Natchitoches Indians

The Natchitoches were one of three Caddo-speaking confederacies, and their name was once given to the Red River itself. About 1730 a French writer counted some 200 cabins in their village by the post, and in 1731 St. Denis led Natchitoch and allied fighters, with some Spaniards, in a battle that killed about eighty Natchez warriors. War, smallpox and measles took their toll, and in 1805 John Sibley reported only fifty people. They soon merged with other Caddo groups. Louisiana recognized the Natchitoches Tribe of Louisiana in 2017.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.7 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.8 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.4 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676-1744) — steps away
• Roque House (circa 1797) — steps away
• Site of Fort Claiborne — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — 0.2 mi