Natchez revolt (Fort Rosalie massacre)

On November 28, 1729, Natchez warriors struck French settlers living close to what is today Natchez, Mississippi, in an episode remembered as either the Natchez revolt or the Natchez massacre. For well over ten years before this happened, the two peoples had coexisted within the Louisiana colony, generally trading amicably and sometimes forming marriages across communities. That relationship soured over time, however, and tensions eventually boiled into conflict once Sieur de Chépart, the French commandant, insisted on seizing land from a Natchez village to build his own plantation near Fort Rosalie. Natchez leaders, pushed to their limit, began organizing a response.

Their planning stretched across several days, and remarkably, they kept most of the French colonists unaware of what was coming. A few settlers did catch wind of the scheme and tried alerting Chépart, but their warnings were dismissed as lies, and they suffered punishment for speaking up. When the assault finally came, it struck both the fort and the surrounding homesteads at once. Nearly every French man present was killed, though the Natchez largely spared women and enslaved Africans. In total, roughly 230 colonists lost their lives, and the settlement, including the fort and its homes, was reduced to ashes.

News of the killings reached New Orleans, the seat of French colonial government, and stirred fears of a broader Native uprising, with officials suspecting the Natchez may have coordinated with other tribes. Their initial reaction, however, targeted an uninvolved group entirely: French forces massacred the Chaouacha people, annihilating their village despite the fact that the Chaouacha had taken no part whatsoever in the uprising. Only afterward did the French, joined by Choctaw allies, turn their forces against the actual Natchez settlements. Hundreds of Natchez were seized and sold into bondage, though a considerable number fled northward and found shelter among the Chickasaw. For years afterward, the Natchez carried on a smaller-scale campaign of resistance against the French, but further French expeditions in 1730 and 1731 targeting Natchez refugees sheltering with the Chickasaw eventually drove them further afield. They became wanderers, seeking refuge among the Creek and Cherokee peoples instead. By 1741 the Natchez had founded a settlement within the northern reaches of the Upper Creek Nation, where the Abihka granted them permission to rebuild their community. This restored town later placed its name among the signatories of the Treaty of New York in 1790 and the Treaty of Colerain in 1796. Today, the Natchez continue on as one of the tribes composing the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

The devastation at Fort Rosalie wiped out some of Louisiana's most fertile and productive farmland, putting river shipments of food and trade goods along the Mississippi at serious risk. Because the Company of the Indies had already struggled to manage the colony effectively, this crisis prompted the French crown to reclaim direct control over Louisiana in 1731, ending the company's oversight. Étienne Perier, the colony's governor, bore the blame for the disaster and its consequences, and he was summoned back to France in 1732 as a result.

Attack

Word of Chépart's plan to drive the Natchez entirely off their lands soon reached the tribe, and they responded by quietly readying themselves to strike Fort Rosalie. To gather weapons, they borrowed guns from French settlers, vowing to hunt and share the kill with the owners. Several French colonists caught wind of the scheme. Le Page du Pratz credited Tattooed Arm, a Natchez female chief, with trying to warn the French that an assault was coming, orchestrated by rivals from White Apple. Colonists carried this warning to Chépart, but he brushed it aside, and on the eve of the massacre, drunk, he even had some of them shackled.

On the morning of November 28, 1729, Natchez men arrived bearing corn, poultry, and deerskins as gifts for Chépart, along with a calumet, a widely recognized token of peace. Still groggy from the previous night's drinking, the commandant felt sure the visit was harmless, and he mocked those who had cautioned him, daring them to prove their suspicions correct.

The moment Chépart took hold of the offerings, gunfire erupted, the signal that launched a synchronized assault against Fort Rosalie and the surrounding farms and concessions in what is today the city of Natchez. Chépart dashed off to summon his troops, only to find they were already dead. Much of what happened next has been lost to history, since chroniclers, including Le Page du Pratz, who spoke with a number of witnesses, called the events too dreadful to put into words.

Beforehand, the Natchez had taken control of the Company of the Indies' galley moored on the river, cutting off any hope of escape by water, and had positioned fighters across the river to catch anyone fleeing that way. Monsieur du Codère, commandant of the Yazoo post at Fort St. Pierre, happened to be at Fort Rosalie with a Jesuit priest when the shooting began. They tried to double back toward their vessel, but warriors overtook them, killing and scalping both men.

