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THE revolt of the Natchez Indians against the tyranny and oppression of the French officers, and their massacre of the garrison and settlement, threw the colony into the hitherto unexperienced troubles of an Indian war. The Indians in the upper Mississippi country became openly hostile, those on the lower banks covertly so. Travel on the river changed, from its old time loitering picnic pleasure to a series of hairbreadth escapes from one ambush after another. Every white settlement in the colony trembled and shook with fear, and each plantation became the centre of secret panic, for, to the horrors of Indian attacks, were added the horror of an African rebellion, and the union of the two barbarous nations against the whites, incomparably their inferiors in number. Planters, with their families, abandoned their homes and rushed for protection to New Orleans, which itself lived in a continual state of alarm. One day a woman who had taken too much tafia came running in from the Bayou St. John, screaming that the Indians were raiding the Bayou, and had massacred all the settlers, men, women, and children, there, and were in full pursuit of her. Drums beat the
