While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Kiowa Apache. A small Athapascan
tribe, associated with the Kiowa from the earliest traditional period and
forming a component part of the Kiowa tribal circle, although preserving
its distinct language. They call themselves Na-ishañ-dina,
'our people'. In the earliest French records of the 17th century, in Lewis
and Clark's narrative, full in their first treaty in 1837, they are called
by various forms of 'Gattacka', the name by which they are known to the
Pawnee; and they are possibly the Kaskaia, 'Bad Hearts, of Long in 1820.
The Kiowa call them by the contemptuous title Semät,
'Thieves', a recent substitute for the older generic terra Tagúi,
applied also to other Athapascan tribes. They are commonly known as Kiowa
Apache, under the mistaken impression, arising front the fact of their
Athapascan affinity, that they are a detached hand of the Apache of
Arizona. On the contrary, they have never had any political connection
with the Apache proper, and were probably unaware of their existence until
about a century ago. A few Mescalero Apache from New Mexico are now living
with them, and individuals of the two tribes frequently exchange visits,
but this friendly intimacy is of only 60 or 80 years' standing. The Kiowa
Apache did not emigrate from the southwest into the plains country, but
carne with the Kiowa from the north west plains region, where they lay the
scene of their oldest traditions. It, is probable that the Kiowa Apache,
like the cognate Sarsi, have come down along the east base of the Rocky
Mountains from the great Athapascan body of the Mackenzie river basin
instead of along the chain of the sierras, and that, finding themselves
too weak to stand alone, they took refuge with the Kiowa, as the Sarsi
have done with the Blackfeet. As they are practically a part of the Kiowa
it everything but language, they need no extended separate notice.
Their authentic history begins nearly 70 years earlier
than that of the Kiowa, they being first mentioned under the name Gattacka
by La Salle in 1681 or 1682, writing fron a post in what is now Illinois.
He says that the Pana (Pawnee) live more than 200 leagues to the west on
one of the tributaries of the Mississippi, and are "neighbors and allies
of the Gattacka and Manrhoat, who are south of their village and who sell
to them horses which they probably steal from the Spaniards in New
Mexico." It is therefore plain that the Kiowa Apache (and formerly also
the Kiowa) ranged even at this early period in the sauce general region
where they were known more than a century later, namely between the Platte
anti the frontier of New Mexico and that they already had horses taken
front the Spanish settlements. It appears also that they were then in
friendship with the Pawnee, unless, as seems more probable, by Pana is
meant the Arikara, all offshoot of the Pawnee proper and old trading
friends of the Kiowa and the Kiowa Apache. From the fact that they traded
horses to other tribes, and that La Salle proposed to supply himself from
them or their neighbors, it is not impossible that they sometimes visited
the French post on Peoria lake.
In 1719 La Harpe speaks of them, under the name of
Quataquois, as living in connection with the Tawakoni and other affiliated
tribes in a village on the Cimarron near its junction with the Arkansas,
in the present Creek Nation, Okla. In 1805 Lewis and Clark described the
Kiowa Apache as living between the heads of the two forks of Cheyenne
river in the Black Hills region of northeast Wyoming, and numbering 300 in
25 tipis. The Kiowa then lived on the North Platte, and both tribes had
the same alliances and general customs. They were rich in horses, which
they sold to the Arikara and Mandan.
In 1837, in connection with the Kiowa and Tawakoni, the
Kiowa Apache (under the name Kataka) made their first treaty with the
Government. Their subsequent history is that of the Kiowa. In 1853 they
are mentioned as a warlike band ranging the waters of Canadian river in
the same great plains occupied by the Comanche, with whom they often
joined in raiding expeditions.
By the treaty of Little Arkansas in 1865 they were
detached at their own request from the Kiowa and attached to the Cheyenne
and Arapaho on account of the unfriendly attitude of the Kiowa toward the
whites; but the arrangement had no practical force, and in the treaty of
Medicine Lodge, in 1867, they were formally reunited with the Kiowa,
although a part of them continued to live with the Cheyenne and Arapaho
until after the readjustment at the close of the outbreak of 1874-75. In
keeping with the general conduct of the tribe they remained peaceable and
friendly throughout these troubles.
In 1891 their population was 325; together with the
Kiowa they suffered terribly in 1892 from an epidemic of measles and
fever, losing more than one-fourth of their number. In 1905 they numbered
only 155.
