Episode Details

France built the opposite of Carolina. Where the English ran their frontier through free-lance traders who cheated and enslaved the nations they lived among, the French in Louisiana learned the languages, kept the sacred calumet, and held their thousand-mile colony together with alliances instead of arms — a wiser empire, run by Bienville, the man who studied the people he could not afford to lose. This episode follows that model to the place it broke: the Natchez, the last sun-worshipping kingdom of the Mississippi, and the chronicle of Le Page du Pratz, who lived among them and recorded a war chief’s verdict that the French had “two hearts, a good one today, and tomorrow a bad one.” When a profit-driven company pushed Bienville out and a commandant demanded the Natchez abandon their temple and their ancestors’ graves for his tobacco, a Natchez noblewoman tried to warn the French — and was put in irons for it. What followed on the morning of November 28th, 1729, proved that the smarter empire reaped the same harvest as the lawless one.