The
question I want to answer here is: who were the original indigenous inhabitants
of Central Texas? More specifically,
since I have chosen 1600 as the arbitrary starting point of my chronological
map of North America: who, in the year 1600, inhabited the portion of Texas
located south of the Red River, east of the Jumanos, west of the Caddo
confederacies, and north of the Sanans and Coahuiltecans? I.e. how do I fill in the empty portions of
this map?
 |
| Texas, ca. 1600 A.D. (slightly modified from previous post) |
Most
historical maps of Texas or North America will, as usual, be wrong here. They'll put the Comanches in the western part
of Central Texas, the Tonkawas in the south, and usually the Wichitas in the
region around Waco—all wrong. Usually
the Jumanos will be ignored entirely, and you'll likely never see a map that so
much as acknowledges the existence of the Sanans. Sometimes they will even show the Kiowa
residing in Texas in the 15th or 16th centuries, which is an error of a thousand
miles or so.
Part
of answering this question is determining the easternmost extent of the
Jumanos' territory. The farthest east I
have seen them depicted on a map is the following from Lockhart (1997):
The
different shape of this compared with Jumano territory as shown on my map is
due to Lockhart’s assumption that the so-called Jumanos of the Salinas region
in New Mexico were a different people, distinct from the Jumanos of the Texas
buffalo plains. My maps have mostly been following Nancy
Hickerson's research, according to whom the Salinas and Plains Jumanos were the
same. Both theories have merit, but this
isn’t the place to argue that point.
Instead, note how Lockhart has the Jumanos stretching all the way across
Central Texas—apparently bordering the Caddo: this is much farther east than
I've seen anyone else claim for Jumano occupancy, and to me seems
implausible. Lockhart presents this map
more-or-less without comment, but I would guess his reasoning is based on the
fact that the La Salle expedition sighted Jumanos (“Choumanes”) trading among
the Hasinai Caddos in 1686 (Hickerson 1994:165). However, since according to Hickerson the
Jumanos were long-distance traders, it doesn’t necessarily follow from this
that their territory extended that far.
So, I
can't rely on maps made by other people, meaning I'll have to work from
scratch. This poses a problem, since
Central Texas is a very poorly-documented region for the first couple centuries
of European contact. In fact, the
regions surrounding it—on the north, south, east, and west—are all better known,
from early explorations and entradas during the 17th or even 16th
centuries. By contrast, our first quality
witnesses to Central Texas don't really arrive until well into the 18th century. This means that whatever conclusions I draw
about 1600 A.D. will have to be highly speculative, based on very meagre
evidence, and probably wrong. The
sparseness of the evidence also means there's a sparseness of modern scholars
studying the problem, so I'll have to engage in more original research and
speculation than I'd prefer. Nevertheless,
although I am sure to make some errors in my analysis, whatever incorrect
information that ends up on my map at the very least won't exceed industry standards...
The
earliest account containing any information of value for Central Texas comes
from the late 17th century, in a report written by the Franciscan friar Alonso
de Posada. This report, written in
either 1686 or 1687, contains a description of North America (as he understood
it) beyond the borders of New Mexico—including a dramatic and exaggerated
account of the Apaches who, according to him, controlled an empire of over half
a million square miles:
"[I]t should be noted that the Apacha nation possesses
and controls all the plains of sibola. The Indians of this nation are so haughty and
arrogant and so proud as warriors that they are the common enemy of all the
tribes below the northern regions. They
have struck fear to all other tribes and have overrun, ruined and cast most of
them out of their own lands. This tribe
occupies, defends and considers itself owner of four hundred leagues of land
east and west and two hundred leagues north and south. In some places along their borders they claim
even more territory." (Posada [1686] 1958)
Posada's
report is more useful to me, however, for its description of two Spanish
expeditions made into the interior of Texas during the middle years of the 17th
century: one in 1650, conducted by Hernán Martín and Diego del Castillo
[henceforth the "Castillo expedition"], and one four years later in
1654, conducted by Don Diego de Guadalajara.
These expeditions both had as their goal to investigate a settlement of
Jumanos living along a river they called the "Rio de las Nueces"
(which was probably the Concho, a tributary of the Colorado—however, see
below); both expeditions also briefly probed the territory east beyond the
Jumanos, downstream along the Concho and Colorado Rivers. These two reconnoitering missions beyond of
the Jumanos are the closest we get to any European exploring Central Texas
during the 1600's.
Remember that this "Concho River"
is not to be confused with the Rio Conchos in Mexico, this "Colorado
River" is not to be confused with the Colorado River in Utah-Colorado, and
that this "Nueces River" is not to be confused with the Nueces River
in southern Texas. Here, this map:
 |
| The Concho and Colorado Rivers |
Alonso de Posada described the
1650 Castillo expedition thusly:
"...they arrived at this spot on the Nueces River in the Jumana Nation. They stayed there six months because the
Indians were friendly and because they found more than enough sustenance...
