Contact Between the Southeastern Area and Mexico

The following data is extracted from Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of 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 was 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 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 line 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 Bay. The nearest points between these two cultures were thus as far apart as Washington and Chicago or Columbus and Kansas City. If any southeastern cultural features carne 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 strain 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 anal include neither the Caddo nor the Haustec.

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 unto the remote past.
Almost the only traditions of a migration of peoples from Mexico, to the Mississippi valley are given by the Frenchmen Du Pratz and Milfort. (3) The first merely states that his native informant indicated the southwest as the region from which his people had come, Du Pratz inferring that he meant Mexico. A still earlier authority, the missionary Do la Vents, however, quotes the Natchez to the effect that "they came from a very far country, and, according to our reckoning, to the northwest." (4) Du Pratz's work, was widely read and I can not avoid the conclusion that it influenced Milfort in later times in affirming that the Creek Indians traced their origin to the same quarter. In this particular Milfort is not followed by any other person who has recorded the migration legends of the Creek Indians.

Du Pratz's rendering of the Natchez migration legend is too confused to allow us to place much reliance upon it, yet there is one reference which may contain a true historical reminiscence. This is where his native informant speaks of stone houses in the country from which his people had come, some of them "large enough to lodge an entire village." (5) This strikingly suggests one of the great houses of the Pueblo Indians and may be based upon a knowledge of the existence of the Pueblo people, though there is no reason to think that this knowledge had been handed down from a remote antiquity. This, however, is not, the only suggestion of contact between the lower Mississippi and the Pueblos. The Caddoan peoples, who occupied the intervening territory at this point were upon a decidedly higher level than the tribes south of them, as evidenced for instance by the elaborate ceremonialism of the Pawnee. Certain Southeastern ceremonies like that of the new fire and certain customs like that of the matrilocal residence of individuals within the tribe, recall those of the Pueblos, artifacts from the Pueblo country arc reported sporadically from parts of the Southeast, (6) and in particular it is known that the Tewa Indians obtained the best wood for their bows from the Osage Orange, most of which was probably obtained in trade from the Kadohadacho on Red River. (7) These facts and the prevailing migration legends of the area under consideration, nearly all pointing to the west, lead me to believe that contact with the Pueblo country was far more likely than with the civilized peoples of Mexico, and in consideration of the ethnologic condition of southern Texas, I am inclined to regard most. Mexican influences as having been introduced via the Pueblos rather than by the more direct route.

Source: Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of Mexico

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