Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz

Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz (1695?–1775)[1] was a French ethnographer, historian, and naturalist who is best known for his Histoire de la Louisiane.

He gives lengthy descriptions of Natchez society and its culture, including the funeral rituals associated with the 1725 death of Tattooed Serpent, the second-highest ranking chief among the people.

It also includes his account of Moncacht-Apé, a Yazoo explorer who told him of completing travel to the Pacific Coast and back, likely in the late 17th or early 18th century.

[1] When Le Page wrote his memoir more than a decade after returning to France, he used the verbatim words of many of his Native informants, rather than describing the "manners and customs of the Indians" in the detached fashion of so many later colonial authors.

During the uprising by the Natchez, Chickasaw, and Yazoo, which Le Page described in detail, the Natives destroyed Fort Rosalie and killed nearly all of the male French colonists there.

[3] After the massacre, King Louis XV of France ended the concession of the Company of the Indies and seized control of the plantation which Le Page was managing.

They sold several hundred captive Indians into slavery and transported them to their colony of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, which was developed by slave labor for sugar cane plantations.

[4] Le Page du Pratz also wrote about the supposed Samba rebellion of 1731, in which he allegedly participated in arresting the conspiratorial slaves.

[5] In 1763, after the British had defeated France in the Seven Years' War, an English translation of part of Le Page du Pratz's work was published in London.