Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/569

 THE END OF THE NATCHEZ

By JAMES MOONEY

When LeMoyne cTIberville sailed into the Mississippi in 1699, just two centuries ago, he found the Na'tsi or Natchez Indians, from whom the modern town takes its name, settled in nine vil- lages, with a total population of perhaps 2500 persons, along what is now St Catherine creek, in Adams county, Mississippi. Thirty years later their villages had been destroyed, their chiefs and hundreds of their people killed or sold into slavery, and the sur- vivors were fugitive refugees with other tribes. Today there may exist twenty of the name.

For several reasons a peculiar interest attaches to the Natchez. Their language seems to have had no connection with that of any other tribe, excepting possibly the neighboring Taensa of Louisiana. Their strongly centralized government and highly developed religious ceremonial gave them commanding influence among all the tribes of the region, while their heroic resistance to the French, and their final destruction as a nation, lend their history a tinge of romance which writers have been quick to ap- preciate. The interest is in no degree diminished when we learn that, contrary to the ordinary idea, they were not exterminated, but rather extirpated, which after all is but another word for the same process. P£nicaut, Dumont, Dupratz, and Gayarr£, have told us of their religion, government, and primitive home-life. In this short sketch we shall endeavor to throw some light on their history subsequent to 1730, prefacing with a brief statement of the causes which led to their dispersal.

In 1699 the French under dTberville made their first perma- nent establishment on the gulf coast at Biloxi, Mississippi, eighty

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