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for the souls of the American Indians, for he, just like Thomas Nairne, planned to send missionaries among them. By June 1714, less than a year after his arrival, his advice was sought by South Carolina's Common House of Assembly about many issues relating to white-Indian relations, including which presents were fitting to give prominent Chickasaw chiefs who were then in Charles Town as preparation for a new peace treaty. Pryce had gained his knowledge of this tribe from an earlier expedition to the Mississippi along with the South Carolina Indian trader and official, Thomas Welch. An attempt in 1720 to estimate the population of Carolina's 1715 Indian population used figures compiled by Pryce Hughes and Nairne.23 Pryce left Charleston for the last time in 1714 to seek the perfect location for his colony. It is clear from both French and British sources that his influence among the Indians along the Mississippi, even those that were officially French allies, was so great that the French decided to remove him. There is a charming French account of his seizure. those sent to detain him waited until he had left an Indian town and had only a handful of people with him. According to a French eyewitness, [Andre ?] Penicaut, 'we found him sketching' at a river bank. Hughes expressed surprise at his arrest, for France and England were at peace. Although he and the fifteen or so Indians he had with him did not submit passively, they were outnumbered and overcome. Pénicaut explained that Pryce had a warehouse for skins and goods among the Choctaws, a tribe supposedly aligned with the French at that time. Pryce had clearly combined his vision of a colony with involvement in the lucrative deerskin trade.24 This was a dual threat-economic and diplomatic-to the infant French colony of Louisiana with its centre then located at Mobile, and was regarded as such by the French governor, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. When under arrest in Mobile, Pryce refuted French claims to that area. He informed the governor that Queen Anne was about to send five hundred families there, implying that she had favoured his petition. Bienville obviously took Pryce and his plans seriously, calling him 'the King's Lieutenant of Carolina', for Pryce had a commission from Governor Charles Craven of South Carolina. Bienville apparently treated Pryce well, and released him early in 1715.25 The next reliable record is an extract from the minutes of a meeting of the Board of Trade, dated 16 July 1715, mentioning that Hughes had been taken prisoner by the French. He was possibly already dead by that date.26 An official letter dated March 1716, from South Carolina's administrators to the Board of Trade, contained the news that Pryce Hughes 'was kill'd in going from Pancicola [Pensacola, Florida] to the Talapoochies by Some French Indians who had way lay'd the path for that purpose, as it is thought by the order of the Govern'r of Mobile who was privy to Mr. Hughs's being on the Journey'.27 A 1721 map by John Barnwell of South Carolina showed the purported location of his "Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 4-12 June 1714, R.S.U.S. SC Alb/l/4, pp.268-9; B.P.R.O., Vol. 7, p. 239. These census figures were corrected against later observations taken by Colonel John Barnwell. 4Richebourg G. McWilliams, Fleur de Lys and Calumet: Being the Pinicaut Narrative of French Adventure in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), pp. 160-4. As so frequently happens, Pénicaut calls him an 'Englishman', and his name was transposed as 'Mestriou', a corruption of Mister Hughes! It seems that one reason that Hughes has been so neglected is his name, one the Indians understood as 'Yous'. It became 'Hutchey' in some colonial sources. "Dunbar Rowland and Albert G. Sanders (eds.), Mississippi Provincial Archives (Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1932), Vol. 3, p. 182. *B.P.R.o., Vol. 6, pp. 137-9. 27B.P.R.O., Vol. 6, p.159.