Sw ANTON J INDIANS OF THE SOUTHEASTEiRN UNITED STATES 29 



late arrivals from the north or northeast. Dumont de Montigny 

 informs us that the symbol of the Houma Indians was a red craw- 

 fish and from this it is easy to infer that they were a branch of 

 the Chakchiuma, or Ked Crawfish, people on Yazoo River. Since 

 De Soto in the sixteenth century found the latter about where 

 they were still living in the eighteenth century, and since the Indians 

 met by the survivors of his expedition on the Mississippi below the 

 Natchez appear to have been related to the latter tribe, except those 

 Indians living at the very mouth of the Mississippi, it seems evident 

 that the Houma were a late offshoot of the Chakchiuma and had come 

 from the north. (Dumont de Montigny, 1753, vol. 1, p. 184; Bourne, 

 1904, vol. 1, pp. 101-102; vol. 2, pp. 132-133.) There is some reason 

 to think that the Quinipissa were an offshoot of the Acolapissa, and 

 the Bayogoula, so conspicuous in the narratives of Iberville's expedi- 

 tion (1699), were not encountered by La Salle in 1682, though it 

 must be added that Ford finds evidence of long continued occupancy 

 of the Bayogoula site. The Chatot, whose earliest known home was 

 on Apalachicola River, were probably a Hitchiti or Apalachee tribe. 

 They retained their identity until dissipated in Louisiana in the early 

 part of the nineteenth century (Swanton, 1922, pp. 134-137). 



In De Soto's time the Natchez, or at least tribes with similar cus- 

 toms and apparently a similar language, lived on both sides of the 

 Mississippi between the Arkansas and Red Rivers, and occupied most 

 of the lower and middle Ouachita. The Timucua would naturally 

 be regarded as ancient occupants of Florida were it not for the fact 

 that the tribes south of them seem to have been more closely connected 

 with the true Muskogee than with them and the discovery that a tribe 

 speaking their language lived in central Alabama in 1540. These 

 two facts indicate at least two displacements and possibly a general 

 southeasterly drift. The Osochi I regard as a fragment of the 

 Florida Timucua which broke away from the rest and joined the 

 Lower Creeks after the Timucua uprising of 1656, and subsequently 

 adopted the Hitchiti language from their friends the Chiaha (Swan- 

 ton, 1929; 1922, pp. 165-167). 



Archeological evidence collected by Ford and Chambers seems 

 to show that the Natchez were preceded, in part at least of the ter- 

 ritory later occupied by them, by Tunica people, but their earliest 

 historic home, as indicated by the De Soto narratives and the location 

 of the "Tunica Oldfields," would be on the Mississippi River above 

 the St. Francis, and perhaps also in the region of the Hot Springs. 

 They may have been driven northward by the Natchez. At a later 

 date, however, they returned to the lower Yazoo and northeastern 

 Louisiana, while two tribes went farther south and joined the Natchez. 

 The others stayed on until the French began their settlements when 



