MooNEv] THE KIOWA IN 1803 167 



the sources of Red river, ami extending from the mountains eastward 

 indefinitely. They were a wandering people, claiming no particular 

 boundaries, and, although i)ossessing no guns, were brave and warlike. 

 Their country abounded in wild horses, besides great numbers which 

 they raised themselves {Lewis and Vlarl, 3). 



In his volume published a few years later the explorer, Zebulon M, 

 Pike, states that the Kiowa, estimated by him to number 1,000 men, 

 had in 1803 been driven by the Dakota into the mountains on the 

 heads of the Platte and Arkansas and north of the Comanche, where 

 they were then wandering. They owned immense herds of horses, were 

 armed with bows, arrows, and lances, hunted the buffalo, and were at 

 warwith the Dakota, Pawnee, and "Tetau"( here meaning the Ute). In 

 another place he mentions both Ute and Kiowa as living in the moun- 

 tains of northern Jlexico — the present Colorado and Xew Mexico — the 

 former being more civilized from contact with the Spaniards. He 

 speaks also of meeting, in 1807, a party of Kiowa and Comanche 

 returning from a trading expedition to the Mandau (PiAe, 1). 



EXPLANATION OF "ALIATAN" AND "TETAU" 



As the names Aliatan and Tetau here quoted from Lewis and Clark, 

 with their variants, have been the cause of much confusion in our west- 

 ern tribal nomenclature, some explanation will not be out of place. 

 Although so unlike in appearance, these ai)pellations are really but 

 different forms of the same word. The Ute of the mountain region at 

 the headwaters of the Platte and the Arkansas, being a powerful and 

 aggressive tribe, were well known to all the Indians of the jjlaius, who 

 usually called them by some form of tlieir proper name, Yufawuts, or, 

 in its root form, Ynto, whence we get Eutaw, Utah, and Ute. Among 

 the Kiowa the name becomes I('(t(i(-f/o), while the Siouan tribes seem to 

 have nasalized it so that the early French traders wrote it as Ayutan, 

 latan, or lef^in. By i)refixing the French article it became L'latan, 

 and afterward Aliatan, while by misreading of the manuscript word 

 we get Jatan, .Jetan, and finally Tetau. Moreover, as the early traders 

 and explorers knew but little of the mountain tribes, they frequently 

 confounded those of the same generic stock, so that almost any of these 

 forms may mean Shoshoni, Ute, or Comanche, according to the general 

 context of the description. 



UNSUCCESSFUL OVERTURES OF THE DAKOTA 



As an incident of the war in progress during this period between the 

 Kiowa and the Dakota, we find it recorded on a calendar of the latter 

 tribe, under date of 1814-15, that a party of their people visited the 

 Kiowa camp on Horse creek for the purpose of making peace, but their 

 benevolent purpose was defeated by the occurrence of a sudden quarrel 

 between one of their own men and a Kiowa, which ended by the Dakota 

 sinking his tomahawk into the Kiowa's head, thus bringing the peace 



