Natchez

The Natchez are a Native American people whose historic homeland was the Natchez Bluffs on the east bank of the lower Mississippi, around today's Natchez, Mississippi. They are remembered as the last Mississippian-style chiefdom to survive well into the colonial era, ruled by a paramount chief called the Great Sun. Defeated by the French in 1731, the survivors scattered, and their descendants today are mostly citizens of the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) nations in Oklahoma.

Before the historic Natchez, people of the Plaquemine culture, part of the wider Mississippian tradition, had lived on the bluffs since at least 700 CE, farming maize intensively and building platform mounds. Among them is Emerald Mound, the second-largest pre-Columbian structure north of Mexico, which the Natchez used before abandoning it, shortly before 1700, for the Grand Village of the Natchez with its three to five mounds. Whether the powerful chiefdom of "Quigualtam" that attacked Hernando de Soto's men on the river in 1542 was the Natchez is debated. For more than 140 years afterwards no Europeans came, but epidemics spread through Indigenous trade routes reduced the population.

When the French arrived, French sources counted six to nine Natchez village districts, with perhaps 4,000 to 6,000 inhabitants able to field 1,500 warriors. The Great Sun held authority over civil affairs and his brother, Tattooed Serpent, over war and diplomacy. Rank passed through the mother's line, and each Great Sun was born to the woman known as the Female Sun. French accounts describe Suns, Nobles and Honored People who had to marry commoners, but scholars disagree sharply on how this system worked, and some suggest it was a structure of ranked clans or of distance from the ruling family rather than true classes. At the death of a Sun, wives, relatives and servants could choose ritual death to accompany him, an act that brought honour to their families. The Natchez language is generally considered an isolate, possibly related to the Muskogean languages.

La Salle passed in 1682, Iberville was welcomed with a three-day peace ceremony in 1700, and by the 1720s around 400 French settlers and 200 enslaved Africans were working tobacco plantations around Fort Rosalie. The Natchez were divided between villages friendly to the French, led by the Grand Village, and a more hostile faction centred on White Apple. Wars broke out in 1716 and again in 1722–23. When the commander of Fort Rosalie ordered White Apple cleared for a plantation, the Natchez struck on 28 November 1729, killing between 229 and 285 settlers; about 450 women and children were made captives.

The governor of French Louisiana, Étienne Perier, resolved on what he intended as a war of extermination. With Choctaw allies, French forces drove the Natchez from their forts, and in January 1731 Perier seized chiefs who had come to negotiate; the Great Sun and hundreds of other prisoners were sold into slavery in Saint-Domingue. Refugees found shelter among the Chickasaw, whose refusal to hand them over helped spark the Chickasaw Wars, and later among the Muscogee and the Cherokee. Natchez living with the Cherokee went west with them on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

Natchez descendants are enrolled mainly in the Cherokee Nation and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, which counts some 12,000 Natchez citizens, and a few remain with the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina. Two state-recognised tribes in South Carolina also claim Natchez descent. The language's last fluent speakers died in 1944 and 1957, and some descendants are now working to revive it.

Our maps draw an approximate Natchez territory on the lower Mississippi in 1492, 1500, 1530, 1600, 1650 and 1700; by 1700 the real homeland was roughly the size of the northern half of Adams County, Mississippi. Neighbours on the same maps include the Caddo; in the early eighteenth century the region was drawn into French Louisiana, part of New France.