swanton: siouan tribes of the east 609 



ETHNOLOGY. — Some information from Spanish sources re- 

 garding the Siouan tribes of the East. John R. Swanton, 

 Bureau of American Ethnology. 



The discovery of a group of tribes of the Siouan linguistic 

 stock in the southeastern part of our country was in its day one 

 of the great surprises in American Ethnology. The number and 

 names of these, together with the relationships existing between 

 them and the ethnological information regarding them furnished 

 by early writers, were made the subject of a special study by 

 Mr. James Mooney and the results appear in Bulletin 22, of 

 the Bureau of American Ethnology, entitled Siouan Tribes of the 

 East. Not much additional information bearing upon these 

 peoples has since come to light and but very few alterations 

 would be required in a new edition, so far as the Siouan tribes 

 themselves are concerned. Nevertheless, as information regard- 

 ing them is scanty it becomes proportionately more valuable, and 

 for this reason I desire to call attention to one or two additional 

 sources of information among Spanish writings. 



The first of these, in a work long well known to students of 

 American history but unfortunately overlooked by the ethnolo- 

 gist, is Peter Martyr's account of the province of Chicora, and 

 the customs of its inhabitants, in his De Orbe Novo. The reason 

 for this neglect is, no doubt, due in part to the dependence of 

 investigators on Gomara's transcription of Peter Martyr's nar- 

 rative, particularly because they were acquainted only with 

 faulty translations of the latter, which contain grotesque and 

 exaggerated statements tending to throw discredit upon the 

 entire account, a discredit moreover which has ancient support 

 from the historian Oviedo. The greater part of the information 

 was derived by Peter Martyr from an Indian of Chicora, named 

 by the Spaniards Francisco, who was carried to Spain and taught 

 the Spanish language, but taken back as interpreter for Ayllon's 

 colony which came to such an inglorious end in 1526. The origi- 

 nal narrative is contained in the Seventh Decade of Peter Mar- 

 tyr's work, where it occupies all of the third book and parts of 

 the second and fourth; and if one goes back to this, instead of 

 trying to depend on later transcriptions and translations, he 



