swANTON] INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 329 



beads; their mothers tlatteu them as soon as they are born. They took the 

 provisions which they had left there in comlniLC down and went to the Natehe." 



In the relation of his expedition of 1G86 Tonti does not mention 

 the Koi'oa, though it is possible from circumstantial evidence that 

 the Natchez chief who met him, calumet in hand, on the bank of the 

 river may have been in realitj^ the chief of that tribe.'' During- his 

 third descent of the Mississippi (1690) Tonti sent two men to the 

 Koroa •" to spare myself the fatigue of dragging on with our crew 

 G leagues inland." These men not rettirning, he sent others in search 

 of them, but not finding them in the Koroa town they returned, and 

 he subsequently sent them to the Natchez, where he found the two men 

 had been killed.^ This Koroa town was evidently not the one below 

 Natchez, but either that on the Yazoo or some town on the western 

 side of the Mississippi. We have already seen that there must have 

 been camps of Tunica west of the INIississippi, and it is equally evi- 

 dent from Tonti's Memoir that there were Koroa settlements in that 

 region also. On his return from the Caddos he secitred a guide who 

 was to take him to '' the village of the Coroas," '' and later, " after 

 crossing seven rivers," they came to " the river Coroas." ^ Subse- 

 quently the}' reached the Mississippi, and finding themselves 30 

 leagues from the Koroa village they resolved to go thither, though 

 they '' had never set foot in that village,'' and they arrived there 

 three daj's later without apparently having crossed the great river.<^ 

 He states, moreover, that the savages received him ver}^ well, which 

 would hardly have been the case had they been the same people 

 with whom he and La Salle had had difficulties eight years earlier. 

 " During three daj's," he says, " they did not cease feasting us, send- 

 ing men out hunting every day, and not sparing their turkeys." He 

 is probably referring to this trans-Mississippi division of Koroa in 

 his short account of the route from the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico 

 when he sa^'s that the Koroa were neighbors of the " Mauton " 

 [Mento], though 13 leagues off ," ^ for he has already spoken of the 

 Tunica, Yazoo, Koroa, and Ofo " on the river of the Yazou." ^ In 

 ITOO, when Bienville crossed from the Taensa towns to the Natchi- 

 toches, he was told by his guide, when making the passage of one of the 

 numerous rivers in that region, that farther up this stream there was 

 a village of the Koroa.'' Laying aside Iberville's hearsay statement 

 of 1G99 that the Koroa and Yazoo occupied a single village on the 

 left in going up three days" journey above the Taensa,' these are all 

 the times we hear of Koroa to the west of the great river, Avliile not 

 another word occurs anywhere regarding the Koroa who lived below 



" Margry, Decouvertes, i, 565-566. f Ibid., 83. 



» Ibid., Ill, 556. " Ibid., 82. 



<= French, Hist. Coll. La., 72, 1846. '' Margry. Decouvertes, iv, 433. 



" Ibid., 77, 1846. * Ibid., 179. 



e Ibid., 78. 



