…Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The basis of the Mississippian economy has largely shifted from hunting and gathering to intensive maize cultivation by 900.

Mississippian house forms have gradually become rectangular; some villages possess stockades or fortifications.

The Spanish expedition of 1540 had only been in the Central Mississippi Valley for a short time but the Spanish presence had had devastating effects.

A favorite tactic of the expedition had been to play off local political rivalries, causing more conflict.

More significantly, the introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases would have ravaged the native population, who had no acquired immunity.

The Central Mississippi Valley by the time the French arrive in 1699 is sparsely occupied by the Quapaw, a Dhegiha Siouan people hostile to the Tunica.

The Tunica and Koroa have relocated further south to the mouth of the Yazoo River in west central Mississippi in the intervening century-and-a-half since the de Soto Expeditio.

The French establish a mission among the Tunica around the year 1700, on the Yazoo River near the Mississippi River in the present-day state of Mississippi.

Archaeological evidence suggests that they had recently migrated to the region from eastern Arkansas, in the late seventeenth century.

Father Antoine Davion is assigned as the missionary for the Tunica as well as the smaller tribes of the Koroa, the Yazoo, and Couspe (or Houspe) tribes.

Unlike the northern tribes with which the French are familiar, the Tunica (and the nearby Taensa and Natchez) have a complex religion.

They have built temples, created cult images, and have a priestly class.

The Tunica, Taensa, and Natchez retain chiefdom characteristics, such as a complex religion and, in the case of the Natchez, the use and maintenance of platform mounds, after they had disappeared elsewhere.

Several characteristics link the Tunica to groups encountered by de Soto: their emphasis on agriculture; cultivation by men rather than women (as de Soto noted when describing Quizquiz); trade; and manufacture and distribution of salt, a valuable item to both native and Europeans.

The trade in salt is an ancient profession among the Tunica, as evidenced by de Soto's noting salt production when visiting the village of Tanico.

Salt is extremely important in the trade between the French and the various Caddoan groups in northwestern Louisiana and southwestern Arkansas.

Scholars believe the Tunica were middlemen in the movement of salt from the Caddoan areas to the French.

By the early eighteenth century, the Chickasaw raid the tribes along the lower Mississippi River to capture people for the English slave trade in South Carolina.

They take an estimated on thousand to two thousand captives from the Tunica, Taensa, and Quapaw tribes during this period.

Southeastern native tradition relates that a race of giants, who were a peaceable people engaged in agriculture, once inhabited Yazoo county and other lands on the Yazoo river.

They were annihilated by the fierce Yazoos, who invaded and took forcible possession of their lands.

There is an oral tradition that the Chickasaw came from the West over the Mississippi river and had waged a war of extermination against the Yazoo and other tribes, and that the Yazoo warriors had fought desperately until the last of their race was slain.

By treaty, the Chickasaw had taken as their share of the conquest all the lands along the Yazoo river and many of the counties east of that river.

The Choctaws were in possession of part of this country when it was first discovered by the white man, though the Yazoos were not exterminated, as their name appears on many of the earliest maps of this part of the country.

French explorer La Salle had named the Yazoo River in 1682 as "Rivière des Yazous" in reference to the Yazoo tribe living near the river's mouth.

The exact meaning of the term is unclear.

One long held belief is that it means "river of death".

Nothing is definitely known concerning the Yazoo language, believed to be related to Tunica, a language isolate.

Father Antone Davion, of the Quebec Seminary of Foreign Missions, had in 1699 established a mission among the Tunica.

He also reached out to allied tribes, such as the Taensa.

The Yazoo, however, were, like the Chickasaw, under the influence of the English traders from Carolina.

Yazoo warriors aid certain of the Koroa in killing Father Nicholas Foucault and three French companions in 1702.

The tribe's leaders have the murderers executed; the seminary temporarily withdraws Father Davion from the area.

The Yazoo and Koroa join with the Natchez in attacking the French in 1729, killing more than two hundred people.

The French had established a fort near the village of St. Pierre in 1718 to command the mouth of the Yazoo River at the Mississippi.

The young Jesuit priest Jean Rouel had been given the Yazoo mission, near the French post, in 1722; he has remained until the outbreak of the Natchez War, when the Yazoo and Koroa, on learning of the event, waylay and kill Father Rouel and an enslaved black man in his service on December 11, 1729.

They attack the neighboring post the next day, killing the whole garrison.

The tribes bury Father Rouel's body; his bell and some books will afterward be recovered and restored by the Quapaw.

Father Stephen Doutreleau is attacked on January 1, 1730, but escapes.

The French attempt to besiege the main fort of the Natchez in January 1730, but they are driven off.

Two days later, a force of about five hundred Choctaw attacks and captures the fort, kill at least one hundred Natchez, and recover about fifty French captives and fifty to one hundred Africans enslaved by the French.

French leaders are delighted, then surprised when the Choctaw demand ransoms for the captives.

Vicksburg is the key remaining point of the Confederate defense of the Mississippi River.

The city's capture will yield the North control of the entire course of the river, and thus enable it to isolate those Confederate states that lay west of the river from those in the east.

The city is ideally suited for defensive purposes, however; as it is situated on high bluffs along the river and protected on the north by a maze of swampy bayous.

The Confederates' batteries on the bluffs can outgun any Union ships on the river.

A Union naval expedition in May and June 1862 uses ironclads in a failed attempt to subdue the Confederate batteries.

After two assaults in mid-May fail, Grant settles down on May 22 to methodical siege tactics while augmenting his forces.

Grant's Union besiegers control all the approaches to Vicksburg, and by early June, the Confederate garrison is desperately short of ammunition and on the brink of starvation.