These Indians revered, as more than mortal, their great chief, whom they called the child of the Sun.  They had a tradition that when they were a great nation, in Mexico, they were divided into parties by feuds among their chiefs, and all their power to resist the aggressions of their enemies was lost; consequently they had fallen under the power of the Aztecs, who dominated them, and destroyed many of their people.  Upon one occasion, when a common enemy and a common suffering had made them forget their quarrels, they were assembled for council.  Suddenly there appeared in their midst a white man and woman, surrounded with a halo of light coming directly from the sun.  They were all silent with awe when this man spoke, and with such authority as to make every chief tremble with fear.  They bowed to him with reverence, and he professing to be weary with his long journey, they conducted him with his wife to a lodge, and bade them repose and be rested.  The chiefs, in the darkness of the night and in silence, assembled, while the celestial pair slept, conscious of security.  After long and close council, they determined to proffer the supreme authority of the nation to this man, sent to them by the sun.  When this determination had been reached, the chiefs, in a body, repaired to the house occupied by their mysterious visitors and, arousing them from sleep, they formally tendered to the man the crown and supreme authority over the chiefs, all their villages, and all their people.  At first he refused, asserting that he knew their hearts; they carried hatred of one another, and that they would come to hate him; then they would disobey him, and this would be death to all the Natchez.  Finally yielding to the importunities and earnestly repeated protestations of a determination to obey him and follow his counsels implicitly, he agreed to accept the crown upon certain conditions.  These were:  first and paramount, that the Natchez should abandon their homes and country, and follow him to a new home which he would show them; and that they should live and conform strictly to the laws he would establish.  The principal of these were:  the sovereign of Natchez should always and forever be of his race, and that if he had sons and daughters, they should not be permitted to intermarry with each other, but only with the people of the Natchez.  The first-born of his sons should be his successor, and then the son of his eldest daughter, and should he have no daughter, then the son of his eldest sister, or in default of such an heir, then the eldest son of the nearest female relative of the sovereign, and so in perpetuity.

So soon as he was inaugurated chief and supreme ruler, he went out in the midst of the assembled multitude and called down in their presence fire from the sun; blessed it and made it holy.  He created a guard of eight men, made them priests and gave them charge of the fire, and bid them, under pain of death, to preserve and keep alive this holy fire.  They must tend it day and night and feed it with walnut wood, and in their charge it went before the moving host to where he had promised they should find a new and better home than the one they were leaving.