Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/573

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514 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [x. s., I, 1899

children, all or most of whom were sold as slaves in the island of San Domingo.

Says Charlevoix :

The war was far from being finished. Le Sueur had ascertained from the Head Chief that the whole nation was not by any means in the fort that we had besieged ; that it still comprised two hundred warriors including the Yazoos and the Corrois, and as many youth who could already in an emergency handle a musket ; that one of their chiefs had gone to the Chickasaw with forty men and many women ; that another, with sixty or seventy men, more than a hundred women, and a great number of children, was three days' journey from his fort, on the shore of a lake ; that twenty men, ten women, and six negroes were at the Ouatchitas ; that a band discovered by the army on the 18th of January comprised twenty men, fifty women, and many children ; that some twenty warriors were prowling around their old village to cut off the Frenchmen ; that the Yazoos and Corrois were in another fort three days' march from his ; that all the rest had died of hardship or dysen- tery. We were finally informed that the Flour Chief might have as- sembled sixty or seventy men, a hundred women, and a great number of children.

This itemized statement would seem to give the Natchez 240 warriors, or perhaps a total of 1200 persons, still remaining, ex- clusive of the Yazoo and Koroa.

The survivors were desperate men, and the French historian continues : " We were not slow in perceiving that the Natchez could still render themselves formidable, and that the step of sending the Sun and all who had been taken with him to be sold as slaves in San Domingo, had rather exasperated than intimi- dated the remnant of that nation, in whom hatred and despair had transformed their natural pride and ferocity into a valor of which they were never deemed capable."

In June the Flour Chief with over one hundred warriors and their families, having come to the town of the Tonfka, a tribe in the French interest, made a treacherous attack upon them, killing and wounding a large number, but losing thirty-six of his own warriors. About the same time some others, who had surren-

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