Contact Between the Southeastern Area and Mexico

II. Contact Between the Southeastern Area and Mexico

     The culture of the Southeast reached its highest levels in the lower part of the valley of the Mississippi and its main tributaries, and in the region east of it, back from the coast, -as far as the Atlantic Ocean, including also northern Florida. Northward it formerly extended over most of the Ohio valley, while the Iroquoian peoples of New York and Ontario formed its marginal territory. On the Atlantic coast it shaded out much more rapidly although cultural elements belonging to it are traceable as far as New England. Toward the northwest it did not extend much beyond the Mississippi, and directly toward the west it ended rather abruptly with the Caddo tribes of northwestern Louisiana and northeastern Texas. The habitat of these Caddo fell short of Trinity River, and toward the south they did not reach the coast. In the neighborhood of the Gulf the cultural area can not be traced beyond Vermillion Bay, Louisiana.
     The possibility of contact between 'the culture of the Southeast-and that of Mexico has been artificially enhanced by confounding and identifying the area of ancient Mexican civilization with the territory of the modern republic. But, while the latter stretches northeast as far as the Rio Grande, the Aztec or Mexican state proper was more than four hundred miles southwest of that river in a direct line. There were other of the so-called civilized tribes less distant, but the nearest of these, the Huastec, were still more than two hundred miles south of the Rio Grande. The intervening territory teas occupied by numerous small tribes without any pretensions to an advanced culture and so difficult to subdue that, although the Huastec were conquered by Cortez early in the sixteenth century, these wild peoples did not succumb until well along in the eighteenth. Populations of an identical character and status extended beyond them as far as the Caddo -- the Coahuiltecan tribes, the Tonkawa, and the Karankawa -described tersely on the maps as "wandering and cannibal" people, and pictured by Cabeza de Vaca, the companions of La Salle, and later explorers of all nationalities as exceedingly crude and barbarous. To find the like in North America we should have to go to the cold northern interior, or the arid districts of the Great Interior Basin and Lower California. And this cultural "sink," to borrow a geological term, extended considerably over six hundred miles in a direct lime from the Huastec boundaries to the nearest Caddo towns. Measuring along the coast, which might be thought by some a more natural line of movement, it would be fifty or a hundred miles farther to Vermillion Ray. The nearest. points between these two cultures were thus as far apart as Washington and Chicago or Columbus and Kansas City. 1f any southeastern cultural features came by this route, they must, therefore, have been transported for this immense distance before establishing themselves again, so that even in the case of single cultural elements, with which we are not now concerned, the problem must be recognized as a serious one. To prove that an entire culture was transplanted from the one region to the other demands a still greater drain on the imagination, and for it we must have historical, linguistic, or archaeological proof.
     The first is, of course, entirely wanting, and the same may be said of the second. In one of his early papers Brinton attempted to show a linguistic connection between the Huastec and Natchez Indians but he subsequently retracted the theory
(1) . Very recently the writer has brought data together tending to establish the relationship between several of the languages of central and southern Texas
(2), but these were all spoken by people belonging to the low type of culture above mentioned and include neither the Caddo nor the Huastec.
     An archaeological survey of the Texas ethnological "sink" is of the utmost importance on account of its bearing, on. the question we have raised and it is. indeed', being undertaken by the University of Texas and the Texas State Historical Society, but to the present time the net result seems merely to establish the condition described as one that extended into the remote past.

This site includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These items are presented as part of the historical record and should not be interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes implied .

Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of Mexico, 1924

Southern Contacts Free Genealogy | Indian Genealogy | Southern Contacts