"And did they bury all those seven hundred folks that they killed, papa?" asked Ned.
"No," replied his father; "they left them lying strewed about in every place where they had struck them down to death, dancing over their mangled bodies with horrid yells in their drunken revelry; then they left them there unburied, a prey for hungry dogs and vultures. And all the dwellings in all the settlements they burned to ashes."
"Didn't anybody at all get away from them, uncle?" asked Alie Leland.
"Nobody who was in the buildings at the time of the massacre," replied the captain; "but two soldiers who happened to be then in the woods escaped and carried the dreadful tidings to New Orleans."
"I'm glad they didn't go back to the fort and get caught by those savage Indians," said Elsie Dinsmore. "But how did they know that the Indians were there and doing such dreadful deeds?"
"By hearing the deafening yells of the savages and seeing the smoke going up from the burning buildings. Those things told them what was going on, and they hid themselves until they could get a boat or canoe in which to go down the river to New Orleans, which they reached in a few days; and there, as I have said, they told the sad story of the awful happening at the colony on the St. Catherine."
"Were there any other colonies that the Indians destroyed in that part of our country, papa?" asked his daughter Elsie.
"Yes; one on the Yazoo, near Fort St. Peter, and those on the Washita, at Sicily Island, and near the present town of Monroe. It was a sad time for every settlement in the province."
"When the news of this terrible disaster reached New Orleans, the French began a war of extermination against the Natchez. They drove them across the Mississippi, and finally scattered and extirpated them. The Great Sun and his principal war chiefs were taken, shipped to St. Domingo and sold as slaves. Some of the poor wretches were treated with barbaric cruelty—four of the men and two of the women were publicly burned to death at New Orleans. Some Tonica Indians brought down a Natchez woman, whom they had found in the woods, and were allowed to burn her to death on a platform erected near the levee, the whole population looking on while she was consumed by the flames. She bore all that torture with wonderful fortitude, not shedding a tear, but upbraiding her torturers with their want of skill, flinging at them every opprobrious epithet she could think of."
"How very brave and stoical she must have been, poor thing!" remarked Grace. "But, papa, have not the Natchez always been considered superior to other tribes in refinement, intelligence and bravery?"