Antoine-Simon
Le Page du Pratz
The History of Louisiana
Site
created by Gordon Sayre, Associate Professor of English, University of Oregon
An
ethnographer, historian, and naturalist, Le Page du Pratz is in my opinion the
most interesting writer of French colonial Louisiana, and one who deserves to
be better known among anthropologists, literary scholars, and anyone interested
in the history of the French colony on the Lower Mississippi. His Histoire
de la Louisiane,
published in three volumes in Paris in 1758, is now very rare, and has never
been fully translated into English. This site features basic information about
Le Page du Pratz, and translations of selected chapters of his book. I plan to
expand the site as I continue the translations, and publish articles and book
chapters about the work. So far I have published two articles about Le Page du
Pratz's book and that of his contemporaries. "Le Page du Pratz's Fabulous
Journey of Discovery: Learning about Nature Writing from a Colonial Promotional
Narrative" is included in a collection of essays edited by Steven
Rosendale and entitled The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature,
Theory, and the Environment (University of Iowa Press, 2002). It focuses on the first and
fourth of the translated excerpts found on this site. The other article is
"Plotting the Natchez Massacre: Le Page du Pratz, Dumont de Montigny,
Chateaubriand" Early American Literature 37:3 (2002) 381-412. It discusses the
Natchez uprising recounted in the fifth excerpt below. If you would like copies
of either of these articles send me an email.
The Louisiana Colony
The
French colony of Louisiana was established under Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville,
who led three expeditions, beginning in 1699, that built small forts near
modern Mobile, Alabama, and Biloxi, Mississippi. In 1718 the colonial capital
was moved to a new site at New Orleans. [Click here for a map of the lower Mississippi area
published in Le Page du Pratz's book]. The French recognized that the
Mississippi River would become the corridor for trade and colonization in the
center of North America, and by securing the mouth of this great river, they
hoped to connect their settlments in Québec and Illinois with those on the Gulf
of Mexico, and thus to outflank British settlements on the continent's east
coast. History foiled this geopolitical scheme, however. The French surrendered
their claim to Louisiana to Spain in 1763, at the same time that France's loss
to England in the Seven Years War resulted in the surrender of Québec to the
British. French "creole" colonists remained the dominant population
around New Orleans, however, and in 1801 Spain returned Louisiana to French
control, just before Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.
A Biographical Outline
Antoine-Simon
Le Page du Pratz was probably born around 1695. He came to Louisiana in 1718,
and remained until 1734. He had some training in engineering, architecture, and
astronomy, and enough wealth to obtain a concession near Natchez, in today's
state of Mississippi, under the entrepreneurial colonization scheme organized
by John Law and the Company of the West. He lived at Natchez from 1720 to 1728,
along with a native woman of the Chetimacha tribe (with whom he seems to have
fathered children), and a few African slaves. His familiarity with the local
Natchez, and knowledge of their language and customs, is the basis for some of
the most unique and fascinating parts of his writings. He returned to New
Orleans to take an appointment as manager of the Company's plantation, and
thereby avoided being killed in the so-called Natchez Massacre of 1729. This
uprising, which he described in detail, destroyed the French Fort Rosalie and
nearly all the colonists there, and led to the King ending the concession of
the Company of the West, and seizing control of the plantation that Le Page du
Pratz was managing.
His Published Writings
For
unknown reasons, Le Page du Pratz waited more than fifteen years after his
return to France before he published anything about his experience in
Louisiana. Then the Journal Oeconomique, a Paris periodical devoted to scientific and commercial
topics, published in twelve installments between September 1751 and February
1753 a "Memoire sur la Louisiane" by Monsieur Le Page du Pratz. This
contained in abbreviated form the material for his subsequent book.
Unfortunately, the Journal Oeconomique is even more difficult to find in U.S. libraries than the
book. In 1758 appeared the three octavo volumes of the Histoire de la
Louisiane. Part of the
book is devoted to ethnographic description of the native peoples of Louisiana,
particularly the Natchez whom he knew so well. Other sections, reflecting its
title, describe the history of the colony, from the Spanish and French explorers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through establishment of the French
settlements along the Mississippi. The book was also intended to have a
practical value for French colonizers; it offered advice about agriculture,
climate, trade with the natives, and the management of slaves. It was too late
to be of significant use to French colonists, however.
In
1763, just after the British victory in the Seven Years War, a partial
translation of Le Page du Pratz's work was published in London. The title, The
History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina, subordinated the former French colony
to its English neighbors to the east, and its preface asserted that English
"nation may now reap some advantages from those countries...by learning
from the experience of others, what they do or are likely to produce, that may
turn to account." The translation severely abridged and rearranged the
text, and although anglophone scholars have long used the English edition and
quoted from it, it should not be regarded as authoritative. It is for this
reason that I am developing this site and my translations. In addition, in the
summer of 2003 I will be teaching at the Newberry Library in Chicago part of a
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on "French Travel
Writing from the Americas, 1500-1800." Participants in the institute will
be reading these translations and studying the Louisiana colony alongside those
of New France, Brazil and Haiti. Click here for more on this NEH institute.
