a | 
THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 595 
cannon were planted within a few yards of their walls.* In the States 
still farther to the south, the same method of fortification was prac- 
ticed. Le Moyne, the artist of Laudonniére’s expedition, gives a picture 
of one of these villages, t which is surrounded by a single row of. pali- 
sades, twice the height of a man, set close together. The entrance is 
narrow, drawn in after the manner of a snail shell, and is further de- 
fended by two small round buildings, with slits and holes for observa- 
tion, something like an old-fashioned sentry box. 
In the Gulf States, including under this head portions of Tennessee 
and Arkansas, the Indians have been in the habit of fortifying their 
vilages with ditches and stockades from the time of De Soto down to the 
beginning of the present century. As late as 1814 the position of the 
Creeks, at the battle of the Horseshoe, is said to have been protected 
by a line of earth-works from 6 to 8 feet high,t and about 1735, almost 
a century earlier, the Chickasaws met the attack of Bienville in a 
stockaded fort, and standing waist deep in a ditch.§ Going back still 
further, we are told by the Portuguese gentleman || that the wall around 
a town belonging to the Cacique of Coga, as well as that “of others 
which afterwards we saw, was of great posts thrust deep into the 
ground, and very rough; and many long rails, as big as one’s arm, laid 
across between them, and the wall was about the height of a lance, and 
it was daubed within and without with clay, and had loopholes.” The 
town of Mauvila was situated in a plain, and consisted of eighty houses, 
the smallest of which, according to La Vega, might contain six hundred 
persons. It was surrounded by a high rampart, palisaded with heavy 
beams of wood planted in the ground, and with timbers placed cross- 
wise. The vacant places were filled in with earth mixed with straw, 
so that the wall looked like a piece of masonry. At every 50 paces 
there was a small tower with loopholes large enough to hold eight 
men. The town had two gates and a large square in the middle, which 
was surrounded by the principal houses.4{ West of the Mississippi 
was the village of Capaha, which is said to have consisted of five hun- 
dred houses. It was situated on a little hill, surrounded by a ditch 10 
*Martin, North Carolina, vol. 1, p. 251: New Orleans, 1829. 
t De Bry, plate xxx. 
tSchooleraft, Indian Tribes, vol. v1, p. 372. 
§ Hist. Coll. of Louisiana, part 11, p. 83: ‘Surrounded by timber 1 cubic foot placed 
circularly with three rows of loopholes; the Chicachas were bedded to the stomach in 
the earth,” ete. ‘‘A large village, surrounded by a kind of wall made with potter’s 
clay and sand, fortified with little towers at intervals, where we found fastened to 
a post the arms of Spain engraved on a copper plate, dated 1588.” Cavelier in Shea’s 
Early Voyages, p. 21, Albany, 1861. ‘‘The old village of the Akansea, where they 
formerly received the late Father Marquette, and which is discernible now only by 
the outworks (dehors), there being no cabins left.” Father Gravier in Shea’s Larly 
Voyages, p. 126. 
|| ist. Coll. of Louisiana, part UW, p. 153. 
q La Vega, seconde partie, p. 19. 