These Captains traveled downstream on an easterly course with a declination to
the south through the Indian nations called the Cuytoas, the Escanjaques and
Ahijados. After walking about fifty
leagues, they arrived at the border of a nation called Texas. They did not
penetrate this territory as they knew it to be very extensive and well
populated. This Texas nation goes forth
from north to south the distance [of] probably about a hundred leagues. In width, from east to west, it is probably
about the same distance. From the
eastern border of this nation to the Coast and the Gulf of Mexico it must be
about fifty leagues. These remaining
fifty leagues are inhabited by migratory Indians that do not plant nor harvest,
for according to the information from near the coast there are many sand dunes
and much sandy soil." (Posada [1686] 1958)
Four
years later, in 1654, the governor of New Mexico sent Sargento Mayor Don Diego de Guadalajara to the Jumanos to
corroborate the Castillo report:
"They found many Jumana Indians who warned the Sargento Mayor that the Cuitoas,
Escanjaques and Ahijados were on the warpath.
To verify this information, the Sargento
Mayor sent Captain Andrés López, some Christian Indians and many Jumana
Indians, who willingly accompanied them to scout the above-mentioned warring
nations. Sargento Mayor, Don Diego de Guadalajara, remained behind with the
rest of his men. After walking some
thirty leagues to the east, Captain Andrés López and his company of twelve
soldiers, Christian Indians and Jumana Indians, ran across a settlement of
Indians of the Cuytoas nation with whom they fought a very fierce battle and
learned that Indian bands from the Escanjaques and Ahijados nations were
helping the Cuytoas Indians whom they were fighting. After a battle lasting almost all one day the
victory was won by our men with a loss of very few of our Indians, while many
were lost by our adversaries. The
victors took two hundred prisoners and booty of bales of hides of antelope, elk
and buffalo. They then returned to the
camp of the Jumanas on the Nueces
River where Don Diego de Guadalajara, royal servant, had his post."
(Posada [1686] 1958)
These
descriptions paint a consistent picture of the situation in the 1650's along
the Colorado River downstream from the Concho Jumanos (or "east" of
them: the Spaniards were evidently a little disoriented). The first stretch of the river, just below
the Jumanos, was controlled by a detente of three tribes comprising the
Escansaque, Aijado, and Cuitoa [to use the more common spellings of their
names]. The second stretch was
controlled by the Texas (or Tejas) Indians, the Spanish name for the Hasinai
Caddo. The third and final stretch,
between the Hasinai and the Gulf of Mexico, were migratory hunter-gatherers
whom we can suppose to be the Karankawa and Sanan tribes.
The
Jumano and the Escansaque-Aijado-Cuitoa seem to have tolerated each other in
1650, if Posada can be believed, but by 1654 the Cuitoas were leading an
offensive against the Jumanos, bringing their allies the Escansaque and Aijado
along with them. Nancy Hickerson (1994)
surmises that this may have been an effort to cut off the Jumano from the
Hasinai and seize the Colorado River trade.
In other Spanish documents, "Escansaque" and
"Aijado" both refer to tribes located further to the north—their presence
on the Colorado River thus suggests a southward migration or expansion of these
tribes (and of the Cuitoa), and that by 1654 they possessed territory
stretching from their northern reaches, all the way across Central Texas, at
least as far as the Colorado.
And
helpfully, Alonso de Posada provides detailed information on the locations of
these tribes... or at least of those portions of territory adjacent the
Colorado River. Starting from the mouth
of the Concho River, following the course of the Colorado River to its mouth at
Matagorda Bay, there were 50 leagues of Escansaque-Aijado-Cuitoa territory,
then 100 leagues of Hasinai territory, then 50 more leagues of migratory
hunter-gatherer territory before the river reached Matagorda Bay—for a grand total
of 200 leagues, or 520 miles. Matagorda
Bay is 302 miles (116 leagues) from the mouth of the Concho, measured linearly
as the crow flies, but remember that a river's true length depends upon its sinuosity
(its true length divided by the linear distance between its source and its
mouth). The average sinuosity factor for
a river to have is 1.94—assuming a sinuosity similar to this for the Colorado,
you can calculate its true length as approximately 585 miles, or 225
leagues. This is acceptably close to the
200 leagues given by Alonso de Posada, especially considering various
factors—such as that the Spaniards only traversed the first 50 leagues of the
Colorado River (meaning the remaining distance was relayed to them via
interpreters and converted from some Native mode of reckoning distance into
Spanish leagues), and that "200 leagues" is clearly a neat,
rounded-off number anyway.
