52 SIOUAN TRIBES OF THE EAST. [^.^ 



REAU OF 

 HNOLOGY 



New York (Hall, 1), It is barely possible that some of their descend- 

 ants, retaining the laugaage, may still be found among the Cayuga in 

 New York. 



About sixty years ago, says Hale, when Brantford was a frontier ham- 

 let, the Tutelo cabins were scattered over these heights, having in the 

 center the "long house" wherein their councils were held and their fes- 

 tivals celebrated. They numbered then about 200 souls, and from all 

 accounts were a jovial, uproarious lot, quite difierent from the sedate 

 Iroquois among whom they lived. Nearer to the M'hite settlements than 

 the others, they sunk still lower into dissipation, until their systems 

 had become so enfeebled that they became a prey to disease. When 

 the cholera swept over the country in 1832 it carried off the greater 

 portion of the tribe, and a second visitation in 1848 completed their 

 destruction. The few survivors took refuge among the Cayuga and the 

 Tutelo tribe ceased to exist. In 1870 only one full-blood Tutelo remained. 

 This venerable remnant of a nation was said, when discovered by 

 Hale in the year named, to be the oldest man on the reservation. He 

 believed himself to be considerably over a hundred, and was a pensioner 

 of the war of 1812. His memory went back to a time before the Revo- 

 lution when his people Avere living together with the Saponi and the 

 Patshenin (Occaneechi ?). His Cayuga name was "• Old Mosquito;" 

 his Tutelo name was Waskiteng. Hale describes him as having "a 

 wrinkled, smiling countenance, a high forehead, half-shut eyes, white 

 hair, a scanty, stubbly beard, fingers bent with age like a bird's claws," 

 but withal a man of marked intelligence and nuich lively humor. His 

 wife Avas a Cayuga and for many years he had spoken only that langu- 

 age, but he remembered well his own, and from him Hale obtained a 

 sufficient vocabulary to establish the important discovery that the 

 Tutelo is a Siouau tongue. This was published in the Proceedings of 

 the American Philosophical Society in 1883, having been noted in the 

 minutes of that society as early as 1871). Even on the threshold of his 

 second century, the old man remembered that the tribes against whom 

 the Tutelo had been most often at war had been the Tuskarora, 

 Seneca, and Cayuga. 



On a second visit to the reservation in October, 1870, Hale obtained 

 some additional material from the old man, who died shortly after, in 

 February, 1871, leaving none of full Tutelo blood behind. There are, 

 however, several children of Tutelo mothers by Iroquois fathers still 

 remaining, retaining their language and their name of Tutelo, accord 

 ing to the Iiulian law of descent through the female line. One of them 

 (from whom other linguistic material was obtained) was even allowed 

 to retain his seat in the councils of the league as the representative of 

 the Tutelo, and to exercise the league privilege of making his address 

 in the language of his tribe, after the tribe itself had disappeared 

 (Hale, 7). 



In 1882 Dorsey visited the Grand River reservation in Canada, but 

 found then only two persons of Tutelo blood remaining and retaining 



