Koroa

Koroa communities appeared in French accounts of the lower Mississippi country in the late seventeenth century. Settlements were reported on both sides of the river, including the country associated with the lower Yazoo. They cultivated crops and lived in organised villages with dome-shaped reed houses. River knowledge also supported commerce: in 1700 French priests recorded Koroa traders arriving at a Taensa village with boatloads of salt.

Colonial expansion drew these communities into increasingly violent relations. In 1729 Koroa living east of the Mississippi joined their Yazoo and Natchez neighbours in attacks on French settlements. French and allied Indigenous retaliation dispersed the participants. Later references place surviving Koroa warriors among the Chickasaw in northeastern Mississippi. Their recorded history therefore follows several settlements and movements rather than a single continuously occupied town. The river connected farming villages and trading journeys, but also carried the military campaigns that disrupted their communities in the eighteenth century.