French Fort St. Pierre

France's Fort St. Pierre was a short-lived post on the Yazoo bluffs, founded in 1719 to shelter settlers and trade with Native nations such as the Tunica. Its end belongs to the Natchez War. When the commandant at Fort Rosalie demanded a Natchez sacred site and rejected the Great Sun's compromises, the Natchez killed French men around that post, and the Yazoo outpost was destroyed in December 1729. Accounts differ on who struck it: the Yazoo and Koroa in one telling, the Yazoo and Chickasaw in another. The Choctaw later freed captives. France gave up the site.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 9.1 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 11 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• Old Court House Museum — 11 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Delta National Forest — 19 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• Haynes Bluff Mound — 2.3 mi
• Chickasaw Bayou Battle — 6.8 mi
• Waltersville — 8.9 mi
• Fort Nogales — 9.5 mi