USA > Louisiana > Historical memoirs of Louisiana, from the first settlement of the colony to the departure of Governor O'Reilly in 1770; > Part 6
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to have abandoned only Natchez to the fury of the savages, to punish the intolerable and crying injustice of its commandant.
It was 1729, and, towards the close of October, a galley had left the capital loaded with sundry effects and merchandise for the Natchez post, which began to flourish by the numerous houses raised there. The erop, too, had been that year very abundant in tobacco, wheat, maize, potatoes, &c., and they were actually building a large store-house for the company. The galley reached Natchez on the 28th of November, bring- ing Sieurs de Koly, father and son, who had just come from ' France to see the fruit of all they had expended for their con- cession of St. Catharine's, and who, not finding the command- ant at the fort, were proceeding to his house on horseback. In fact, the Sieur Chopart, accompanied by Sieur Bailly, judge and commissary of the post, and the Sieur Ricard, store- keeper, had that day gone to the Great Village, where he had sent some refreshments, with wine and brandy, by negroes, in- tending to enjoy themselves there. There, while gazing on the beautiful prairie where the village lay, he already saw in his imagination his house, his gardens, his barns, his store- · houses, the huts of his negroes-in a word, he already traced in thought the plan of the beautiful and agreeable seat that was to reward his injustice and violence.
CHAPTER XXVII.
GENERAL MASSACRE OF THE FRENCH BY THE NATCHEZ.
AFTER tracing in thought, as I have said, the plan of his new seat, the Sieur Chopart, followed by his company, went to visit the great chief, by whom he was well received; the
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Sieur Ricard, storekeeper, acting as interpreter. They drank and enjoyed themselves, and spent the night in revelry until three o'clock in the morning, when the French retired to the fort to recover from the fatigue.
Meanwhile, the fatal sticks had reached an end, and that very day the Indians were to execute the horrible plot they had premeditated. Although they had kept their enterprise very secret, it had nevertheless crept out ; some Indian women and girls, who loved the French, and were actually their mis- tresses, could not but tell them all, and warn them to take care of themselves when the great chief came to present the calumet to the commandant, telling them that their countrymen would use that sign of peace to cover their design of massacring all the French in the country. The interpreter, Papin, was informed of it, as well as the Sieur Mace, sub-lieutenant of the garrison at the fort, and four or five others. Even the day of this bloody execution was told : it was on the 29th of No- vember, St. Andrew's-eve. On these tidings, Chopart had scarcely got in, when Macé, who was moreover his comrade, came to tell him all that he had heard; but far from giving it the least attention, the commandant treated him as a coward and visionary, charged him with trying to impose on him, by exciting unscasonable suspicions against a friendly tribe, by · whom hic had but a few moments before been so well received, and as a reward for his report he ordered him to put himself under arrest. The next moment, Sieur Papin came to make the same report; far from listening to him, he put him and four or five others in irons. After this he went to bed, first telling the sentry at his door to let no one into his room till nine o'clock the next morning.
Certain it is, that, warned as he was, he might very easily have prevented the misfortune which happened, had he
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chosen; to disperse the storm, it would have been enough to put the troops under arms and fire a cannon even without ball; but, either because wine and the table had troubled his judg- ment, or that he was unfortunately prejudiced in favor of the Indians, or that he believed them incapable of daring to exe- cute such a design, he would never take any measures to thwart it; and, as his injustice provoked, so his obstinacy crowned the evil and made it remediless.
During all this time the Indians were preparing to enact the last act of this bloody tragedy; and in order to take, so to say, all the French at one haul, they lay in troops near Terre Blanche,* St. Catharine's and the fort, where the soldiers had their muskets indeed, but not a charge of powder. There was not a settler, in whose house there was not an Indian under some pretext,-some coming to pay what they owed, others coming to beg their friends to lend them a gun to kill a bear or deer that they had just seen by their hut; some, too, to pre- tend to wish to buy goods; and where there were three or four Frenchmen there were at least a dozen Indians, who had orders from the chief not to act till he gave the signal.
