Bienville's Fort

The French marched toward a Chickasaw defeat. Bienville's southern army gathered at Mobile in March 1736 and reached Fort Tombecbe, up the Tombigbee, by April 23 with 544 European and 45 African men, joined by about 600 Choctaw warriors. On May 26 it attacked the Chickasaw town of Ackia and lost decisively; the villagers' palisades and fortified houses, and the English weapons they had traded for, held. The French lost roughly 100 killed and 100 wounded, and with ammunition and provisions short they retreated. The French and Choctaw tried again in 1739.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chickasaw Council House — 19 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.
• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 20 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 21 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 23 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.

More markers nearby

• Cotton Gin Port — 1.2 mi
• Amory, Mississippi: Blues from a Railroad Town — 3.6 mi
• Chickasaw Cession — 3.8 mi
• Athens — 10 mi