were the watchwords, and disorder was the rule. The
agents of power quarrelled among themselves, except when they leagued
together to deceive their transatlantic masters and cover their own
misdeeds. Each maligned the other, and it was scarcely possible for the
King or the Company to learn the true state of affairs in their distant
colony.

Accusations were renewed against Bienville, till in 1724 he was ordered
to France to give account of his conduct, and the Sieur Perier was sent
out to take his place. Perier had no easy task. The Natchez Indians,
among whom the French had made a settlement and built a fort called Fort
Rosalie, suddenly rose on their white neighbors and massacred nearly
all of them.[315] Then followed a long course of Indian wars. The French
believed that there was a general conspiracy among the southern tribes
for their destruction,--though this was evidently an exaggeration of the
danger, which, however, was serious. The Chickasaws, a brave and warlike
people, living chiefly in what is now western Tennessee and Kentucky,
made common cause with the Natchez, while the more numerous Choctaws,
most of whose villages were in the present State of Mississippi, took
part with the French. More than a thousand soldiers had been sent to
Louisiana; but Perier pronounced them "so bad that they seem to have
been made on purpose for the colony."[316] There were also about eight
hundred militia. Perier showed little vigor, and had little success. His
chief resource was to set the tribes against one another. He reports
that his Indian allies had brought him a number of Natchez prisoners,
and that he had caused six of them, four men and two women, to be burned
alive, and had sent the rest as slaves to St. Domingo. The Chickasaws,
aided by English traders from the Carolinas, proved formidable
adversaries, and when attacked, ensconced themselves in stockade forts
so strong that, as the governor complains, there was no dislodging the
defenders without cannon and heavy mortars.

In this state of things the directors of the Mississippi Company, whose
affairs had gone from bad to worse, declared that they could no longer
bear the burden of Louisiana, and begged the King to take it off their
hands. The colony was therefore transferred from the mercantile
despotism of the Company to the paternal despotism of the Crown, and it
profited by the change. Commercial monopoly was abolished. Trade between
France and Louisiana was n