Measures being thus taken, the great chief set out from his village, attended by his warriors and great men, with the calumet raised aloft, beating the ceremonial pot, and bearing to the French commandant the reward which he had exacted for the two moon's delay granted the Indians, and which consisted of poultry, bear oil, wheat, furs, &c. This troop passed by the foot of the fort, singing and whirling the calumet before the soldiers of the garrison, who had run up to see the procession.
* Terre Blanche, or, the Great White Apple Village of the Natchez, (now a part of Col. A. Hutchen's plantation,) was situated about twelve miles south of the city of Natchez, three from the Mississippi, and within a short distance of Second Creek. Here, beneath bowers rivaling those of Tempe or Arcadia, was the sweet and lovely home of this most interesting tribe of Indians.
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The Indians advanced thus in cadence, with measured steps, towards the commandant's house, who slept, however, uncon- conscious of all the goods they were bearing. On their way they passed by the company's old storehouse, where the Sieur Ricard lived. He was already up, and had gone down to the shore to discharge the galley and put the cargo in safety. They at last reached the Sieur Chopart's house." Awakened by the noise of the man beating the pot and the cries of the Indians, he rose en robe de chambre, and made the cortege enter. They offered him the calumet, and laid at his feet the presents required to save the great chief of the Natchez from being sent in the galley to the capital tied hand and foot. What goods displayed before the eyes of the commandant ! what jars of bear oil arranged in his view ! He admires these presents with complacency, laughing in his heart at the vain credulity of those who would have excited his suspicions against his Indian friends ; he orders them to be set at liberty to witness with their own eyes what is going on, and see how improbable it is that men thus loading him with presents, could have formed a plot for exterminating the French. They danced and sung, and meanwhile a part of the great chief's troop drew off and proceeded to the galley discharging by the river side. There, each Indian picked out his man, took aim, fired, and stretched him dead on the spot. At this signal, which all the other Indians awaited, the massacre of the French began on all sides ; in less than half an hour more than seven hundred were killed, some pierced by their own arms, others beaten down or assassinated. Of the whole garrison,
* Chopart's house was situated just below the fort (Rosalie,) upon a point jut- ting out towards the river. The earthquake that destroyed New Madrid in 1811, also sunk a portion of this celebrated fort, leaving but a portion of one of the bastions to mark the site where the massacre took place.
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only one soldier escaped. Sieur Mace, who had left the guard- house, was killed entering his own dwelling; the Kolys, father and son, who had arrived the night before, were killed at their own concession of St. Catharine's, with the Sieur de Longraye, who was director. The same fate befel Sieur Desnoyers, director of Terre Blanche, who had come in that very morning from the Yazoos with several piraguas, accompanied by the Sieur Coder, French commandant o that post, and a Jesuit father, (Du Poisson.)* Both were enveloped in the general massacre, and the commandant was scalped, for his hair was long and very beautiful.t I could not end, were I to attempt to express all the cruelties then perpetrated by the Indians on men to whom they had been previously so much attached. Several French women attempting to defend their husbands, or avenge their death, were themselves pitilessly cut down by the savages.
Amid this general massacre of all the French, Chopart re- mained alive, as if Providence chose to reserve him to witness the destruction of so many settlers solely through his fault. He saw it, but too late. Rising from his chair he fled to the garden, instead of seizing his gun to defend himself. He whistled for the soldiers of the garrison, but they were no longer alive, and he could see around him, through the palisades of his garden, the earth strewn with their lifeless bodies. He was himself surrounded by Indians, who panted for his blood, yet none would lay hands on him; they re- garded him as a dog, unworthy of being killed by a brave, and summoned the Puant chief, who killed him with a club.
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* Father Poisson was one of the first missionaries sent among the Arkansas Indians. See a translation of his graphic and interesting journal in the appendix to this work, by Kip, from the Lettres Edifiantes.
t See Historical Collections of Louisiana, vol. iii., p. 151, for an account of this massacre, from the Lettres Edifiantes.
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CHAPTER XXVIII.
SEQUEL OF THE MASSACRE .- FRENCH WHO ESCAPED.
