develop the site for public visitation. Despite the fact that people had been digging there for a century and a half, mostly pot hunting, there was minimal recorded data about any features that might have been discovered. So officials planned small excavations to verify and locate the construction of the log palisade around the village, to define one or more of the small houses, and to test the big ceremonial mound for evidence of structures on top. Excavations at the south end of the village revealed the palisade; in fact, they showed that the palisade had undergone several phases of expansion. Remains of the palisade and several small houses found near the log wall were then “ghosted” by placing modern poles in the imprints where ancient posts once stood. Small excavations were also made at the north end of the property and on the big mound. There were plans for future excavations at the north and south ends of the village to make sure the visitor center and support buildings would not impinge upon important archaeological features. Signs were erected near the ghosted palisade lines and houses, and a steady trickle of visitors began finding their way to this out-of-the-way spot.
Then in the late spring of 1973, the river began to rise. By June, only the tops of the largest mounds protruded above a seemingly endless expanse of water. It was one of the worst Mississippi River floods in history, covering a large expanse of the Bootheel, including nearby Big Oak Tree State Park, where most facilities were destroyed. After the flood, the master plan was reevaluted, and a decision was made not to erect the planned structures and to provide only a passive visitor experience.
The ruined signs were removed, and any open excavations were closed. Towosahgy was put totally into preservation mode, with no visitor access to the site. A new sign at the north end of the property provided information about the village site and its history, but visitors were limited to viewing the site over the fence from the county road running alongside, from which only the larger mounds were clearly visible. For more than a decade, the site was mowed and kept clear of brush, but no further developments were undertaken.
Eventually, in response to continuing interest in the site and in deference to the LWCF grant, a new round of excavations began in the late 1980s that would lead to reopening the site to visitors. Excavations at the north and south ends conclusively determined that there was a moat on the outside of the log palisade, while excavation in the large ceremonial mound showed that what was thought to have been a ramp on the plaza side was actually much more interesting: the remains of one or more buildings that once stood on top. These buildings had been demolished by the inhabitants and pushed over the front side of the mound, after which the debris pile and the entire mound had been sealed with a thick cap of clay in a ritualistic manner of unknown significance. The mound excavation also recovered many objects of ceremonial importance, including natural crystals of various types, ear plugs and spools, a tobacco pipe, and effigy pottery. A surprise finding was evidence of early earthquakes associated with the nearby New Madrid Fault—fissures filled with sand pushed up from below, from two different earthquake events between ad 300 and 900. Finally, new radiocarbon dates indicated that the village had been occupied much longer than previously thought, roughly a thousand years from ad 400 to 1400.
The site once again welcomed visitors with a new entry road, parking, and toilet facilities along with a redefined walking trail, renewed ghosted palisade lines, and a dozen new interpretive panels presenting the latest research. Because of the probability of flooding, the facilities were designed for submersion and subsequent return to use.
It was good that they were: in the flood of 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers determined it was necessary to activate the New Madrid Floodway by dynamiting the Bird’s Point Levee along the Mississippi. Once again, both Towosahgy and Big Oak Tree went under water—and stayed that way for weeks. At Towosahgy, only the tops of the two largest mounds showed, the big temple mound harboring a collection of refugee deer, turkeys, and coyotes. This time, when the river receded, the waterproof facilities were hosed off. Duplicates of the explanatory panels were rehung, and the site was soon back in business.
In archaeology, there is always a tension between preservation and excavation. Excavation is destruction. This may be less evident in dealing with a Roman amphitheater or highway, made from massive stone blocks, than in a Native American site, where an archaeological resource may often be only marked by a subtle change in color or texture of the soil itself. Excavation means trading the physical survival of the site for the knowledge gained about it. Caution dictates to excavate only as much as is necessary and with care so that the knowledge gained will become preservation of a different sort.
Thomas Beckwith was a mixed blessing for Missouri archaeology. His diggings were not excavations in the sense of modern professional archaeology. Regrettably, much information was lost in his ambitiously random pursuit of relics. But Beckwith’s somewhat naive approach to archaeology must be contrasted with his contemporaries. As Cyrus Thomas noted, people around Charleston, Missouri, discovered that collectors would pay top dollar for Mississippian pots. Many sites were virtually destroyed, and thousands of Mississippian pots were sold on the open market and dispersed across the country and the world, many forever lost to modern archaeology. In contrast, Beckwith dug carefully, kept good provenance records for the objects he found, and in the end, donated his thousands of artifacts to Southeast Missouri State University for scholarly study. In the context of his times, Thomas Beckwith left a valuable legacy. Given his passion for Missouri’s mound builders, he, and Grandpa Newman too, would likely be pleased to know that his fort is now held in public trust, to be permanently preserved.
Featured photo: This humble hill is the largest of Towosahgy’s mounds. The Mississippian Indians conducted ceremonies upon it until about AD 1420. Oliver Schuchard. When the Army Corps of Engineers dynamited a levee to activate the New Madrid Floodway in May 2011, forty-three deer, four turkeys, and two coyotes shared the shrinking top of the tallest mound during the height of the flood. The ancient Mississippian people knew what they were doing when they built their mounds on this ridge, out of reach of most floods. • Chris Crabtree
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