Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/305

Rh children and negro slaves escaped its fury. So, by repetitions of the first and continuous methods of European devastation on the continent, the French enacted their history. Five years after the Natchez massacre, the French, in 1733, under Perrier, with Choctaws for allies, took vengeance for this slaughter, and broke the power of the Natchez tribe by death and devastation. Four hundred and twenty-seven of the wretched savage survivors were sent by Perrier to St. Domingo, to be sold as slaves.

Meanwhile, after the year 1726, when Louisiana began to give some signs of hope as a colony, enterprising and dauntless English traders, with pack-horses laden with goods, had begun to penetrate the wilderness from Carolina and Georgia, driving a brisk traffic with the Chickasaws. Those Chickasaws, in opposition to the Choctaws, had come into alliance with the scattered fragments of the Natchez Indians, and harried the French. The French, under Bienville, with their Choctaw allies, made a rush upon the Chickasaws in 1736, but the Chickasaws secured a bloody victory. By this time the hostile rivalry between the French and the English for trade and territory extended up from Louisiana to Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. And so through all these feuds, battles, and massacres, involving the Indians in the struggles between the representatives of three European nationalities, — the Spaniards, the French, and the English, — the natives felt the iron scourge weighing on and crushing them alike from the dealing of temporary friends and foes.

Beginning then from the first collision between the French and the English colonists here down to the English conquest of Canada, the Indians found themselves between the upper and the nether millstone, either as allies or foes of the one or the other European combatant. Nor did the hard fate by which they always suffered, whichever party temporarily prevailed, find any relief when the English sway became complete here; for as we shall have