
The Chunkey Player Effigy Pipe (also known as “The Chunkey Player”), is made of flint clay, measuring 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches. Thought to have originally come from Cahokia, it was found in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, dated to 1100-1200 BC. Image courtesy wikicommons
In early March 1702, Fort Louis de La Louisiane was under construction. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, French Mobile’s founder, had only recently arrived, and the obvious progress pleased him. His brother Jean Baptiste Le Loyne de Bienville was directing soldiers and Mobile Indians as they cleared away trees and undergrowth, burned the debris and laid out the town. Now that he was finally on site, Iberville took over the work and directed Bienville to scout the neighboring delta. “He got an Indian to show him the place where their gods are,” Iberville wrote in his journal, “about which all the neighboring nations make such a fuss and to which the Mobilians used to come and offer sacrifices.”
This was at Mound Island, an ancient village site amid the cypress swamps and river cane four miles by the crow from Fort Louis. It was then and remains today only reachable by water. Jay Higginbotham, author of the monumental 1977 book “Old Mobile: Fort Louis de Louisiane 1702-1711,” speculated that Bienville and his guide paddled their dugout canoe upriver to Bayou Matche, thence up the Middle River, down the Tensaw and into Bottle Creek, which borders the island’s eastern side. After they dragged their canoe onto the bank, they would have had to walk a short distance to reach the mounds.
Mound Island today is a National Historic Landmark owned by the Alabama Historic Commission. It is a fantastic place consisting of 18 mounds, the tallest of which stands 45 feet high, and nearby borrow pits where the Indians acquired the dirt by the basketful to build them. Because of all the soaring trees and spreading eye-level palmettos, it is difficult to imagine how the village would have looked during its heyday — no trees or undergrowth, a smooth plaza, and wood and mud houses atop the mounds. Actively occupied between 1250 and 1550, the island served as a ceremonial, political and trade center for the northern Gulf Coast. Largely abandoned by the time the French arrived, it still bore some ritualistic importance to the local native people.
Iberville wrote that his brother had to cajole the guide with the gift of a musket to take him to the spot. There, “on a little hill among the canes,” sat the gods — five effigies representing a man, a woman, a child, a bear and an owl. The Mobilians believed these figures had descended from the sky, and that it was death to touch them. Even with his cherished new musket, the guide would approach no closer than “10 steps away” and then only with his back turned.
Bienville examined the figures carefully. Iberville later described them as platre or plaster, and noted the similarity of the man, woman and child to the “Indians of this country.” His use of the word plaster has puzzled modern scholars. The Indians typically fashioned their effigies of fired clay, stone or wood, rather than a highly perishable material like plaster. Greg Waselkov, a retired University of South Alabama archaeologist, thinks that the Bottle Creek figures were probably a soft stone like limestone, sandstone or even marble, all easily available via the Indians’ sophisticated trade network. That said, he adds that “a flint clay statue of a crawfish did turn up at the Dauphin Island shell mound site, so who knows!” Neither Bienville nor Iberville indicated the size of the Mound Island effigies, but existing examples range between six and 24 inches in height. In “Old Mobile,” Higginbotham guessed that they “were very likely made by area natives of a much earlier period.” If so, that would partially explain why the Mobilians held them in such veneration.

To his guide’s shocked consternation, Bienville committed an act of gross cultural vandalism, gathering up the statues and placing them in the bottom of the canoe for the return trip to Fort Louis, where they excited considerable comment. Iberville put them on display and remarked, “The Indians who see them here are amazed at our boldness and amazed that we do not die as a result.” He hypothesized that “some Spaniard in the time of Soto” made the effigies. Why he did not credit their manufacture to native hands is unknown, though it likely reflected an arrogance toward people he regarded as savages. “I am taking the images to France,” he concluded, “though they are not particularly interesting.”
Iberville’s attitude notwithstanding, his account of the statues’ discovery guaranteed their enduring appeal and has inspired several modern searches as to their whereabouts. As early as 1718, a French cartographer named Guillaume Delisle commemorated the place where Bienville found them as Isle aux Statues (Island of Statues) on his Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi (Map of Louisiana and the Course of the Mississippi). During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gulf Coast historians and writers like Grace King and P. J. Hamilton wrote about them, generally sticking to Iberville’s journal, though Hamilton considered their discovery “important.”

A diagram of Bottle Creek, the largest mound complex on the northern Gulf Coastal Plain. Image Courtesy the Alabama Department of Archives and History
What happened to the figurines? Were they lost or destroyed after they landed in France? Or do they still survive on a dusty shelf, or tucked away in the attic of an aristocratic family’s house, or in the recesses of some little-visited museum? In his 1966 book, “The Mobile Indians,” Higginbotham wrote that during a Paris research trip, “I attempted to locate these idols without success.” And during the 2000s, Mobile city officials made inquiries about them on trips to the Paris Air Show, also without luck. Still the effort continues. According to Waselkov, “Vin Steponaitis [an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina] has been searching for the Bottle Creek statues most recently. He had remarkable success not long ago in tracking down one of the statues stolen by the French from the Natchez temple in 1730.” When contacted about this, Steponaitis expressed optimism about the prospects of finding the Bottle Creek figures. “Given that the effigies were in Iberville’s possession when he wrote his 1702 journal entry,” he explained via email, “it’s entirely possible that they ended up in France. It was common at the time for wealthy Frenchmen to display such items in ‘cabinets of curiosities.’ Such cabinets and the objects they contained often changed hands over time, going from one collector to another. And in the 20th century some of these objects ended up in museums.” If something similar happened to the Mobile effigies, perhaps they will yet emerge. If so, how wonderful to hope that they will return to Mobile, their rightful home.
John S. Sledge’s “Mobile and Havana: Sisters Across the Gulf” with coauthor Alicia García-Santana and photographers Chip Cooper and Julio Larramendi is now available on mobilebayshop.com.