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Native Inhabitants and European Settlement
Hernando De Soto's expedition undoubtedly passed (1540–42) through the region, then inhabited by the Choctaw,
Chickasaw, and Natchez, but the first permanent European settlement was not made until 1699, when Pierre le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville,
established a French colony on Biloxi Bay. Settlement accelerated in 1718, when the colony came under the French Mississippi
Company, headed by the speculator John Law. The region was part of Louisiana until 1763, when, by the Treaty of Paris. England
received practically all the French territory E of the Mississippi River and also East Florida and West Florida, which had
belonged to Spain.
English colonists, many of them retired soldiers, had made the Natchez district a thriving agricultural community, producing
tobacco and indigo, by the time Bernardo de Gálvez captured it for Spain in 1779. By the Treaty of Paris of 1783, at the
end of the American Revolution, the United States claimed as its southern boundary in the West lat. 31°N. Most of the present-day
state of Mississippi was included in the area. Spain denied this claim, and the long, involved West Florida Controversy ensued.
In the Pinckney Treaty (1795), Spain accepted lat. 31°N as the northern boundary of its territory but did not evacuate
Natchez until the arrival of American troops in 1798. Congress immediately created the Mississippi Territory, with Natchez
as the capital and William C. C. Claiborne as the governor. After Georgia's cession (1802) of its Western lands to the United
States and the Louisiana Purchase (1803), a land boom swept Mississippi. The high price of cotton and the cheap, fertile
land brought settlers thronging in, most of them through the Natchez Trace, from the Southern Piedmont region and even from
New England. A few attained great wealth, but most simply managed a living.
In 1817 Mississippi became a state, with substantially its present-day boundaries; the eastern section of the Mississippi
Territory was organized as Alabama Territory. The aristocratic planter element of the Natchez region initially dominated Mississippi's
government, as the state's first constitution (1817) showed. With the spread of Jacksonian democracy, however, the small
farmer came into their own, and the new constitution adopted in 1832 was quite liberal for its time.
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