It was one of the laws established in the beginning of the reign of the Great Sun, that his posterity should not marry inter se, but only with the common people of the nation.  This custom was expelling the pure blood of royalty more and more every generation, and long after the arrival of the Natchez upon the Mississippi, the great and little suns were apparently of the pure blood of the red man.  Their traditions, however, preserved the history of every cross, and when Lasalle found these at Natchez and the White Apple village, nearly every one could boast of relationship to the Great Sun.  At that time they had diminished to an insignificant power, and were overawed by their more numerous and more powerful neighbors, the Choctaws and Muscagees or Alabamas.  Their legends recorded this constant decline, but assigned no reason for it.  They could now not bring more than two thousand warriors into the field.  Gayarie says not more than six hundred; but those contemporaneous with planting the colony of Orleans say, some two thousand, some more, and some estimate them as low as the number stated in that admirable history of Louisiana whose author is so uniformly correct.  And here let me acknowledge my obligations to that accomplished historian, and no less accomplished gentleman, for most of the facts here stated, and if I have used his own language in portraying them to a great extent, it was because it was so pure and beautiful I could not resist it, the excuse the Brazilian gave for stealing the diamond.

With regard to these people, their mode of life was that of most of the other tribes.  They lived principally by the chase; their only cultivation was the Indian corn, pumpkins, and a species of wild beans or peas, perfectly black, until their intercourse with the French, and then they only added a few of the coarser vegetables.  From whom they derived the pumpkin is not known.

Their wars were not more frequent or more destructive than those of their neighbors; and their general habits were the same.  Still they were going on to decay, and they contemplated with stolid calmness their coming extinction.  They felt it a destiny not to be averted or avoided by anything they could do, and were content with the excuse of folly for all its errors and sins. It is the will of God, or the Great Spirit, as the Indian phrases it. They were more enlightened than their neighbors, as historians have stated, because, I suppose, they were more superstitious.  They bowed to fate, the attribute of superstition everywhere, and made no effort at relief from the causes of decay.

Their religion, like all the aborigines of the continent, consisted in the worship of the Great Spirit typified in the sun, to whom was addressed their prayers and all their devotion.  The sacred fire was the emblem on earth; their Great Sun had brought it from the sun and given it as holy to them to be forever preserved and propitiated by watching and prayer.  In every village and settlement they erected mounds upon which the temple of the sun was built, and where was deposited the sacred fire.  Mounds, too, were built for burying-places, and in these are now to be found in great abundance the flat heads and other bones of this remarkable people.