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The Southern Families Of Indians
The early explorers of
the Gulf territories have left to posterity
a large amount of information concerning the
natives whom they met as friends or fought
as enemies. They have described their
picturesque attire, their curious, sometimes
awkward, habits and customs, their dwellings
and plantations, their government in times
of peace and war, as exhaustively as they
could do, or thought fit to do. They
distinguished tribes from confederacies, and
called the latter kingdoms and empires,
governed by princes, kings and emperors. But
the characteristics of race and language,
which are the most important for ethnology,
because they are the most ancient in their
origin, are not often alluded to by them,
and when the modern sciences of anthropology
and ethnology had been established on solid
principles many of these southern races had
already disappeared or intermingled, and
scientific inquiry came too late for their
investigation.
A full elucidation of
the history and antiquities of the subject
of our inquiries, the Creeks, is possible
only after having obtained an exhaustive
knowledge of the tribes and nations living
around them. The more populous among them
have preserved their language and remember
many of their ancestors customs
and habits, so that active exploration in
the field can still be helpful to us in many
respects in tracing and rediscovering their
ancient condition. Three centuries ago the
tribes of the Maskoki family must have
predominated in power over all their
neighbors, as they do even now in numbers,
and had formed confederacies uniting distant
tribes. Whether they ever crossed the
Mississippi river or not, the Indians of
this family are as thoroughly southern as
their neighbors, and seem to have inhabited
southern lands for times immemorial. The
scientists who now claim that they descend
from the mound builders, do so only on the
belief that they must have dwelt for
uncounted centuries in the fertile tracts
where Hernando de Soto found them, and where
they have remained up to a recent epoch. In
the territory once occupied by their tribes
no topographic name appears to point to an
earlier and alien population; and as to
their exterior, the peculiar olive admixture
to their cinnamon complexion is a
characteristic which they have in common
with all other southern tribes.
My introduction to the
Kasi’hta national legend proposes to assign
to the Creeks: (i) their proper position in
the Maskoki family and among their other
neighbors; and (2) to describe some of their
ethnologic characteristics. The material has
been divided in several chapters, which I
have in their logical sequence arranged as
follows:
Linguistic families
traceable within the Gulf States.
The Maskoki group; its
historic subdivisions.
The Creek Indians;
tribal topography, historic and ethno
graphic notices, sketch of their language.
Linguistic Groups Of
The Gulf States
In the history of the
Creeks, and in their legends of migration,
many references occur to the tribes around
them, with whom they came in contact. These
contacts were chiefly of a hostile
character, for the normal state of barbaric
tribes is to live in almost permanent mutual
conflicts. What follows is an attempt to
enumerate and sketch them, the sketch to be
of a prevalently topographic nature. We are
not thoroughly acquainted with the racial or
anthropological peculiarities of the nations
surrounding the Maskoki proper on all sides,
but in their languages we possess an
excellent help for classifying them.
Language is not an absolute indicator of
race, but it is more so in America than
elsewhere, for the large number of
linguistic families in the western
hemisphere proves that the populations
speaking their dialects have suffered less
than in the eastern by encroachment, foreign
admixture, forcible alteration or entire
destruction.
Beginning at the southeast, we first meet the historic
Timucua family, the tribes of which are
extinct at the present time; and after
describing the Indians of the Floridian
Peninsula, southern extremity, we pass over
to the Yuchi, on Savannah river, to the
Naktche,
Taensa and the other stocks once
settled along and beyond the mighty Uk’hina,
or "water road" of the Mississippi river.
The enumeration of the
southern linguistic stocks winds up with the
Atákapa; but it comprises only the families
the existence of which is proved by
vocabularies. Tonica and the recently
discovered Taensa furnish the proof that the
Gulf States may have harbored, or still
harbor, allophylic tribes speaking languages
unknown to us. The areas of the southern
languages being usually small, they could
easily escape discovery, insomuch as the
attention of the explorers and colonists was
directed more toward ethnography than toward
aboriginal linguistics.
Notes About Book:
Source: Gatschet, Albert S., A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians.
Pub.
D.G. Brinton, Philadelphia, 1884.
Notes about Online Publication: This manuscript has been ocr'd and heavily
edited. Many of the Native American words have been reproduced as clearly as
online publication will allow us, but not all are exactly the way they were in
the original work. The structure of this manuscript has been changed to allow
better online presentation.
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