Natchez people

The Natchez lived in the bluff country of the lower Mississippi near the present city of Natchez, the only Mississippian chiefdom to survive long into the European colonial era. Heirs of the Plaquemine culture with its platform mounds and maize fields, they kept a rigid sun-king order: the Great Sun ruled by divine descent through the Female Sun's line, nobles married commoners, and human sacrifice honoured dead Suns. De Soto's men passed in 1543 without recording them; Frenchmen who built Fort Rosalie in 1716 found a polished court of some four thousand souls. The Natchez revolt of 1729 destroyed the French post, and the revenge wars of 1730 to 1731 broke the nation: hundreds were shipped to Saint-Domingue as slaves, the rest fled to the Chickasaw, Muscogee and Cherokee. Their language, an isolate possibly kin to Muskogean, died with its last speakers, but Natchez descendants enrolled in Oklahoma nations and state-recognised tribes keep the name of the Suns.