April 29, 1887.] 



scmjsrcu. 



413 



same stock. I could not obtain the numerals in 

 Cotoname, but in Comecrudo the majority of them 

 are borrowed from Nahuatl. 



The Comecrudo Indians mentioned to me a num- 

 ber of extinct tribes, who lived in their vicinity, and 

 spoke their language, or dialects closely related to it, 

 but left no representatives at the time of my visit. 

 These were the Casas Chiquitas, Tejones (or ' rac- 

 coons '), Pintos or Pakaw^s, Midkkm, Catujanos, 

 and the Carrizos above mentioned. The Pintos and 

 the Cotonames originally belonged to the northern 

 or Texan side of the Eio Grande. The Midkkan be- 

 longed to the Mission de los Borregos, at the town of 

 Mier, and spoke a language that was neither Coto- 

 name nor Comecrudo. 



Upon being informed by a French priest at Kio 

 Grande City that a colony of Indians existed at Sal- 

 tillo, the capital of Coahuila state, I resolved to visit 

 that place. One day's ride upon the railroad brought 

 me there from Laredo. The coimtry between the 

 Kio Grande and Saltillo can be irrigated only in a 

 few places, for want of running water ; but if that 

 commodity was procured through artesian wells, or 

 pumped by windmills to the surface, there would be 

 no land more fertile on earth. The ground luxu- 

 riantly produces the nopal, guisache, mescal, palm- 

 tree, and uiia de gato (or ' cat's-claw ') tree. The 

 scenery, as soon as the mountain-ridges are reached, 

 at Lampazas, is of extraordinary grandeur, the effect 

 being heightened by the transparency of the southern 

 atmosphere. Beyond the city of Monterey the rail- 

 road-track begins to wind up along the tortuous 

 passes of the Einconada, once held and sfci-ongly de- 

 fended by the wild tribes of the Guachichile Indians ; ■ 

 then it emerges into a wide, dry plain, in the midst 

 of which Saltillo (literally, ' the small water-spring ') 

 is situated, surrounded upon all sides by the high 

 mountains of the Sierra Madre. ^In this city of about 

 42,000 inhabitants, the Tlask^tec Indians, said to . 

 count about a thousand souls, live in some of the 

 eastern thoroughfares, and in early colonial times 

 were allotted the whole eastern quarter of Saltillo, 

 "which was founded about A.D. 1575. Over a hun- 

 dred and fifty families of these Indians were then 

 brought to this distant place from Anahuac to defend 

 the new cplony against hostile tribes, such as the 

 Guachichiles and Borrados, who seem to have disap- 

 peared entirely since the eighteenth ^century. The 

 Indians, who now speak the Tlaskaltec language, , 

 which is almost identical with Aztec, do not number 

 over two hundred. The language has adopted as 

 many Mexican-Spanish terms as English has adopted 

 words from Norman- French, or perhaps more. La 

 planta de mokshi is ' sole of the foot ; ' huesito de 

 ndkshi, ' ankle-bone ; ' se chorrito de atl, ' a cas- 

 cade ; ' eerca de naxkoyome, ' around the city.' 

 Tlaskaltec has also lost many derivational endings 

 from the old Nahuatl, as in nenepil, for nenepilli 

 (' tongue'). 



It is quite probable that the linguistic family to 

 which the tribes on the lower Eio Grande belong 

 extended once to Saltillo and the rest of Coahuila, 

 or at least to the western slope of the moimtain- 

 chain forming the Einconada passes. But no vocab- 

 ularies of these tribes are now extant, and we have 

 to expect the concluding numbers of a publication 

 now issued at Saltillo by Mr. EstebanPortillo, which 

 will perhaps shed more light on this subject. The 

 title of this book is ' Apuntes para la historia an- 

 tigua de Coahuila y Texas' (Saltillo, 1886, 8°). 



This title is explained by the circumstance that 

 Texas once formed a part of the local government of 

 Coahuila, which, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth 

 centuries, comprised a much larger extent of terri- 

 tory than it does now. Albeet S. Gatschet. 



T-wo ethnographic maps. 



Linguistic families of the Gulf states. 

 The annexed map represents the linguistic families 

 of Indian dialects within the south-eastern parts of 

 the United States of America, as far as they could be 

 traced through actual remnants of tribes still linger- 

 ing in their old haunts, or in the vicinity of these, 

 and by historic research. As far as the smaller stocks 

 are concerned, their areas, or the probable limits of 

 the territories claimed by them, are shown by lines, 

 mostly of a rounded shape, enclosing their principal 

 settlements, which are marked by colored dots. Full 

 ethnographic and historic jjarticulars of these lin- 

 guistic families will be found in my publication, ' A 

 migration legend of the Creek Indians' (1884, vol. i. 

 pp. 11-118). In the present article I restrict myself 

 to a few remarks necessary for the understanding of 

 the map, and begin with the family of the 



Timucua. — This Floridian stock, properly called 

 Atimuca, extended north to a line which can be in- 

 dicated only approximately, and seems to have ex- 

 tended farther north on the Atlantic side than on the 

 western side towards the Chatahutchi Eiver. It is 

 very probable that the Kalusa and Tekesta villages 

 at the southern cape of Florida spoke dialects of 

 Timucua. Tribes speaking Creek and Hitchiti dia- 

 lects had intruded upon the Timucua domain since 

 1550 (perhaps before); and from 1706 to the present 

 time they have inhabited its whole area, under the 

 name of Seminoles. 



Kataba. — The dialects of this family, which does 

 not properly belong to the Gulf states, must have 

 occupied a much larger area than is indicated by the 

 two rings on the map. But since we possess but two 

 vocabularies, Kataba proper and Woccon, these alone 

 could be indicated in the map, for fear of infringing 

 against historic truth. 



Yuchi. — From historic documents, three areas 

 could be made out for this people, which never ap- 

 pears prominently in history. Of these, the settle- 

 ments on Chatahutchi and upper Flint rivers were 

 the most recent. Other Yuchis existed between the 

 Altamaha Eiver and the northern border of Florida. 

 In the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, they occupy 

 a tract near Wialdka and Deep Creek, on the south 

 shore of the Arkansas Eiver. 



Cheroki. — The settlements of this people were 

 divided into Otali or Otari ('upland' or 'over hill') 

 towns, and Elati or Erati (or ' lowland') villages, the 

 latter in upper Georgia and Alabama. The limit be- 

 tween the Cheroki and the Mask6ki family is marked 

 approximatively. The land cessions made by Cheroki 

 Indians to the United States government are given in 

 detail in C. C. Eoyce's ' Map of the former territorial 

 limits of the Cherokee Indians,' etc., issued in the 

 ' Fifth report of the bureau of ethnology,' with his 

 article on the same subject (pp. 123-378), now in 

 press. 



Arkansas, properly called Ugdxpa (or ' down- 

 stream') trilDe, speaks a dialect of the great Dakotan 

 or Sioux family. The subdivisions of this tribe now 

 live in the north-eastern angle of the Indian Terri- 

 tory. The Biloxi, formerly on the Gulf coast, state 



