512 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
French burned one village and beheaded the chief. It is prob- ably this circumstance to which Adair alludes when he says that the old men of the tribe had told him that the French had demanded " from every one of their warriors a dressed buckskin without any value for it," which made their hearts grow very cross, because they loved their deerskins. 1 The climax came in 1729, when the French commander coolly ordered them to abandon their principal village, that he might clear the ground for his own purposes. Engaging the Yazoo, Koroa, and Tioux to their support, and supplying themselves with arms and ammunition by means of a shrewd stratagem, at a given signal they fell upon the garrison on November 28, and massacred two hundred men — only about twenty escaping — besides capturing all the women, children, and negroes, with a loss to themselves of but twelve warriors. While the bloody work was going on, the Natchez chief was calmly seated under a shed giving directions for piling the severed heads in heaps about him as they were brought in. a
The war was now on. A smaller garrison was massacred by the Yazoo, boats descending the river were fired upon, the Koroa joined forces with the hostiles, and even the Choctaw grew rest- less. To terrorize the weaker tribes and to remove the imminent danger of an alliance between the Indians and the negro slaves, the governor at New Orleans compelled a party of negroes to massacre the entire small tribe of Chaouacha, and, later on, when some negroes who had fled to the hostiles were retaken, they were given over to the Choctaw to be burned. In January, 1730, a force of several hundred Choctaw, led by a French officer, at- tacked a Natchez stockade, killing eighty men, capturing eighteen women, and releasing a large number of captives taken at the first massacre. The next month a strong force, with field guns,
��1 Adair, op. cit., p. 353.
- Charlevoix, History and General Description of New France \ Shea's translation,
1872, vi, p. 83.
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