248 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY Ibill. 43 



doubt that the ca]niii'c nnd subsequent eushiveineiit of the head Sun 

 and his family, together with the loss of so many women and chil- 

 dren, did deal the tribe a very severe blow, but had their losses been 

 confined to those suffered at this time the strength of the nation would 

 not have been seriously impaired. In fact, the Black river expedi- 

 tion was little more fruitful in positive results than the previous 

 fiasco at Natchez, and in it many of the very same blunders were 

 relocated. Perrier was a good governor over the whites and an excel- 

 lent man personall}^, whose justice is loudly praised by his contempo- 

 raries, yet he evidently knew little about dealing with Indians, either 

 from a military or civil standpoint. If he intended to strike terror 

 his bloW' should have been delivered rapidly, without wasting days 

 in parleA^ until a favorable opportunity allowed his enemies to give 

 him the slip. If his intentions, on the other hand, were pacific, he 

 w^as not warranted in enticing the head chief within his lines and 

 making him a prisoner, and his subsequent disposition of those who 

 had yielded themselves, especially when we consider that they were 

 probably the head Sun's own follov/ing, and, therefore, the remnants 

 of the old French faction in this tribe, capped the climax of political 

 unwisdom. It is further to be noted that the captives included only 

 40 w^arriors, and that the expatriation of the wives of so many others 

 simply served to turn adrift a number of other warriors, deprived 

 of everything but a desire for vengeance. Altogether, either polit- 

 ically or from a military point of view, very little glory was garnered 

 by the French forces from this campaign, and unless some radical 

 improvement took place in future operations one might have prophe- 

 sied ti:ie disasters of 1730 and 1741, when the same methods were tried 

 against a really powerful people, the Chickasaw. What actually 

 did destroy, or very largely decimate, the Natchez nation was the 

 attrition of numberless encounters with other Indians, losses in the 

 swamps from sickness and exposure, and epidemics which Avould have 

 reduced them in any event, with or without warfare. That part of 

 the Natchez war 3^et to be told concerns several minor engagements 

 out of wdiich finally grew the disastrous war with the Chickasaw. 

 Says Charlevoix: 



Tlio war wns far from being finished. Le Sueur had ascortnined from the 

 head cliief that the whole nation was not by any means in tlie fort tliat we had 

 besieged; that it still comprised 200 warriors," including the Yazoos and the 

 Corrois, and as many yonth, who conld already, in an emergency, handle a 

 musket; that one of their chiefs had gone to the Chickasaws with 40 men 

 and many women ; that another, with 00 or 70 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 20 men, 10 women, and G negroes were at 

 the Ouatchitas; that a band discovered by the army on the ISth of January,'' 



" Diron d'ArtaKuette says "throe hundred." — Gayarro, Hist. Louisiana, i, 4-40. 

 '' Gayarro says thoy met this band on the 19th and killed 2 men and 1 woman belonging 

 to It. — Hist. Louisiana, i^ 445. 



