The American Race

Seminoles, in Florida.

Yamassees, around Port Royal Bay, South Carolina.

7. THE CATAWBAS, YUCHIS, TIMUCUAS, NATCHEZ, CHETIMACHAS, TONICAS, ADAIZE, ATAKAPAS, ETC

Within the horizon of the Muskoki stock were a number of small tribes speaking languages totally different. We may reasonably suppose them to have been the débris of the ancient population who held the land before the Muskokis had descended upon it from the north and west. The Catawbas in the area of North and South Carolinas were one of these, and in former times are said to have had a wide extension. South of them was the interesting tribe of the Yuchis. When first heard of they were on both banks of the Savannah river, but later moved to the Chatahuche. They call themselves “Children of the Sun,” which orb they regard as a female and their mother. Their gentes are the same as those of the Creeks, and are evidently borrowed from them. Descent is counted in the female line. Women are held in honor, and when De Soto first met them they were governed by a queen.[104 - See for the Yuchis, their myths and language, Gatschet in Science, 1885, p. 253.]

Some of both these tribes still survive; but this is not the case with the Timucuas, who occupied the valley of the St. John river, Florida, and its tributaries, and the Atlantic coast as far north as the St. Mary river. They have been extinct for a century, but we have preserved some doctrinal works written in their tongue by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century, so we gain an insight into their language.[105 - Arte de la Lengua Timuquana compuesto en 1614 per el Pe Francisco Pereja. Reprint by Lucien Adam and Julien Vinson, Paris, 1886. An analytical study of the language has been published by Raoul de la Grasserie in the Compte Rendu du Congrès International des Américanistes, 1888.] It is an independent stock.

Near the Choctaws were the Natchez, not far from the present city of that name. An account of them has been preserved by the early French settlers of Louisiana. They were devoted sun-worshippers and their chief was called “The Sun,” and regarded as the earthly representative of the orb. They constructed artificial mounds, upon which they erected temples and houses, and were celebrated for their skill in weaving fabrics from the inner bark of the mulberry tree and for their fine pottery. In their religious rites they maintained a perpetual fire, and were accustomed to sacrifice captives to their gods, and the wives of their chieftain at his death.

The Taensas were a branch of the Natchez on the other bank of the Mississippi. Attention has been drawn to them of late years by the attempt of a young seminarist in France to foist upon scholars a language of his own manufacture which he had christened Taensa, and claimed to have derived from these people.[106 - See “The Curious Hoax of the Taensa Language” in my Essays of an Americanist, p. 452.] The Natchez language contains many words from the Muskoki dialects, but is radically dissimilar from it.[107 - D. G. Brinton, “The Language of the Natchez,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1873.] A few of the nation still preserve it in Indian Territory.

The Chetimachas lived on the banks of Grand Lake and Grand River, and were but a small tribe. They are said to have been strictly monogamous, and to have had female chieftains. Their chief deity was Kut-Kähänsh, the Noon-day Sun, in whose honor they held sacred dances at each new moon.

The Tonicas are frequently mentioned in the early French accounts of the colony of Louisiana. They lived in what is now Avoyelles parish, and were staunch friends of the European immigrants. Their language is an independent stock, and has some unusual features in American tongues, such as a masculine and a feminine gender of nouns and a dual in three pronouns.

The Adaize or Atai were a small tribe who once lived between Saline river and Natchitoche, La. They spoke a vocalic language, differing from any other, though including a number of Caddo words, which was owing to their having been a member of the Caddo confederacy.

The Atakapas had their hunting grounds about Vermilion river and the adjacent Gulf coast. Their name in Choctaw means “man-eaters,” both they and their neighbors along the Texan coast having an ugly reputation as cannibals, differing in this from the Muskokis and their neighbors east of the Mississippi, among whom we have no record of anthropophagy, even of a ritual character. The later generations of Atakapas have been peaceful and industrious. Their language, though in the main quite alone, presents a limited number of words evidently from the same roots as their correspondents in the Uto-Aztecan family.

