As a Catholic power, the French sought to proselytize Christianity to the Indigenous people inhabiting North America as France expanded its imperial presence on the continent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. French explorers and trappers first arrived in the lower Mississippi River Valley in the 1690s, at which point the Natchez were one of the most powerful Indigenous nations in the region. They possessed a population of an estimated six thousand people living in sixty villages with well-developed political and religious institutions as well as an agriculture-based economy. French colonists in the area, initially seeking to conduct trade with the Natchez, built a trading post in their territory named Fort Rosalie in 1713. But the French agenda quickly became one centered on taking the land of the Natchez, culminating in a formal demand in 1729 that the Natchez relinquish a portion of their farmlands to French inhabitants. The Natchez response the following year was a brutal one: an attack against Fort Rosalie and massacre of many of those within its walls.