¨ His Newly-Discovered Manuscript!
In
June 2005 I visited the Chicago Historical Society to follow up a hint from a
colleague that a few manuscript letters
from Le Page du Pratz are held there. I found, in the Otto Schmidt collection
of French colonial documents, two documents, the only manuscripts by Le Page
that I know of anywhere. One is a letter from Le Page to his mother, dated 1
February 1724, and the other an 18-page ”Relation of the Voyage that Mr. Le
Page du Pratz made from New Orleans to Natchez on the Mississippi River in 1720
and 1721.” This is not so much a travel narrative of this trip as an early
outline of the publications he finally released 30 years later. He lists in the
margin the major French forts in Louisiana, and some of the rivers and islands,
plants and animals, and Native nations found there, and briefly describes each
in the text. In the middle of this sewn booklet is another one consisting of
notes from the 1720 book, Relations de la Louisiane et du fleuve Mississippi, published in Amsterdam by Jean
Frederic Bernard. Bernard had compiled excerpts from Hennepin, and from the
spurious book attributed to Henri Tonty from 1698. I hope to add translations
of the letter and part of this manuscript soon!
The New Translations
So far, I have prepared
translations of five sections of Histoire de la Louisiane.
The first, chapters 16-19 from
Volume 1, tells of a fabulous voyage of exploration that Le Page du Pratz
claims to have made on the Great Plains. It is in Adobe pdf format, and
combines scanned text from the 1763 English translation with my own
translations of the passages omitted by the anonymous eighteenth-century
translator. Although this may take some time to download, it allows you to see
just how much the 1763 translation omitted as it abridged the French original.
The second section consists of
chapters 22-26 from volume 2. This is the first part of Le Page du Pratz's
ethnography of the Natchez, beginning with their language and kinship
structures, and continuing with their cosmogony, religious practices, calendar,
and major feasts. Finally, he writes of how he was asked to marry a Natchez
woman, and why he declined. For this section, I have worked in part from the
translations published by John R. Swanton in Indian Tribes of the Lower
Mississippi Valley (Smithsonian
1911). Swanton put together a lengthy ethnohistory of the Natchez, relying on
translated excerpts from Le Page du Pratz and other French colonial writers,
arranged in an ethnographic catalog. Swanton thus printed a little more than
half of the complete text of these chapters, but I have edited his translation
where I find it too literal, and have tightened up the punctuation of Le Page
du Pratz's long, paratactic style. Most of the remainder was translated by
undergraduate research assistant Nicole Degli Esposti during the Winter and
Spring of 2002. Her work was invaluable to the project.
The third section comprises
chapters 2-5 from Volume 3, and is also in html format. It continues Le Page du
Pratz's ethnography of the Natchez nation, beginning with an account of the
burial ceremonies and sacrifices that he witnessed in 1725 after the death of
Serpent Piqué, or Tattooed Serpent, one of his closest friends in the tribe and
an ally of the French. Then it turns to the mythic history of the Natchez,
their migration north from Mexico, and originally, Le Page du Pratz believes,
from the Mediterranean. The translation of this section is also taken in part
from Swanton's book.
The fourth section continues
with chapters 6-8 of volume III. Here Le Page du Pratz recounts the journeys of
a Yazoo Indian named Monchacht-apé, who tells of his travels to the Atlantic
coast and Niagara Falls, and then up the Missouri River and westward to the
Pacific coast, in the region of Oregon or Washington. If authentic, his journey
anticipated by more than 75 years the famous trans-continental trip of Lewis
and Clark. Moncacht-apé's motive was not to find the long-sought Northwest
Passage, however, but only to trace the origins of his peoples, who according
to their own legends had migrated from a land far to the northwest of
Louisiana. The eighth chapter concludes with a discussion of geography of the
Northwest coast of North America, Alaska, and what are now called the Bering
Straits, a region still little-known in the 1750s. Most of this translation is
a revised version of that published by the nineteenth-century historian Andrew
McFarland Davis.
The fifth section consists of
the narrative of the convulsive uprising of the Natchez people against the
French, which began on 29 November, 1729. About 250 Frenchmen and African
slaves were killed, and the colony at Natchez, which had been established by
the Company of the Indies some twelve years earlier, was destroyed. Although Le
Page du Pratz was in New Orleans at the time, he had contacts among the Natchez
and among the French soldiers who could have informed him of how the revolt was
planned. In particular, he writes of interviewing Bras Pique, the Female Sun or
chief of the nation, who was imprisoned by the French after they mounted the
first of many counterstrikes against the Indians. Other sources, notably the
Memoires Historiques de la Louisiane by Dumont de Montigny, tell a similar
narrative of the uprising, but none offers the details of the Natchez
deliberations that Le Page du Pratz does here. The translation of this section
is entirely the work of Nicole Degli-Esposti and myself. We will be working on
chapters twelve to sixteen during the winter and spring of 2003.
Site updated 10/01/03
gsayre@darkwing.uoregon.edu
