Tensas

The Taensa, or Tensas, lived in villages beside Lake St. Joseph, an old channel of the Mississippi in northeastern Louisiana. Their communities occupied a country of river bends, wooded bottomlands and fertile alluvial soil. French visitors in the late seventeenth century described the Taensa village and its leaders, noting a society linked to the neighbouring Natchez people.

Henri de Tonti visited the lake during La Salle’s expedition in 1682. In 1706 the Taensa left their homes under the threat of raids connected with the trade in enslaved Indigenous people. They moved south and later sought French protection near Mobile Bay. The Tensas River and the surrounding country retain their name, recalling a people whose villages once stood beside the Mississippi’s old waters.