John J. Egan's massive 24-panelPanorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the French Colonial Mississippi Valleydepictsthe Natchez revolt. Created in 1850, the panorama features scenes from across the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Natchez warriors arrived at Fort Rosalie on the Mississippi River on the morning of November 29, 1729, with a false peace offering of barrels of corn and a calumet pipeand the hidden, premeditated intention to commit a massacre that would either wipe out the French colonists in the region altogether or scare them away from ancestral Natchez lands for good.Before the Natchez Revolt, as the event would become known, around 450 French and 280 enslaved Africans lived in the area. By the end of that November day, the Natchez would kill some 230 settlers.French colonists established Fort Rosalie near present-day Natchez, Mississippi, in 1716 as a trading post and seat of government. For a while, relations with the Natchez were relatively calm, but skirmishes increasedas the settler population grew and turned to agriculture, a more land- and labor-intensive system.Relations deteriorated even further by 1729 after Etienne de Prier, the governor of French Louisiana, appointed a man known as Commandant de Chpart to lead Fort Rosalie.Chpart was naturally of a haughty and tyrannical disposition, Horatio Bardwell Cushman wrote in his 1899 History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians. He even rubbed his own subjects the wrong way, prompting complaints to the French governor in New Orleans. Chpart would have been removed from his post and punished but for the interference of influential friends, Cushman later argued.The pardoned tyrant returned, of course, to his colony, Cushman continued, and went on to oppress and abuse the Indians who had no higher power to which they could appeal.With little notice, Chpart demanded that the Natchez depart from White Apple, a village that hosted their high temple and the bones of their ancestors, to make room for a French plantation.In a meeting with the Great Sun, as the Natchez chief was known, Chpart denigrated the Natchez, reportedly calling their leader an insolent barbarian whom he would soon force off the land. Sketch of "The Great Sun, Paramount Chief of the Natchez People" by French settler, ethnographer and naturalist Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons For the Natchez, Chparts aggressions, demands and insults, to say nothing of years of French encroachment, justified resistance. The Great Sun gatheredother Natchez leaders and contiguous tribes to construct a plan for revenge. other Natchez leaders and contiguous tribes to construct a plan for revenge.On the morning of the revolt, a young French soldier ran intoa Natchez woman who tipped him off about the impending attack. The soldier went hastily to Chpart, but the commandant was recovering from a night of drunken debauchery and dismissed the warnings.As the Great Sun and a contingent of warriors approached the fort, bearing false gifts to signal acquiescence to the commandants demand to take over White Apple, they fired a round of rifle shots as a signal for the revolt to begin.The details of the attack itself are murky. Few who made it out alive were willing to discuss scenes that were too horrific to recount in detail, accordingto Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, a former resident of Fort Rosalie who spoke to survivors in New Orleans.By Cushmans account, however, Chpart was the last to receive his just reward. Though he fled to his garden, he was found, dragged forth and handed over to the lowest class of the Natchez warriors, who beat him to death with their war clubs. The highest class of Natchez would not deign to touch the blood of so contemptible a wretch.As news and rumors of the brutal attack spread, French Louisiana was beset by fear and loathing. Colonists abandoned once promising agricultural settlements, and, in an act of cruel, retaliatory bloodletting, Prier ordered the massacre of the Chaouacha, an innocent tribe uninvolved in the revolt. The massacre was neither the start nor the end of a protracted power struggle between white colonists and Indigenous people.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Colonialism, France, Louisiana, Mississippi, Native American History, On This Day in History, Warfare