The coast of Texas, between the mouths of the Colorado and Nueces rivers, was the home of the Carankaways. The Spaniards gave them a very black character as merciless cannibals, impossible to reduce or convert; but the French and English settlers speak of them in better terms. In appearance they were tall and strong, with low foreheads, hooked noses, prominent cheek bones, tattooed skins, and wore their black hair long and tangled. The older writers affirm that they spoke Atakapa, and were a branch of that tribe; but the scanty material of their idiom which we possess seems to place them in a stock by themselves.

The Tonkaways are a small tribe who lived in northwest Texas, speaking a tongue without known relationship. A curious feature of their mythology is the deification of the wolf. They speak of this animal as their common ancestor, and at certain seasons hold wolf dances in his honor, at which they dress themselves in wolf skins and howl and run in imitation of their mythical ancestor and patron. A branch of them, the Arrenamuses, is said to have dwelt considerably to the south of the main body, near the mouth of the San Antonio river.

The lower Rio Grande del Norte was peopled on both its banks by a stock which was christened by Orozco y Berra the Coahuiltecan, but which Pimentel preferred to call the Texan. The latter is too wide a word, so I retain the former. There is not much material for the study of its dialects, so we are left in the dark as to the relationship of many tribes resident in that region. They were small in size and rich in names. Adolph Uhde gives the appellations and locations of seventy-four, based on previous works and personal observations.[108 - Die Länder am untern Rio Bravo del Norte. S. 120, sqq. (Heidelberg, 1861.) I give the following words from his vocabulary of the Carrizos:The numbers three, four and five are plainly the Nahuatl yey, nahui, macuilli, borrowed from their Uto-Aztecan neighbors.] The missionary Garcia, in his Manual of the Sacraments, published in the last century, names seventeen tribes speaking dialects of the tongue he employs, which appears to be a branch of the Coahuiltecan.[109 - Bartolomé Garcia, Manuel para administrar los Santos Sacramentos. (Mexico, 1760.) It was written especially for the tribes about the mission of San Antonio in Texas.]

It is useless to repeat the long list, the more so as the bands were unimportant and have long since become extinct, with a few exceptions. They were in a savage condition, roving, and depending on hunting and fishing. The following appear to have been the principal members of the

COAHUILETCAN LINGUISTIC STOCK

Alazapas, near Monclova.

Cacalotes, on the left bank of the Rio Grande.

Catajanos or Cartujanos, near Monclova.

Carrizos, near Monclova.

Coaquilenes, near Monclova.

Cotonames, left bank of Rio Grande.

Comecrudos, near Reynosa.

Orejones, near San Antonio de Bejar.

Pacaos or Pakawas, near San Antonio.

Among the extinct dialects of Tamaulipas was the Maratin, which at one time had considerable extension. The only monument which has been preserved of it is a wild song, in which the natives celebrated all too early their victories over the Spaniards. The text contains several Nahuatl words, but the body of the roots appear to have been drawn from some other source.[110 - As chiquat, woman, Nah. cihuatl; baah-ka, to drink, Nah. paitia. The song is given, with several obvious errors, in Pimentel, Lenguas Indigenas de Mexico, Tom. III., p. 564; Orozco y Berra’s lists mentions only the Aratines, Geografia de las Lenguas de Mexico, p. 295.] Uhde locates the Maratins near Soto la Marina and along the Gulf between the Rio Panuco and the Rio Grande.[111 - Adolph Uhde, Die Länder am unteru Rio Bravo del Norte, p. 120.]

