SWANTdNl INDIAN TRIBES OF TTTR LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 17 



iiiovimI fiiitluT south :uul soUlod on a small hayoii at the head of 

 (iraiul lal<(' wliicli caim; to l)e known hv their name. Some after- 

 waril intermai'i'ied with the Chitimaeha. and Chitimacha of Tai-nsa 

 blood are still livinir, but the tril)e, as snch, has disappearecl fi-om 

 sijrht. whethei' by death or mi<iration bcino- unknown. l)rinlon is 

 mistaken, therefore, rejrardin^- the possibility of lino;uistic mateiial 

 having l)een eollected from them in 1827 or lS'i8. The improl)able 

 part of the story is that a tribe which numbered but •!'> men in bS05 

 should, twenty-two years later, and after all had been livin<i- toiicther 

 for a hinidred years, retain two distin<iuishable dialecls. There wei'e, 

 indeed, two tribes called Taensa, though as yet the writer has 

 found but one reference to the second under that name, but the state- 

 ments of the arannnar regarding them do not fit the facts. (latsclu't, 

 with strange inconsistency, strives to identify one division with tlu^ 

 Tangipahoa, though at the same time admitting that these probably 

 .spoke a dialect of Choctaw." The second Taensa tribe, or " li^tje 

 Taensas," spoken of by Iberville were another peoi)le who lived west 

 of the Mississippi and were exidently identical with the Avoyel.'' Hut 

 while the languages spoken by the Taensa proper and the Avoyel 

 mav have been two dialects of the same tongne, the tribes speaking 

 them correspond not at all with those descrii)ed V)y the grammar. Ac- 

 cording to that authority the northern dialect was current among 

 those who spent most of their time in hunting and Avere less refined, 

 while the sonthern dialect was among the more relined Taensa living 

 along the Mississippi. On the contrary, the more refined of these two 

 tribes, Taensa and Avoyel, were the former, who lived to the north 

 bnt Avhose home was not along the Mississippi but on an oxbow 

 cut-off west of it now known as Lake St. Joseph. The Avoj^el, on 

 the other hand, lived to the south and west on Red river. There 

 is no evidence, however, that the Taensa and Avoyel lived together 

 in historic times, and in 1805 Sibley states that all that remained of 

 the latter were 2 or 3 Avomen on Washita river. The chance in 

 1827 of collecting the " more polished southern dialect," on which 

 more stress is laid than on the other, would thus seem to have been 

 very slight. As we have seen, it developed in the course of the con- 

 troversy that all of tlie manuscripts could not have been in Spanish, 

 but that even a small part of them should be in that language is sur- 

 prising. During the Spanish occupation of Louisiana it is true that 

 many Spaniards settled in the country, but the presence of a Spanish 

 Taensa manuscript in Europe would almost necessitate the suj)posi- 

 tion that it had been written by an intelligent Spanish traveler, and 

 the records do not teem with instances of intellectual Spaniards 

 burying themselves in the canebrakes of Louisiana after its cession 



" La Lanjrue Taonsa, xvii-xix, Paris, 1882. * See p. 26. 



83220— Bull. 4.S— 10 2 