I HAVE elsewhere said that the Sieur de la Loire des Ursins, after having been judge and commissary at Natchez, had formed an establishment on the road between the fort and St. Catharine's. The very day of the massacre he had received information of the attack to be made by the Indians on the French, and he had in consequence armed all on his place, consisting of an Indian slave, on whom he could rely, a Frenchman and woman, and a natural son that he had had by a woman of that very Natchez tribe, whom he had called Rosa- lic, after the fort at the post. After taking these precautions, he hid his best effects in a secure place, and set out on horse- baek for the fort to announce what he had heard. Some Indians had been prowling all the morning around his house, but they let him pass, as the signal had not yet been given, but he had scarcely got in sight of the fort when the massacre began, and he saw at a distance the butchery of the garrison. At this, he wheeled about to regain his house, but the Indians blocked up the way and fired, though they did not wound him. He turned again towards the fort, which the enemy had now abandoned to descend to the foot of the hill; there, he halted to breathe his horse, and started off again in hopes of forcing a passage at a gallop and reaching his house, but after escaping several shots on the way, another laid him dead just as he was about to reach it.
Those whom he had left there, seeing themselves attacked, held their ground, and sustained a kind of siege all day long,
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against a large party of the Indians-fired on them, and wounded several-the French woman keeping all supplied with powder. This heroine was killed at last, but they held out, till a heavy shower compelled the enemy to retire. Then, profiting by the darkness, they left the house and reached the river, where they found a piragua at the stern of the galley, and getting in, made their escape. They afterwards asserted that the Indians then in the galley were dead drunk, and that, had there been thirty Frenchmen together, they could have destroyed all the butchers.
Night, also, enabled the only surviving soldier of the garrison to make good his escape. When the massacre began, he was at the foot of the height on which the fort was built, putting wood in an oven run into the hill-side itself. Seeing the bloody work around, he drew the wood out, and ereeping in, lay there all day till darkness enabled him to escape.
Sieur Ricard also escaped, but in a manner almost miracu- lons. I have said that he went down to the river in the morn- ing to discharge the galley. Seeing the first volley fired by the Indians on our people, he sprang into the river and swam to the neighboring wood, where he lay hid till night. He then left his retreat, but not daring to follow the shore for fear of falling in with the enemy, he went up to his neck in the water, and so descended the river to the place of one Rousseau, a potter, who had settled about a league from the fort. Arriv- ing there and perceiving a light, he entered, but to his sur- prise found himself in the midst of a party of Indians, who made him go to the fire and warm and dry himself, gave him food, and even one of their piraguas and provisions to enable him to escape. They were the Yazoos, who had come down that morning with the Sicur Coder, and whom the Natchez had not drawn yet into their plot.
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Two other Frenchmen, Postillon and Louette, were not both as fortunate. They set out in the morning together for Terre Blanche; but on reaching a height which overlooked the con- cession, they beheld at a distance the Indians massacring the French. At this sight they stopped, and not daring either to go on or to return to the fort in broad day, they hid them- selves in the woods till night. Then they started, not by the ordinary route, but across the woods and meadows. In this way they reached the company's old storehouse, where they saw a light. Postillon, looking through the keyhole, took those inside for Frenchmen; he knocked; the door was opened, but when he got in he found them to be Indians, dressed in the clothes of his butchered countrymen. As soon as they saw him among them they gave him a glass of brandy and talked a moment with him; then, giving him a second glass, they knocked him down, laid his head on a block and severed it from the body with a blow of an axe. Louette saw from without the reception given his comrade, and deeming it inex- pedient to put up with such pleasant hosts, started off for the river, in hopes of finding some craft there to get in. Passing by a cabin he thought he heard people talking French, and went in; they were French women, taken by the Indians, and assembled there under the guard of one of their tribe. As soon as the women saw him, they cried : "What brings you here, poor Louette? Run! the French are all killed." He took the advice and escaped.
