34 JOURNAL OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES VOL. 13, No. 3 
In the fall of 1886 Dr. Gatschet, in the course of linguistic researches 
among the tribal remnants of Louisiana, came upon a few individuals 
of the Biloxi tribe, formerly occupying the neighborhood of the bay 
of that name in southern Mississippi. The vocabulary collected by 
him showed undoubted Siouan affinities, and in 1892 and 1893 Dr. 
Dorsey made visits to the same people and collected a large amount 
of material from them which was edited by the writer after Dr. 
Dorsey’s death and published in Bulletin 47.5 
In 1908, among the remnant of Tunica Indians living near Marks- 
ville, Louisiana, the writer happened to meet with a single individual 
of the Ofo, or Ofogoula, tribe, previously supposed to have been 
Muskhogean, and the vocabulary collected by him, although relatively 
small, proves without doubt that this little tribe was also of the great 
Siouan connection. More detailed information regarding both the 
Ofo and the Biloxi will be found in the Bulletin just mentioned.® 
A superficial comparison between the Biloxi and Ofo languages on 
one hand and the remaining Siouan dialects on the other, made when 
the material from the first two was being prepared for publication, 
brought out the rather surprising fact that, intead of resembling the 
Siouan language nearest them, Quapaw, they were connected rather 
with the Tutelo of Virginia and the Dakota of the far north. At this 
time it was assumed that since Tutelo and Catawba were both dialects 
of the eastern Siouan group they must be more closely related to each 
other than was either to any language of another group and that what 
was true of Tutelo must necessarily be true of Catawba. A few years 
later, however, the writer paid a visit to the Catawba remnant in 
South Carolina and in connection with his visit the material collected 
by Dr. Gatschet about forty years ago was reéxamined. Almost 
immediately a striking difference was perceived, not merely as between 
Catawba and Tutelo but as between Catawba and all other Siouan 
languages. The same conclusion has been reached by another inves- 
tigator in the same field, Dr. Frank G. Speck, who also feels certain 
that the differences had a cultural aspect. Catawba is evidently a 
survival of a peculiar southeastern Siouan group which took in all of 
the Siouan tribes of South Carolina and probably most of those of 
North Carolina as well. 
In order to place the relationship between these languages on a firm 
basis the writer has taken Hale’s comparative vocabulary of Tutelo, 
Dakota, and Hidatsa as a basis and added to it the Biloxi, Ofo, 
5 Bur. Amer. Ethnol. Bull. 47. 
6 Tbidem, pp. 5-12. 
