possession of their adopted homes, that the surrounding country was comparatively without inhabitants; for the savage and warlike nations which lived in the neighborhood never would have permitted the Natchez, when in their infancy, to occupy lands, which afterward oven they defended more by moral than by physical force.
As fire-worshippers, the Natchez displayed their Oriental origin, and they were more sincere in this most poetic of all idolatries than the magi of the East. They possessed a tradition which, unlike the traditions of any other nation, gallantly ascribed the salvation of their race to a woman. This was, that after the destruction of all the inhabitants of the earth, save a single family, which family was about to die because of the continued darkness of the heavens, a young girl, inspired with the wish to save her race, threw herself into the fire which was used as a light; and that no sooner was her body consumed, than she arose in the East, surrounded with such surpassing glory that her form could not be looked upon thus enshrined, she became the chief, her nearest female relation being elected her successor. Hence was established the worship of the sun, and the living sacrifice of the sacred fire, together with the belief, that so long as it blazed upon their altars, the Natchez would be powerful and happy.
The Sun, a female sovereign, was absolute in power. The rewards of the chase, and of the cultivation of the soil, were placed under her charge, implying, that they were the results of her genial rays, and through her, as if direct from the hands of Providence, they were distributed among the people.
The Natchez must have rapidly increased after their establishment on the banks of the Mississippi; for their tradition was, that in the first century of their settlement, they created those monuments of industry on which to erect their temples and bury their dead, the remains of which are so much admired to this day. Their great work was built upon a hill, where they believed fire fell from the sum, indicating that their wanderings were at an end. This series of mounds, the most remarkable in the valley of the Mississippi, have been almost entirely overlooked by the curious in such relies of ancient days.
A natural hillock was levelled upon the top, and used as the foundations of the mounds, the only example known. Upon a base thus
