ABSTRACT
Building on the work of seventeenth-century traders and missionaries, and relying on shared interests with Indian peoples, the French established a viable colonial enterprise in North America, with furs and fish driving the Canadian economy and plantation agriculture struggling to flower in Louisiana. During the deliberations, which occurred in the summer of 1701 in Montreal, French and Indian representatives articulated a wide range of interests using the symbolic diplomacy that had come to dominate intercultural relations in New France and its borderlands. In 1729 tiring of French demands on their goods and lands, the Natchez Indians organized war parties to drive the French from their settlements in the lower Mississippi Valley, killing nearly 150 French colonists and taking many others captive. A Natchez attack is drawn from a history of Louisiana first published in Paris in 1758 by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734.