8. THE PAWNEES (CADDOES)

The Pani[112 - The name Pani is not a word of contempt from the Algonkin language, as has often been stated, but is from the tongue of the people itself. Pariki means a horn, in the Arikari dialect uriki, and refers to their peculiar scalp-lock, dressed to stand erect and curve slightly backward, like a horn. From these two words came the English forms Pawnee and Arikaree. (Dunbar.)] stock was scattered irregularly from the Middle Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico. The Pawnees proper occupied the territory from the Niobrara River south to the Arkansas. The Arikari branch had separated and migrated to the north at a comparatively recent period, while the Wichitas, Caddoes and Huecos roamed over Eastern Louisiana and Western Texas. The earliest traditions of all these peoples assign their priscan home toward the south, and the Pawnees remembered having driven the Dakota tribes from the hunting grounds of the Platte Basin.

The stock as a rule had an excellent physique, being tall and robust, with well-proportioned features, the lips thin and the eyes small. Longevity however was rare, and few of either sex reached the age of sixty. The division of the tribes was into bands and these into totems, but the gentile system did not prevail with much strength among them. The chieftainship of the bands was hereditary in the male line, and the power of the chief was almost absolute. He was surrounded by a body of retainers whom he supported, and who carried out his orders. When he wished a council these messengers carried the summons. Property as well as power passed to the family of the male, and widows were often deprived of everything and left in destitution. Marriage was a strictly commercial transaction, the woman being bought from her parents. The purchase effected, the bridegroom had a right to espouse all the younger sisters of his wife as they grew to maturity, if he felt so inclined. The laxity of the marriage rules of the stock was carried to its limit by the Arikaris, among whom it is said fathers united with their daughters and brothers with their sisters, without offending the moral sense of the community. This may have arisen after corruption by the whites.

Agriculture among them was more in favor than generally on the plains. Maize, pumpkins and squashes were cultivated, each family having its own field two or three acres in extent. For about four months of the year they were sedentary, dwelling in houses built of poles and bark covered with sods, while the remainder of the time they wandered over their hunting grounds, carrying with them tents of skins which were stretched on poles. The women manufactured a rude pottery and the men implements and weapons of wood and stone. The Arikaris were skilled in the construction of boats of skin stretched over wooden frames, an art they may have learned from the Mandans.

The information about their religion is vague, but it seems in some respects to have resembled that of the Mexican nations. One of their chief divinities was the morning star, Opirikut, which was supposed to represent the deity of fertility and agriculture. At the time of corn-planting a young girl, usually a captive, was sacrificed to this divinity. The victim was bound to a stake and partly burned alive; but before life had ceased, her breast was cut open, her heart torn out and flung in the flames. Her flesh was then cut into small pieces and buried in the cornfield. This was believed to secure an abundant crop. The similarity of the rite to that in vogue among the Mexicans, who also worshipped the morning star as the goddess of fertility, is interesting.

The dead were buried with their possessions, and the customs of mourning continued sometimes for years.[113 - The authorities on the Panis are John B. Dunbar, in the Magazine of American History, 1888; Hayden, Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley (Philadelphia, 1862), and various government reports.]

PANI LINGUISTIC STOCK

Anaddakkas, on left bank of Sabine river.

Arikaris, on the middle Missouri.

Assinais, in central Texas.

Caddoes, near Clear Lake, La.

Cenis, see Assinais.

Huecos, on the upper Brazos river.

Innies, see Texas.

Nachitoches, on upper Red river.

Natacos, see Anaddakkas.

Pawnees, between Niobrara and Arkansas rivers.

Tawakonies, on upper Leon river.

Texas, on upper Sabine river and branches.

Towachies, see Pawnees.

Wichitas, on north bank of Red river.

Yatasses, on Stony creek, an affluent of Red river.

9. THE DAKOTAS (SIOUX)

The western water-shed of the Mississippi river was largely in the possession of the Dakota or Sioux stock. Its various tribes extended in an unbroken line from the Arkansas river on the south to the Saskatchewan on the north, populating the whole of the Missouri valley as far up as the Yellowstone. Their principal tribes in the south were the Quapaws, Kansas and Osages; in the central region the Poncas, Omahas and Mandans; to the north were the Sioux, Assiniboins and Crows; while about Green Bay on Lake Michigan lived the Winnebagoes.