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!
The following data were recorded in New York City in the winter of
1921-22 with the cooperation of White Moon, a recent
Caddo graduate of Carlisle
who in New York shrewdly called himself Chief Silver Moon. In Oklahoma he was
generally known as Mike Martin. In December, 1927, at Anadarko, Oklahoma, while
collecting folk tales from the Kiowa, I had opportunities to check up on some of
White Moon's data and to add to them, as I worked with two middle-aged men,
James Ingkanish, a Caddo; and Grayson Pardon or Ninnid, whose mother was a
Delaware, his father, Caddo, and his father's father's father, a Frenchman.
Dr. Gladys Reichard worked with White Moon in language and checked some
of the terms he gave me. My thanks to her, also to Dr. Erminie Voegelin for
comparative notes, for reading manuscript and encouraging publication. I have
worked so little with broken cultures that it was hard to estimate the value of
this contribution. It seemed quite negligible, but Dr. Voegelin opines that in
view of the dearth of information about the Caddo it will be welcome.
Comparatively little may be known about the Caddo, yet had I known as much about
the ethnology of Southeastern tribes as is to be known today I might have
secured fuller Caddo records.
In my ignorance
lay one advantage, I was not consciously or unconsciously seeking survivals.
Now, in editing the notes, I am all the more impressed by the persistence of
Southeastern traits in these fragmentary groups of the once large Caddo
confederacies. How little the Caddo seem to have been affected by recent Indian
neighbors in Texas and Oklahoma is another general impression. Probably
broken cultures thrown together helter-skelter borrow little from one another.
