Since prehistory, the bluffs of Natchez have called to the bold, the cruel and the quietly determined. The diverse opportunists who heeded that call have left behind more than three-hundred years of colorful and tragic stories. The Natchez Indians, who inhabited the bluffs at the time of European contact, made a calculated but ultimately catastrophic decision to massacre the French, who had settled nearby. William Johnson, a Black man, who occupied a tenuous position between two worlds, found wealth and status in antebellum Natchez. In the wake of Union occupation, thousands of the formerly enslaved became the city's protective garrison.