One Canterelle, seeing what was going on, shut his house during the massacre, and lay hid all day in his garret with his wife, no Indian daring to enter. When night came, they both took what was most valuable, and started out across the woods; but on the way Canterelle remembered that he had left behind some important article, and telling his wife to wait for
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him at a place he named, started baek. On his return he could not find his wife, who had either missed the way or been taken by the Indians; but while looking for her, he fortunate- ly struck on a piragua, in which he escaped. Some other Frenchmen swam across the river and reached a cypress grove, where Couillard,* a master-carpenter, was preparing building materials. They told him the state of affairs, and warned him to fly.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CONDUCT OF THE INDIANS AFTER THE MASSACRE-THEIR CRUELTY.
ALL the French women who survived the massacre were made slaves by the Indians. They killed some, such as the wife of Sieur Papin, the interpreter, and Mme. Mace, the wife of the sub-lieutenant, who was killed coming out of the guard- house. The other French women became the property of those who had taken them; the great majority, however passed to the service of the great chief and the white woman, who, as we have seen in the previous portion of these memoirs, is a kind of empress in the nation, and the stock from which all who govern must spring. Among those thus disposed of was my wife, who had been taken like the rest, and from some of those who escaped I learned all the details of the massacre. For my own part, I happily escaped the common misfortune, having started the night before for the capital. All these women were employed by the Indians in making
* This should read " Perricault," who, after his escape, wrote a MS. journal of all that passed in Louisiana from 1700 to 1729, which is now deposited in the Bibliotheque du Roi, Paris.
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shirts to give as presents to those who came to bear the calumet to their warlike nation, which had just signalized itself by so great an exploit. Two weeks after, they were sent to the galley to take out the little left there by the Indians, after which they fired the galley, fort, and all the French houses, which were thus reduced to ashes.
Of all the French. established or living at the post, the Indians had spared but two, whom they reserved for their usefulness, and the advantage they hoped to derive from them. One, Mayeux, a carter, was employed in carting to the Great Village all that had belonged to the French-provisions, furni- ture, effects, goods, even the cannon of the fort, with their car- riages, as well as the powder, balls and bullets found there -in a word, all that had belonged either to the company, or to the settlers and grant-holders, was carried to the great chief's, and he there distributed it among his subjects. In carrying it the Indians also employed the negro slaves scattered on the plantations, who had by that fatal day recovered their liberty.
The other Frenchman spared was a tailor, named Lebeau, whom the Indians kept to alter the French clothes to fit them. As this tailor's wife was very old they killed her, to make him marry a younger one, and employed him in surprising several of his countrymen, who but for him would have escaped their barbarity. Three or four days after the massacre, they heard in the woods, near the landing-place, a plaintive voice, which seemed to ask help. No Indian durst go and see what it was, so the tailor was sent to speak to him. He asked him who and what he was, and promised him, on behalf of the Indians, that if he surrendered at discretion no harm should befall him. Ile was the storekeeper of the Yazoos, by the name of Le Hou, who had come to Natchez with the Sieur du Coder, of whom I have spoken, and had been wounded in several places
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while defending himself when the Indians attacked them. On Lebeau's word he surrendered to the Indians, who, after bath- ing his wounds with brandy and treating him quite well, made him undergo at night the same course as Postillon, and cut off his head.
A few days after, the Indians perceived a piragua, in which some voyageurs were descending the river, unaware of what had occurred at Natchez. The tailor was ordered to hail them; he obeyed, but the piragua was no sooner within gun- shot of the shore, than the Indians, ambushed there to meet it, rose, gave the war-ery and fired on them, killing three of the five who were in it; the fourth escaped to the woods and reached the Tonica village; the fifth, who was sick, fell into the hands of the savages.
