The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735

Conclusion

> 32 > > > CONCLUSION AFTER THE CHICKASAW WARS, few Natchez Indians remained in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In addition to the remnant of the tribe discussed above, which may have held on until the end of the eighteenth century in their old home place, a few Natchez families apparently remained with the Chickasaws into the 740s. In 764, a remnant of the Natchez tribe was located in the western edge of Chickasaw country, on the east bank of the Mississippi River above the mouth of the Arkansas River. The Natchez group with the Cherokees eventually formed its own village, called Notchee Town, located on the Hiwassee River in North Carolina. There they developed a reputation as dance leaders.2 According to the historian James Mooney: “[The Natchez] seem to have been regarded by the Cherokee as a race of wizards and conjurers, probably due in part to their peculiar religious rites and in part to the interest which belonged to them as the remnant of a broken tribe.”3 With the Creeks, the Natchez also formed a village named after them on Tallahatchie Creek (formerly Natchez Creek) in Talladega County, Alabama.4 By the end of the eighteenth century, the Natchez were established in their Cherokee and Creek towns and had found an important niche as spiritual leaders. The other two Natchezan groups,the Avoyel andTaensa,also succumbed to the pressures brought on by the influx of European and African settlers. The Avoyel remained along the Red River in Rapides and Avoyelles parishes in Louisiana, where they became known as horse and cattle traders between the Spanish to their west and the French and English to their east. After the Treaty of Paris, the Avoyel allied with the Spanish against English encroachment in the Lower Mississippi Valley. With their numbers declining in the early nineteenth century, they intermarried with the Chitimacha, Atakapa, Alabama, and Tunica-Biloxi. Throughout the twentieth century, Avoyel descendants living near Marksville, > 33 34 35 < CONCLUSION With the advent of the Internet, an eventual reunion of these disparate groups of Natchez descendants seems inevitable. Indeed, this process has already begun with Hutke Fields’ leadership of the Natchez Nation at Notchee Town.6 Fields’ efforts have brought the Natchez heightened public recognition—if not the federal recognition they desire, taking the story that began with the meeting between De Soto’s conquistadores and Quigualtam’s warrior boatmen into the twenty-first century. The history of the Natchez Indians is an account of a Native American society evolving in response to the relentless impact of European contact. In that first encounter in 542–543, the Quigualtam chiefdom was powerful enough to easily take the dominant role. One hundred and thirty-nine years later, when La Salle’s party descended the Mississippi River, the late prehistoric chiefdoms had all been swept away by disease and environmental factors. In their place were smaller populations organized along simpler lines. The political organization of the Natchez at the end of the seventeenth century offers a unique example of this simplification process. They were a multi-ethnic confederation of autonomous settlement districts that retained vestiges of chiefdom ceremonialism. They recognized the Great Sun’s ritualistic role but invested him with no real power. The political power in the tribe rested with the settlement district chiefs, who enjoyed the freedom to act independently to reinforce their leadership positions and to come together in council for mutual support. The confederation of autonomous settlements proved to be adaptive during the period 682–76, when agents of France and England were pulling the allegiance of the Natchez in two directions. Although they managed to avoid extended European settlement during these three decades (with the exception of Saint-Cosme), the Natchez people suffered from exposure to disease and were inexorably drawn into the European economic web through the slave-catching business and the deerskin trade. The founding of Fort Rosalie and the establishment of the agricultural colony at the Natchez in 76, with the influx of hundreds of European and African settlers, hastened the tribe’s destruction. Between 76 and 729, the coveted European trade merchandise offered by the settler population brought many Natchez Indians into daily contact with the colonists by supplying food, labor, and companionship. Thus three very different cultural groups—Native American, European, and African, became dangerously intertwined at the Natchez colony, even as they remained strangers to each other. In the tragic aftermath of the Natchez Rebellion of 729, the Natchez Indians vanished as a people; however, their descendants have not relinquished their tribal identity. ...