swANTi.Ni INDIAN ri;iBi:s of ttik t.ower misstsstppt valley 23 



(Kciii- ivreiTiR-es to the lin«j!:iiistic- ufliiiities uiul (liver<j;oiices of the 

 Chickasaw, Tunica, Ilouina, Quinipissa, Osage, Quapaw, Kansa, and 

 Missouri, and in the light of all our present knowledge not a single 

 mistake is made. The information of the priests extends even to the 

 point of determining the closer relationship of Osage, Quapaw, and 

 Kansa to one another than of any of them to the Missouri. If this 

 were true of the comparativel}^ remote tribes, why should they have 

 blundered regarding the nearer ones? 



The writer had hoped to render assurance doubly sure by dis- 

 covering some living representative of the tribe in question from 

 whom a few words in the old Taensa language might be gathered. 

 From the Chitinuicha, at Charenton, La., he learned that the father 

 of the oldest woman of that tribe was a Taensa, and that she herself 

 had formerly been able to use the language. A few days after receiv- 

 ing this intelligence he called upon this woman and endeavored in 

 every way to stimulate her memory into the resurrection of at least 

 a word of the old tongue, but in vain. All that he could learn was 

 that kl'pi., which signifies ' meat ' in Chitinuicha, had another mean- 

 ing in Taensa, but what it was she could not say. This is indefinite 

 enough, but perhaps it may have really been the Natchez infinitive 

 ending -kip^ -kipi^ -kup^ -kupi, which is employed very frequently, 

 and consequently may have retained a place in the memory after 

 everything else had gone. At any rate ki^pi is a combination of 

 sounds not conspicuous, if indeed it is existent, in Parisot's Taensa 

 Grannnar. 



The writer is infoniied that not merely the old w^oman just referred 

 to had once been familiar with Taensa, but a number of the other Chi- 

 timacha Indians, and the old negro Baptiste himself, from whom Doc- 

 tor Gatschet obtained practically all of his Chitimacha linguistic mate- 

 rial. Thus, by a curious iron}- of fate, in the same year in which the 

 grannnar which occasioned so much discussion appeared, its prin- 

 cipal American defender Avas in communication with a man who pos- 

 sessed information which would have nipped the controversy in the 

 bud, and ^et he never appears to have been aAvare of the fact. 



Summing up. then, we find the following state of affairs: So far as 

 is known, the original Taensa manuscript has never been seen by 

 any person except the gentleman w ho professed to copy from it. The 

 statements made by that person regarding it in 1880 and 1882 do not 

 agree. The "Taensa songs" are un-Indian in tone and contain geo- 

 graphical, botanical, and ethnological blunders wdiich Gatschet has 

 not satisfactorily explained, while Adam has conceded that they are 

 later compilations of " some disciple of the Jesuit fathers who had 

 taken a fancy to the Taensa poetry." The language itself is in almost 

 every respect nnlike any in the region where it is supposed to have 

 been spoken and contains no words that may be recognized as having 



