282 



POPELOUT POPULAR FALLACIES 



[b. a. e. 



to his place Luis Tupatu, who ruled the 

 Tewa and Tanos until 1688, when Pope 

 was again elected ; but he died before the 

 reconquest of the province by Vargas in 

 1692. See Prophets, Pueblos. 



Consult Bancroft, Ariz, and N. Mex., 

 1889; Bandelier in Arch. Inst. Papers, 

 III, IV, 1890-92. Davis, Span. Conq. N. 

 Mex., 1869. (f. w. h.) 



Popelout. Said to have been the name 

 of the site of San Juan Bautista mission, 

 in Costanoan territory. Gal. 

 Popelout.— Eiigelhnrdt, Franc, in Cal., 397, 1897. 

 Popeloutechom. — Ibid. 



Popkum. A Cowichan tribe in a town 

 of the same name on Popkum res., lower 

 Eraser r., Brit. Col.; pop. 12 in 1906. 

 Pa'pk'um.— Boas in Rep. Brit. A. A. S., 454, 1894. 

 Popcum.— Can. Ind. Aff., pt. II, ICO, 1901. Popkum.— 

 Ibid., 309, 1879. 



Popof( named for Vasili and Ivan Popof, 

 traders and hunters in 1762-63). An 

 Aleut fishing settlement at Pirate cove, 

 Popof id., one of the Shumagins, Alaska; 

 pop. 7 in 1880, 146 in 1890 (including 

 another settlement at Humboldt har- 

 bor).— 11th Census, Alaska, 85, 1893. 



Poponesset. A village of Christian In- 

 dians in 1674 near Poponesset bay, Barn- 

 stable CO., Mass. Its inhabitants were 

 probably a part of the Nauset. 



Pawpoesit. — Bourne ( ltl74) in Mass. Hist. Sec. Coll., 

 1st s., I, 197, 1806. Popponeeste.— Freeman (1792), 

 ibid., 231. Popponessit. — Freeman (1792), ibid., 

 231. 



Popotita ('where there is popote', a 

 stiff straw). A Huichol rancheria and 

 religious place about 15 m. s. w. of San 

 Andres Coamiata, q. v. 



Epithapa.— Liimholtz, Unknown Mex., ll, 72,1902 

 (Huichol name, referring to a kind of stiff grass) . 

 Popotita. — Ibid. 



Popular fallacies. Since the day when 

 Columbus miscalled the aborigines of 

 America "Indians," believing that he 

 had discovered India, popular fallacies 

 respecting tliem have been numerous and 

 widespread. Some of the more important 

 of them will be discussed here. 



Origin of the Indians. — As soon as, or 

 even before, the newly discovered conti- 

 nent was found to be not connected with 

 Asia, theories of the origin of the Indians 

 began to be formulated by the learned, 

 and, consistently with the religious spirit 

 of the age, a solution of the problem was 

 sought in Hebrew tradition. In the In- 

 dians were recognized the descendants of 

 the "lost tribes of Israel." The latest 

 and most earnest supporters of the He- 

 brew origin are the Mormons, whose 

 statements are alleged to have the au- 

 thority of direct revelation. Absurd as 

 the theory is in the light of present 

 knowledge, anthropology owes to it sev- 

 eral valuable treatises on the habits and 

 characteristics of the Indians, which it 

 could ill afford to lose, notably Lord 

 Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities 

 (1830-48) and Adair's History of the 

 North American Indians (1775), the lat- 



ter book being filled with fancied simi- 

 larities to Jewish customs, rites, and even 

 traditions. (See Lost Ten Tribes.) 



Equally absurd, but less widespread, 

 was the myth of a tribe of Welsh Indians, 

 descendants of a colony reputed to have 

 been founded by Prince Madoc about 

 1170. The myth placed them, with 

 their "Welsh language and Welsh Bible, 

 first on the Atlantic coast, where they 

 were identified with the Tuscarora, and 

 then farther and farther w., until about 

 1776 we find the Welsh, or "white," 

 Indians on the Missouri, w'here they 

 appeared as the INIandan (according to 

 Catlin), and later on Red r. Later still 

 they were identified with the Hoiji of 

 Arizona, and finally with the Modoc of 

 Oregon, after which they vanish. (See 

 Croatan; WInie Indians; consult Mooney in 

 Am. Anthrop., iv, 393, 1891, and Bow'en, 

 America Discovered by the Welsh, 1876. ) 



Other seekers of a foreign origin for the 

 American aborigines have derived them 

 in turn from Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, 

 Phenicians, Irish, Polynesians, and even 

 from the peoples of Australasia. Most of 

 these theories are based on fortuitous 

 analogies in habits, institutions, and arts; 

 but the attempt is frequently made to 

 strengthen them by alleged similarities 

 of language. The general similarity of 

 the human mind in similar stages of cul- 

 ture in every part of the world, with its 

 proneness to produce similar arts, insti- 

 tutions, religious ideas, myths, and even 

 material products, sufficiently explains 

 the former class of facts, whilst the hy- 

 potheses of identity of language, based, 

 as they invariably are, on a small num- 

 ber of verbal similarities in the nature of 

 coincidences, are wholly disproved on 

 adequate examination and analysis. 



Indian hmgtiages. — Indian languages 

 are so utterly unlike European speech in 

 sound and so different in structure and 

 character that it is not surprising that 

 erroneous conceptions concerning them 

 should arise. The unlearned conceived 

 the idea that the speech of all Indians 

 of whatsoever tribe was practically the 

 same, that it was little more than a sort of 

 gibV)erish, that it contained but a small 

 number of words, that to eke out its 

 shortcomings the Indian was compelled 

 to use gestures, that it was hardly human 

 speech, much less orderly and well de- 

 veloped language. 



A comprehension of the manifold vari- 

 ety of Indian linguistic families, embrac- 

 ing a multitude of languages and dialects, 

 of their rich vocabularies, flexible gram- 

 matical methods, and general sufficiency 

 to express any and all conceiJts the In- 

 dian mind is capable of entertaining, 

 above all, of their capacity, shared with 

 more advanced tongues, of indefinite ex- 

 pansion corresponding to culture growth, 



