swANTON] INDIAN TRIBES OF TIIK LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 7 



caut, Gravier, La Ilarpo. ami in (he joiiiiials of Iberville's first ex- 

 j)t'<liti()!i to Louisiana. wliiK' in icccnt years we have had (iatscliet's 

 ])aj»tM- on the Cliitiniacha. 



Tn arranti'ini;' this material il has Ik'oii found hest to consider (he 

 Xatclu'z first and the other tribes with reference to them. Ethnological 

 information rey'ardin<j; the Natchez and a few other tribes, such as 

 the Tunica and the Chitimacha, has been segregated from the purely 

 historical mnrative and arranged much as would be done for a 

 modern ethnological report. In other cases it is so slight that it has 

 been incori)orated into the historical narrative itself. Tt has also 

 been found best to extract everything bearing on the linguistic affini- 

 ties and })()pulati()n of the various tribes and treat these subjects by 

 themselves at the outset. 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE TRIBES 



The tribes treated in this bulletin, which at the present time are 

 almost extinct, formerly occupied the banks of the Mississippi river 

 and its tributaries from about the neighborhood of the northern 

 boundarv of the present State of Louisiana to the Gulf of ^Mexico and 

 the shores of the gulf for some distance east and west. The region and 

 its ancient occupants as they appear to have been distributed at the 

 beginning of the eighteenth century are shown in accompanying map 

 (pi. 1). Northwest of it, in the area colored j^ellow, were peoples be- 

 longing to the Caddoan linguistic stock, of which the nearest were the 

 Washita of Washita river, and the Natchitoches and Doustiony (or 

 Souchitiony) in the neighborhood of modern Natchitoches, while 

 farther off were the Adai, Yatasi. Nakasa, Caddo, and Cahinnio. 

 None of these falls within the limits of the present discussion." Fol- 

 lowing around to the eastward we find the Siouan stock (colored 

 red), the greater part of which lay next north of the Mississippi 

 tribes under consideration, and extended in an unbroken mass north- 

 ward nearly to the Saskatchewan river. The nearest tribe in this 

 direction was the Quapaw at the junction of the Mississippi and 

 the Arkansas, but two detached bands, the Ofo, or, as they are more 

 commonly called, Ofogoula, on the lower Yazoo, and the Biloxi of 



" The Caddo languase is known from vocabularies and the speech of the survivors. 

 The Natchitoches and the Yatasi are remembered as their relatives, and it is known 

 throu.!,'h Sibley that Caddo was their trade language. (Annals of the 9th Congress, 

 107S, 1084, 1S52.) The Nakasa and the Doustiony were small tribes close to the two 

 last mentioned, whose relationship with them can hardly be doubted. The same may be 

 said of the Washita, whose history so far as it is known shows them to have come from 

 the neighborhood of the Natchitoches and to have returned later either to that tribe or 

 to the Caddo proper. (French, Hist. Coll. La., 72, 1846; La Harpe, Jour. Mist, 32, 

 18.31 ; Documents relating to the Purchase of Louisiana, 18-19, 1904.^ For a time it was 

 thought that the Adai should bo excludod from the Caddoan stock, but Gatschefs careful 

 analysis of a vocabulary taken by Sibley shows that this was a mi-stake. (Gatschet, 

 MS., B. A. E.) Finally the Caddoan position of the Cahinnio is proved by the name of 

 one of their chiefs, Ilinma Kiapemiche, or Big Knife, recorded by Joutel in 1687. (Margry, 

 D^convertes, vi, 421, 1886.) 



