SWANTON ] TUNICA, CHITIMACHA, AND ATAKAPA LANGUAGES 9 
the modern town of that name. Their position is not beyond doubt, 
but an Atakapan connection is the most probable. The same might 
have been said until recently for the bands about Galveston Bay 
and along Trinity River, who were usually called Akokisa by the 
Spaniards. However, a newly discovered vocabulary in an old 
French manuscript has placed their position beyond doubt.’ To 
these the researches of Prof. H. E. Bolton among Spanish documents 
have enabled us to add the Bidai of the middle Trinity and the 
territory immediately to the westward of that river, and two tribes 
less well known, the Deadose and Patiri, which probably lived 
entirely west of the Trinity.’ 
In the main the culture of all of these peoples did not differ 
materially, but that of the Tunica and Chitimacha partook of the 
higher or at any rate more complicated civilization of the lower 
Mississippi, while the Atakapa were on a much lower level, measured 
by our ordinary standards. The Tunica peoples had special religious 
houses or temples set on mounds like the other lower Mississippi 
tribes, and they were probably organized into exogamous clans, 
although of that there is no proof other than indications embodied in 
the terms of relationship recorded at a late date. The Chitimacha 
also had special religious houses and a cult which seems to have 
resembled in general that of the Choctaw. If the testimony of the 
survivors may be relied upon they also had totemic clans with 
matrilineal descent. The Atakapan peoples, however, seem to have 
been divided into a great number of small bands having little 
coherence, either inside or with one another. There is not the 
slightest evidence that they had clans or gentes and the terms of 
relationship preserved are such as are encountered among loosely 
organized peoples without artificial exogamous groups. Like the 
Chitimacha, their principal reliance for food was upon fish and shell- 
fish. While they seem to have raised some corn, they cultivated the 
ground far less than either the Tunica or the Chitimacha. Their 
cultural allies were the Karankawa, Tonkawa, and other peoples of 
central and southern Texas lying west of them. 
For our knowledge of the languages of these three groups of tribes 
we are almost entirely indebted to the indefatigable labors of Dr. A. 8. 
Gatschet, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, guided by Maj. 
J. W. Powell, Director of that Bureau. This is particularly true of 
Tunica, of which scarcely a word remains outside of the material 
collected by Doctor Gatschet in 1886 from an Indian of the Marksville 
band of Tunica. 
While the writer has gone over this with two or three native 
informants he has found it impossible to improve upon it except in 
1 See Int. Journ. Amer. Linguistics, vol. i, no. 1, p. 49, 1917. 
2 Article San Ildefonso, Handbook Amer. Inds., Bull. 30, Bur. Amer. Ethn., pt. 2, 1910. 
