It was one of the laws established in the beginning of the reign of the
Great Sun, that his posterity should not marry _inter se_, but only
with the common people of the nation. This custom was expelling the
pure blood of royalty more and more every generation, and long after
the arrival of the Natchez upon the Mississippi, the great and little
suns were apparently of the pure blood of the red man. Their
traditions, however, preserved the history of every cross, and when
Lasalle found these at Natchez and the White Apple village, nearly
every one could boast of relationship to the Great Sun. At that time
they had diminished to an insignificant power, and were overawed by
their more numerous and more powerful neighbors, the Choctaws and
Muscagees or Alabamas. Their legends recorded this constant decline,
but assigned no reason for it. They could now not bring more than two
thousand warriors into the field. Gayarie says not more than six
hundred; but those contemporaneous with planting the colony of Orleans
say, some two thousand, some more, and some estimate them as low as the
number stated in that admirable history of Louisiana whose author is so
uniformly correct.
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