1800

April 23: Congress establishes a post route between Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi.

1801

Musée du Louvre, Paris The Funeral of Atala, by Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson (1808)

Publication of Atala, a novel by French writer François René de Chateaubriand, about the doomed love between the beautiful Atala, a Christian convert, and the young Natchez warrior Chactas, whom she rescues. Though Chateaubriand had journeyed to America ten years earlier, he never visited the lands formerly inhabited by the Natchez, and much of his description of flora, fauna, and Indian culture in the novel is pure speculation. His title heroine will be adopted as the name of a Mississippi county in 1833.

October 24: In the Treaty of Chickasaw Bluffs, the Chickasaw granted the United States the right of way to build a road through their lands along the Natchez Trace.

December 12: The capital of the Mississippi territory is moved from Natchez to Washington, Mississippi.

December 17: The Treaty of Fort Adams officially opens Old Natchez District to settlement and the Choctaw agree that the United States may open a road, the Natchez Trace, through their lands.

1802

Alexander Gallatin McNutt, the eleventh governor of Mississippi, is born about this year (or possibly 1801) in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

1803

March 12: The town of Port Gibson, Mississippi, is established.

December 1: The Regiment of Tennessee Militia marches along the Natchez Trace to and from Natchez, Mississippi.

1804

1805

1806

1807

April 24: John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne born near Natchez, Mississippi.

1808

1809