When they had this poor wretch in their hands, they began by stripping him, blacking his body with coal-dust, bound his hands, and in this state made him run to the village, firing blank charges at him, with their muzzles touching his body. On reaching the village, he was presented to the great chief, who condemned him to be burnt with all their usual cere- monies. The Indians immediately proceeded to prepare, in the square before the temple, a wooden frame, consisting of two perpendicular posts and two cross-pieces, to which the prisoner was to be attached. When this was all ready, and dry canes had been got to burn him, the wretched vietim was sent for, and his race from the village to the temple was as fearful as the first. On his way, the poor fellow, exhausted by weari- ness and thirst, met a French woman, then a slave, carrying a jar of water on her head; he begged her to give him a drink, and she had the courage to do it, although she knew that she exposed herself to the fury of the Indians, who are not tender- hearted. After this he continued his race and reached the
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place, where death was to close his sufferings and his life. When bound, with his two arms extended on the frame, in the Indian fashion, he saw some French women, and called to them to pray to God for him, telling them that his name was Gratien, and that he had been a workman in Le Blanc's Yazoo conces- sion. Scarcely had he uttered these words, when the Indians, armed with bundles of lighted canes, began to burn him slow- ly, applying them to his sides, thighs, breast, back, sides and face, so that he underwent a long and painful martyrdom.
About the same time an Indian child happened to die, and the child of a French woman was taken and strangled-" to go," they said, "and attend on the deceased in the land of souls." Certain it is, that had the great chief or the white woman died at that time, it would have cost the lives of pro- bably all the enslaved women.
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CHAPTER XXX.
THE NATCHEZ INDUCE THE YAZOOS TO FOLLOW THEIR EXAMPLE .- NEW MASSACRE OF THE FRENCH BY THE LATTER.
"WE have seen, in the previous chapters, that a party of the Yazoos came to Natchez on the very day of the massacre, and that it was these Indians who had so seasonably and generous- ly aided the Sieur Ricard, the storekeeper, to escape in a pira- gua they gave him. But it must be observed that when they did him this service they were unaware of the designs of the Natchez against the French. They had left their village to. come and present the calumet to the Natchez, but arrived at the moment when they were preparing to execute the plot which had been brewing for the last two months; the Natchez
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had not only deemed it inexpedient to let their visitors into their design, for fear of discovery, but, through the great chief, had asked them to postpone the calumet ceremony for some days. This induced them meanwhile to retire to the house of the Sieur Rousseau, who had gone down to the capital with his fami- ly a few days before. It was therefore only three or four days after the massacre that the Yazoos presented the calumet to the great chief of the Natchez, who, in his harangue, recounted all that had occurred, and the reasons why his nation had so acted, exhorting them to follow the example, and massacre all the French settled among them at Fort St. Claude, assuring them that they were the only Frenchmen now alive in the country, the Choctaws having destroyed all those of that nation who lay on the lower part of the river. The Yazoos easily yielded to the persuasion of the great chief; they promised to execute what he advised, and were accordingly sent off loaded with presents, such as shirts, powder, balls, &e., and accompanied by some Natchez sent to encourage and second them in the attempt.
These Indians were ascending the river, ready to redeem their pledge on arriving at their village, when they perceived, at a distance, a boat which had landed some voyageurs, and resolved to take them. Landing with this intent they noise- lessly advanced across the woods, and undiscovered came near where the voyageurs were, little expecting such a surprise. They were all on their knees, hearing mass, which a Jesuit father, (Doutreleau,) was celebrating. When he was at the elevation they fire'l both on the priest and his little flock ; but the God whom they were actually adoring did not permit that any should be wounded, and they had time to re-embark. The only accident was, that, at the second volley fired by the Indians, the boatswain Dusablon, while pushing the boat off, was shot in the thigh, though fortunately the leg was not
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broken. This Dusablon was the same one who, on the arrival of the first vessel which brought girls from France to Louisi- ana, had carried off the prize in a dispute with a comrade for the last one. Notwithstanding his wound he was able to get in. The boat was on its way from Illinois, and reached New- Orleans safely .*
As for the Yazoos, they continued their voyage to their vil- lage, and as soon as they arrived prepared to execute their promise to the Natchez. There was then at Fort St. Claude only a little garrison of about twenty men, with none to com- mand but sergeants, the Sieur du Coder, the commandant of the post, having been killed at Natchez, as I have already re- lated. Three or four days after their arrival, the Indians repaired to the fort in great numbers and dispersed in knots among the cabins, without any one thinking of opposing them; then, when no one expected, they fell on the French and mas- sacred them all, not one escaping. Thus was destroyed the Yazoo post, which lay forty leagues above Natchez. This accident happened in the beginning of the year 1730.
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