BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY


{BULL. 43


doubt that the capture and subsequent enslavement 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
repeated. Perrier was a good governor over the whites and an excel-
lent man personally, 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 parley until a favorable opportunity allowed his enemies to give
him the slip. If his intentions, on the other hand, were pacific, he
was 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 following, 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 warriors, 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 the disasters of 1736 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 would have
reduced them in any event, with or without warfare. That part of
the Natchez war yet to be told concerns several minor engagements
out of which finally grew the disastrous war with the Chickasaw.
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 208 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 Chickasnws with 40 men
and many women; that another, with 60 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 6 negroes were at
the Ouatchitas; that a band discovered by the army on the 18th of January,b
 Diron d'Artaguette says three hundred."'-Gayarr6, Hist. Louisiana, i. 440.
 b Gayarrt says they met this band on the 10th and killed 2 men and 1 woman belonging
to it.-IIist. Louisiana, I, 445.


248