Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz (1695? -1775) was an ethnographer, historian, and naturalist. He was born either in the Netherlands or France and was raised in the latter country. Serving with Louis XIV's dragoons in the French Army, he saw service in Germany in 1713 during the War of the Spanish Succession. On May 25, 1718 he left France, with 800 men on one of three ships bound for Louisiana. He arrived on August 25, 1718. Le Page lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734, the first eight of those years at Natchez, Mississippi. He waited more than fifteen years after his return to France before he published his experience in Louisiana. The Memoire sur la Louisiane was published in the Journal Oeconomique between September 1751 and February 1753. In 1758 appeared the three octavo volumes of the Histoire de la Louisiane. Part of the book is devoted to ethnographic description of the native peoples of Louisiana, particularly the Natchez. Other sections describe the history of the colony, from the Spanish and French explorers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through establishment of the French settlements along the Mississippi.

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