swANTON] INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 233 



Oil tlie Mill lu> ;uloi)to(l the plan of sciitlinj,' tin- Saint Miclniil to Fraucf, to 

 iiifortu the court and eonii)any of the condition in which Louisiana was, and 

 ask relief proijortioned to its actual nwd. Two days after, one of the two 

 ('hoctaw chiefs whom he had sent for, came to tell him that he had disj)atche(I 

 his letter to his nation, and invited all who were enemies of the; Natchez to 

 march against them, and that he advised him not to employ the smaller tribes. 

 as he suspected them of being in concert with the Natchez. " I also suspect 

 them," said M. Perrier, " but if they are in the plot you, too, are implicated ; 

 however, whether you are or not, I have given good orders everywhere, and I 

 am very glad that you know that the secret has taken wind." 



On tlie 1st day of .January, uneasy at not receiving any dispatches from the 

 Sieur liegis, who by his orders resided among the Choctaws, he disi)atched the 

 Sieur de Lnsser, a Swiss captain, to ascertain the actual disposition of these 

 Indians, and on the 4th he learned that the Natchez had gone to sing the 

 calumet to them. This contirmed all his suspicions, and threw him into great 

 perplexity. But ou the IGth he received a letter from the Sieur Regis, inform- 

 ing him that immediately after speaking to the Choctaws in his name, they 

 had raised the death cry ; that afterward 700 warriors had set out to attack 

 the Natchez, and that a party of 150 was to pass to the Yazous to intercept all 

 the negroes and French prisoners, whom they wished to conduct to the 

 Chickasaw. The next day he received letters from de Saint Denis, the com- 

 mandant at the Natchitoches, about whom he was much concerned, as some 

 Natchitoches were seen among the Natchez at the time of the massacre of the 

 French ; but he learned by these letters that the wisdom and vigilance of that 

 officer had saved him from the disaster threatening his post. 



He had, however, great difficulty in reassuring the settlers, whom the sad 

 tidings brought in from all parts, almost all with no foundation, but an 

 alarmed imagination, had hurled at once from excessive confidence to as ex- 

 cessive discouragement. He himself felt less sanguine, as he was fully in- 

 formed that the smaller tribes had been gained by the Chickasaw, and that if 

 the Natchez had not anticipated the day fixed for the execution of the plot 

 they would have acted simultaneously with them. He also discovered that 

 what had induced the Natchez to precipitate their meditated blow was their 

 learning that at the very time that the first Choctaw chiefs who had come to 

 New Orleans on his invitation, were ou their way thither, 120 horses loaded 

 with English goods had entered their country. The Natchez were convinced 

 that these two cirenmstances were the most favorable to insure the success of 

 the project ; that the two Choctaw chiefs were going to delude the commandant- 

 general by "eigned protestations of fidelity, and that their nation, seeing that 

 an alliance with the English would bring plenty into their country, w^ould not 

 hesitate to keep the promise they had given to fill all on the Mobile river with 

 fire and blood. 



But they were deceived. The Choctaw, from the moment they received the 

 general's invitation through the Sieur Regis, began by declaring that they 

 would not receive the goods from the English till they had learned what their 

 father wished to tell them ; and on the return of their deputies they resolved 

 to follow exactly the line of policy w'hich they had long before adopted. Sev- 

 eral yeax's before they had wished to destroy the Natchez, and the French had 

 prevented them ; they had pretended to enter the general conspiracy only to 

 Involve us with our enemies, to whom we had granted peace in spite of them, 

 and thus force us to apply to them to rid ourselves of them, and thus at the 

 same time profit by the spoils of the Natchez and our liberality. 



Perrier had not yet well unraveled all the meshes of this self-interested 

 policy, and all that then seemed to him certain was, that but for the western 



