Le Page’s signature on a letter to his mother, February 1, 1724 from Chicago History Museum
Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz
An ethnographer, historian, naturalist, and teller of tall tales, Le Page du Pratz is the most enigmatic and challenging writer from French colonial Louisiana. He deserves to be better known among anthropologists, literary scholars, and anyone interested in the history of the French colony on the Lower Mississippi, but he remains obscure, I believe, because his writings have been inaccessible. 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. I decided to create this site to provide basic information about Le Page du Pratz, and translations of selected chapters of his book. You will find each chapter in the menu above, as well as in the outlines below.
A note on the name Le Page du Pratz: Many who have written about him abbreviate his name as “du Pratz.” However, his manuscript signature, such as in the letter above, was “Le Page,” and so I refer to him that way. In French the feminine noun “la page” is a page in a book, while masculine “le page” is, again as in English, the male servant of an aristocratic master. Le Page’s family origins are unknown, and the name causes confusion because if you are looking for him in an index or a library or archive catalog, you may need to search under “L” and “P” or even “D”!
A Biographical Outline
Born around 1695, Le Page du Pratz came to Louisiana in 1718 and remained until 1734. He evidently 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 very likely fathered children), and a few enslaved Africans. His familiarity with the local Natchez, and knowledge of their language and customs, is the basis for some of the most 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 Natchez Revolt of 1729. This uprising, which he described in detail, destroyed the French Fort Rosalie and killed nearly all of the male colonists there, and led King Louis XVI and his ministers to end the concession of the Company of the West, and seize control of the plantation that Le Page du Pratz was appointed to manage.
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. In the November 1751 issue Le Page also published a separate article under the heading: “Concerning the draining of marshlands, & the means of building solid levees” including drawings of a simple movable crane and winch for moving mud and sand. His expertise in draining swamplands must have been acquired in Louisiana, but he also mentions having learned from “the time that I spent in Fontenay-le-Comte in bas-Poitou” and that “the success of a capstan that I invented, in service to the King at Rochefort” had been sent to the Academy of Sciences and earned him a commendation from His Majesty. If this leads another researcher to find more clues about Le Page’s life in Fontenay-le-Comte (a town in the Vendee marshes, just north of La Rochelle and Rochefort), please let me know.
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. Those who are interested in reading it in the original French, it is available on-line through the Louisiana Digital Library.
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 accepted as accurate. It is for this reason that I began developing this site and my translations you’ll find below.
Le Page’s Manuscripts in Archives.
In June 2005 I visited the Chicago Historical Society to follow up a hint from a colleague that a few manuscript letters by Le Page du Pratz are held there. I found, in the Otto Schmidt collection of French colonial documents, two manuscripts. One is a letter to his mother, dated 1 February 1724, shown above, 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 his trip as an early outline of the kind of publications he finally produced 30 years later. He lists in the margin of this document the major French forts in Louisiana, as well as names of rivers and islands, plants and animals, and Native nations, that he briefly describes in the text. In the middle of the sewn booklet is another smaller folded page 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 Louis Hennepin’s 1697 book, and from the spurious book attributed to Henri Tonty from 1698. My article in Louisiana History (see below) describes these manuscripts further.
In May 2007 I learned that map dealer Martayan-Lan in New York City had acquired a manuscript map by Le Page du Pratz. It shows the entire Mississippi Valley, as well as part of the Gulf Coast and, in an inset, a plat of New Orleans. It differs significantly from the map published in the Histoire de la Louisiane. I believe that Le Page drew this map shortly after he returned to France in 1734, and so wrote an article about it for the July 2009 issue of the on-line history magazine Common-place.org, and then a longer piece for the journal French Colonial History. We are very fortunate that the map was purchased by the Library of Congress, and it is available on their website: https://www.loc.gov/item/2007633234/
In July 2010 I found in the microfilms of the C13a series of “correspondance générale” between the Louisiana colony and Paris officials an additional clue to Le Page’s career. In 1750 he made a prospectus for a return trip to the Mississippi Valley, to exploit the mines of “cristal de roche” or rock crystal. The two-page document is C13a vol. 24 folio 386. Le Page sought financing and assistance for this expedition, and the way he advertised the potential rewards sounds very much like fabulous voyage which is the first of the five excerpts translated below.
Translations of Le Page’s published writings
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 to the west of his home in Natchez. Traveling along with ten Native Americans whom he calls “naturals,” he finds evidence of lead and diamond mines, as well as observing the dam-building skills of a subspecies of beaver.
The second section consists of chapters 21-26 from volume 2. As some of these chapters are lengthy, I have created a separate link for each. Chapter 21 includes the amusing story of how Claude-Charles du Tisné, an explorer of the Missouri River country whose name Le Page rendered as “du Tissenet,” avoided being scalped by the Indians. Chapter 22 begins the first part of Le Page du Pratz’s ethnography of the Natchez, describing the tribe’s 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 Institution, 1911). Swanton wrote a lengthy ethnohistory of the Natchez, and compiled long 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, and I have filled in the missing parts, and edited his translation where I find it too literal. Most of the remainder was translated by undergraduate research assistant Nicole Degli Esposti during the Winter and Spring of 2002. I am grateful for her work on the project.
chapter 21, chapter 22, chapter 23, chapter 24, chapter 25, chapter 26
The third section comprises chapters 2-5 from Volume 3, which continues Le Page du Pratz’s ethnography of the Natchez. It opens 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 a key ally of the French. [The location of the main Natchez ceremonial complex is now preserved as the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians historical site in Natchez.] 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.
chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5,
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. I published an article about this episode in the on-line journal of American history, Common-place.org, in the summer 2005 issue. Moncacht-apé’s motive was not to find the long-sought Northwest Passage, 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.
chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8
The fifth section, also from volume III, consists of the narrative of the convulsive uprising of the Natchez people against the French, which began on 29 November, 1729. About 240 Frenchmen and Africans 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 Piqué, 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 Mémoires 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.