196 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



Tocobaga population, — We are told that when Menendez was visit- 

 ing the Tocobaga Indians, 1,500 warriors gathered near the town to 

 receive him, but, of course, there is no way of knowing how close an 

 estimate Menendez's chronicler made nor how many of these Indians 

 were bona fide members of the tribe. Mooney's estimate as of the 

 year 1650 is 1,000. The "Macapiras" Indians brought to San Buena- 

 ventura numbered 24. 



TOHOME 



Indians of this tribe may possibly have been among the ones en- 

 countered on the Gulf coast by early navigators like Pineda, Narvaez, 

 and Maldonado, but the river of the Tome which appears in the 

 De Luna documents, and was evidently the Tombigbee, shows that by 

 1560 they were near, if not actually at, the spot where the French 

 discovered them 140 years later. Their earlier home had perhaps 

 been still farther inland, since the name of Catoma Creek, an affluent 

 of Alabama River in Montgomery County, appears on the De Crenay 

 map of 1733 as Auke Thome, "Thome Creek." Their name appears 

 again associated with the Gulf locality in documents narrating the 

 expeditions to survey Pensacola Bay in 1693. In April, 1700, when 

 Iberville was on Pascagoula River, he learned of the Mobile and 

 Tohome Indians, living one day's journey apart on "the river of the 

 Mobile." He sent his brother and two other Frenchmen with the 

 chief of the Pascagoula Indians to these tribes to establish friendly 

 relations with them. In March 1702, while the French were engaged 

 in erecting the first fort in Mobile Bay, Iberville paid this tribe a 

 visit in their towns on the Tombigbee, and relations continued un- 

 interruptedly from that time forward. The French protected them 

 from the Alabama Indians and in 1705 prevented them from declar- 

 ing war against the Mobile. In 1715 an Indian of this tribe killed 

 the English trader Hughes, who had been apprehended by a French 

 force on the Mississippi, but allowed to start back to South Carolina 

 overland. From what Du Pratz tells us, it would seem that, by about 

 1730, the tribe had moved south to a point just above Mobile. We 

 hear of them in various documents as late as 1771-72, but as their 

 language and that of the Mobile differed little from Choctaw, they 

 probably fused in time with the great Choctaw Nation. A body of 

 Choctaw which settled on Bayou Boeuf near the Biloxi and Pasca- 

 goula Indians early in the nineteenth century may have been com- 

 posed of the remnants of the Tohome and Mobile. 



When the French first visited the Tohome, they were divided into 

 two bands, called sometimes the Big Tohome and the Little Tohome, 

 and the smaller of these was probably identical with the Naniaba 

 Indians, since both were located near the junction of the Tombigbee 

 and Alabama Rivers. 



