The French Colonial Moment, Fort Rosalie and the Natchez War

France arrived at the Mississippi River in sixteen ninety-nine, when Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville sailed into the river's mouth with two ships and a mandate from Louis the Fourteenth to establish a colony before the Spanish or English could. By seventeen sixteen, the French had built Fort Rosalie on the high bluffs above the river in the territory of the Natchez people, a strategic post meant to anchor the Louisiana colony and control the river trade between the Gulf and the interior.

The Natchez were not passive hosts. Their society was one of the most complex in North America east of the Mississippi: a strict class hierarchy, a hereditary Great Sun who held absolute ritual authority, and a set of religious practices centered on a sacred fire that burned continuously in the temple at the Grand Village. The French and the Natchez managed an uneasy accommodation for over a decade, trading, arguing, and occasionally fighting over land and respect.

It came apart on November twenty-eighth, seventeen twenty-nine. In a coordinated attack, Natchez warriors moved against Fort Rosalie and French settlements across the area, killing some two hundred thirty French soldiers and settlers, nearly the entire French presence in the district. Historians still debate the exact causes, but the trigger was almost certainly a demand by the new French commandant, the Sieur de Chépart, that the Natchez vacate their Grand Village so he could use the ground as a personal tobacco plantation.

The French response was total. Over the next two years, with Choctaw allies, they waged a war of extermination against the Natchez. The nation was shattered. Survivors dispersed among other nations or were sold into Caribbean slavery. The Natchez as a political entity ceased to exist. Fort Rosalie, rebuilt, became the colonial outpost of Natchez, which eventually became the oldest permanent settlement on the Mississippi River north of New Orleans.