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.