Dumont de Montigny

[2] For nearly 18 years in the Louisiana colony, Dumont was assigned to forts at Yazoo and Natchez, participated in a 1722 exploration of the Arkansas River with Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe, and helped establish a concession at Pascagoula, Mississippi.

He also quarreled with his superior officers, including the colonial governor, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, which led to brief periods of imprisonment.

The rich agricultural lands in this area, on elevated bluffs safe from the annual flooding of the Mississippi River, led to high hopes among the French for tobacco plantations and other development.

[6] However, in his 1747 memoir, preserved today at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois,[5] Dumont wrote that he left Natchez in January 1729, months before the revolt, after escaping from a detention ordered by Chépart.

The French wished to punish Natchez Indians who had sought refuge among the Chickasaw, and prevent them from allying with the English colonists in the Carolinas.

It appears that he may have collaborated with Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who published a series of articles on Louisiana in the Journal Œconomique, a periodical devoted to science and commercial topics.

Dumont also published two brief pieces in the journal and wrote a book about his experiences in the New World, Mémoires historiques sur la Louisane.

[9] Dumont's book relates one of the two earliest accounts of Moncacht-Apé's journey across North America; the other is in Le Page du Pratz's Histoire de la Louisiane.

[10] After publishing his book, Dumont obtained another commission as a lieutenant in the colonial Company of the Indies, and he sailed in 1754 with his wife for Mauritius and then to Pondicherry, a French outpost in India.