16 BUKEAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 43 



granted that they knew of the sugar maple, it is not conceivable that 

 they should have treated it as a tree of every day knowledge or desig- 

 nated one of their months by its name. If the texts were recorded 

 in the years mentioned, the Taensa were then in central Louisiana 

 not far from Red river, and were reduced to a very small band. By 

 no possibility, therefore, could the Choctaw be represented as de- 

 scending to them from the north. In fact there was but one time 

 when the Choctaw ever did live north of them, and that was when 

 the Taensa were in the neighborhood of Mobile. Supposing that 

 " The Song of the Marriage," which the writer has in mind, Avas com- 

 posed at that period, are Ave to believe that the Choctaw chief came 

 to Tensaw river for his bride, across Alabama and Tensas rivers, 

 with an ox cart full of presents? But if this song must be placed 

 at the period when the tribe Avas near Mobile '■" The Poisoned RiA^er " 

 goes back to the very beginning of the eighteenth century, since it 

 refers to Avars betAveen the Taensa and the Yazoo, Avho AA^ere near 

 neighbors at that time only. The poisoning of Tensas river, suppos- 

 ing that to have been possible, could, howcA^er, have had little etfect on 

 persons w^ho did not live upon it, the home of the Taensa having been 

 on Lake St. Joseph. 



The Avhole tone of the Cancionero Taensa is, hoAvever, so utterly 

 un-Indian that no one familiar with Indians will accept for a moment 

 songs in which one party graA^ely asks another Avhether his people 

 knoAv how to hunt buffalo and deer, Avhether there are squirrels in his 

 country, and what plants groAv there. 



These being dismissed from consideration as at least subsequent 

 compositions, Ave are reduced to a consideration of the grammar and 

 vocabulary apart from the use that has been made of them in 

 composition. 



In one particular Doctor Brinton has made an egregious blunder, 

 and that is in supposing that the Taensa Indians had been destroyed 

 in 1730-1740. If Charlevoix makes any such statement for the years 

 mentioned the Avriter has yet to find it, and must suppose that 

 Brinton is thinking of a reference to the Tafiiisa village site in Charle- 

 voix's Journal (letter of January 10, 1722), in which the destruction 

 is indeed affirmed." CharlcA^oix was mistaken, howcA'^er, the tribe 

 being at that time in the neighborhood of Mobile and according to 

 some accounts occupying 100 cabins. In 1764 they moved again to 

 the west side of the Mississippi and settled on Red river, and about 

 the time of the cession of Louisiana to the United States they sold 

 their lands and moA^ed south of Red river to Bayou Boeuf. Later 

 still they sold their land there, but continued to live in the neighbor- 

 hood for some time longer, being noted, as Gatschet states, as late 

 as 1812. At this time they drop out of sight, but it is known that they 



•"French, Hist. Coll. La., 178, 1851. 