Of the roughly 150 Frenchmen at Fort Rosalie, nearly all were slain, most of them unarmed, and only about twenty escaped, some making their way to New Orleans. Women, children, and enslaved Africans were largely spared and shut inside a house atop the bluff, watched over by guards as the carnage unfolded before them. Dumont de Montigny recorded that any women who fought to protect their husbands or sought vengeance were either captured or killed outright. In one instance, a woman's unborn child was said to have been ripped from her before she too was killed. Counted a year later, the death toll stood at 138 men, 35 women, and 56 children, roughly 230 people altogether. Some historians suggest the enslaved Africans were spared because of a felt kinship between them and the Natchez, and indeed some slaves joined the tribe outright while others seized the moment to flee toward freedom. Meanwhile, a band of Yazoo people traveling with du Codère stayed out of the fighting, yet the Natchez uprising left its mark on them. Back at Fort St. Pierre, they tore the post apart, killing the Jesuit priest along with seventeen French soldiers.

The Natchez, by contrast, lost only around a dozen warriors in the fighting. Eight of these fell while storming the La Loire des Ursins homestead, where the family had managed to mount a defense.

Chépart was taken prisoner. His captors debated his fate before settling on execution by a stinkard, a man from the tribe's lowest social rank. Two Frenchmen were kept alive: Mayeux, a carter forced to haul the plundered French goods to the Great Village, and Le Beau, a tailor put to work altering the colonists' clothes for their new Natchez owners. The fort, the storehouse, and every homestead were put to the torch and reduced to ashes. Echoing what Governor Bienville had done to executed Indians in 1717 and 1723, the Natchez cut the heads from the French dead and carried them before the Great Sun for his inspection.

French response

Word of the assault on Fort Rosalie arrived in New Orleans during the opening days of December, sending the colonial population into alarm. Grain and other necessities flowed to the city from the Illinois settlement, and any disruption to river traffic along the Mississippi threatened to cut off these vital shipments now that Fort Rosalie had fallen.

In the aftermath of the strike on Fort Rosalie, Perier concluded that only the total elimination of the Natchez people could guarantee the colony's future safety and economic health. Wary that a group of visiting Choctaw might use a supposed friendly call as cover for their own assault, he refused them entry into the city. Nevertheless he managed to win Choctaw neutrality, and with that secured, he turned to waging his campaign of annihilation against the Natchez.

Perier also dispatched enslaved men and French soldiers downriver to wipe out a small Chaouacha settlement, even though these people had taken no part whatsoever in the Natchez revolt. Officials back in Paris criticized him for this action, which some believe he undertook to head off any possible cooperation between enslaved people and Native Americans against French settlers. The Choctaw, though they remained partners with the French against the Natchez, disapproved of the strike on the Chaouacha and urged neighboring smaller tribes to abandon French-held territory for lands under Choctaw guardianship.

A more substantial French reprisal came in the last weeks of December 1729 and into January 1730, when Jean-Paul Le Sueur and Henri de Louboëy each led expeditions against the Natchez. Both commanders laid siege to Natchez positions in forts constructed near the Grand Village of the Natchez, situated roughly a mile east of the rebuilt Fort Rosalie. Around 80 Natchez men were killed and 18 women taken prisoner, while French women held since the original massacre were set free. Tunica and Choctaw warriors fought alongside the French throughout this campaign. Acting independently, the Choctaw struck the Natchez on their own, killing 100 and seizing women and children as captives, a move that undermined French hopes of catching their enemy unprepared since the Natchez had by then dispersed. Early on, the Natchez stood ready for French counterstrikes, having laid in a supply of cannons alongside the same firearms used two months before in the massacre. Natchez prisoners taken by the Choctaw and Tunica were handed to the governor, sold into bondage, and in some instances tortured publicly to death within New Orleans.

By late February of 1730, Louboëy hoped to surprise the Natchez, but instead the two sides struck a peace agreement under which French captives were released, even as the French quietly readied an attack on the Natchez fort for the following day. The Natchez presented Louboëy with gifts, then slipped away under cover of darkness across the Mississippi, bringing enslaved Africans along with them. Louboëy's forces discovered the fort empty the next day and set the Grand Village stronghold ablaze, while the Natchez took refuge in the bayous bordering the Black River.

Perier himself led another campaign in January 1731 aimed at rooting out the Natchez, taking numerous prisoners including their leadership, among them Saint Cosme, now serving as Great Sun, and his mother, the Female Sun known as Tattooed Arm. By this point the Natchez had relocated westward into the Ouachita River basin, building a new fort close to what is today Sicily Island, Louisiana. On January 21, Perier, commanding Colony troops alongside two marine battalions under his brother Antoine-Alexis Perier de Salvert, assaulted this Natchez fortification. Throughout the siege, French forces employed iron grenades, launching them from mortars as well as hurling them by hand. On January 24, Natchez leaders proposed terms of peace, and several chiefs, meeting with Perier, were invited into what appeared to be an empty cabin; the moment they stepped inside, they were seized as prisoners. The following day, January 25, saw 45 men along with 450 women and children surrender and become captives, though the remaining Natchez and their chiefs slipped away under cover of night. When morning came, only two ailing men and a single woman remained inside the fort. Perier put the