Using
this information, the eastern terminus of Jumano territory seems not to have
extended further east than the mouth of the Concho River. The tribes beyond, along the lower Colorado
River, had the borders of their territory like so:
It
seems, then, that I have almost everything I need here in order to answer the
question "Who Lived In Central Texas?". Directly east of the Jumanos was a strip of
land occupied by the Escansaques and the Aijados, extending contiguously from
their homelands in the north nearly all the way to the Colorado River; the
Cuitoas, a tribe not otherwise known to be from the north, can be tentatively
placed at the southern end of this strip, immediately bordering the river—this
would explain why they formed the
vanguard of the anti-Jumano offensive in 1654.
Further east, the Hasinai territory stretched from their historic core
in East Texas all the way to the middle portion of the Colorado River, thus
extending their range much further west-southwestward than most maps of Caddo
territory would assert.
 |
| Texas, ca. 1600 A.D... or is it? |
That
just leaves a few spots left on my map to fill, and mostly answers the question
of who originally occupied Central Texas... assuming the information is
correct, that is. Is the information
correct?
Well...
No,
it's not. At least, it probably
isn't. The thing is: the Alonso de
Posada report may be our only source of information for Central Texas in this
period, but his description of the Castillo and Guadalajara expeditions is
unfortunately rather problematic—for a couple of reasons. The first is location: we don't even know for
certain where this "Rio de las Nueces" that they visited even is.
It certainly isn't the modern Nueces River in southern Texas. The majority opinion among scholars is that
the Rio de las Nueces was identical with the modern Concho River, but this
conclusion isn't necessarily obvious.
There are some scholars who identify the "Rio de las Nueces" as
one of the rivers further north: the Red, the Canadian, or even the Arkansas
River in Kansas. These alternative
hypotheses have some merit: for instance, they would explain the presence of
"Tejas" Indians along the middle stretch of the river, since the Red
and Arkansas Rivers flow through the heart of Caddo territory... however, as far as I know, "migratory Indians that do not plant nor harvest" doesn't really describe the Chitimacha of Louisiana as well as it does the Karankawa of Texas.
The
argument for the "Nueces" being the Concho River mostly hinges on the
details of a later expedition. In 1683,
the Jumano leader Juan Sabeata (or "Xaviata") journeyed to El Paso
and petitioned the Spaniards for aid against the Apaches, who by that decade
were on the verge of completely overwhelming his people. Sabeata also requested the Spanish send
friars, saying that some of the Jumanos and their Indian allies were Christians. Jironza Petriz de Cruzate, the governor of
New Mexico, agreed to this proposal—partly, perhaps, because it was 3 years
since the Pueblo Revolt and he wanted to make up for lost colonies. But a more pressing reason was that Sabeata
mentioned other white men sighted further to the east. To Sabeata, these other whites were simply
more Spaniards, but Cruzate correctly inferred that they were their nemeses,
the French—specifically, the 1682 scouting mission of René-Robert Cavelier,
Sieur de La Salle, though Cruzate didn't know that. Either way, he felt the Spanish urgently
needed to establish an in-land beachhead against their imperial rivals, and
Sabeata's invitation was a golden opportunity.
An expedition was provisioned and dispatched, led by Juan Domínguez de
Mendoza in 1683-4.
Mendoza
never accomplished the Spanish colony at Jumanería that Cruzate hoped for, but
he did leave a meticulously detailed account of his itinerary, which leaves
virtually zero doubt that his destination was the Concho River (Weddle
2010). As it happens, Mendoza had also
been a member of the Guadalajara expedition in 1654. The assumption that Mendoza would have
proceeded to the same Jumano stronghold he visited three decades earlier—supported
by the fact that Juan Sabeata himself stated that his home had been visited by
Diego del Castillo in 1650—thus lends strong support for concluding that the
Concho River is the same "Rio de las Nueces" from the Castillo and
Guadalajara expeditions (Wade 2003: 77).
 |
| Route of the Castillo and Guadalupe (blue), and Mendoza (red), expeditions (adapted from Skeels 1972) |
The
balance of evidence seems to support identifying the "Rio de las
Nueces" as the modern Concho River.
However, that hypothesis still "leaves certain important details
unexplained," according to T. N. Campbell (2010), so the matter remains
unresolved. Unless I see some compelling
counter-argument in the future, I will assume that the "Nueces" was
the Concho. However, there still remains
another major problem with the Alonso de Posada account: the names of the first
three tribes on the Colorado River.
These names—Escansaque, Aijado, and Cuitoa—each have their own problems,
and I will discuss each in turn.
I'll
start with the Escansaque:
In 1601, Juan de Oñate ("The Last Conquistador")
closed the era of the epic Spanish entradas into North America with his
expedition to the Great Plains of Kansas and Oklahoma. This expedition took him to the Wichitas of
Quivira—the same Quivira to which Coronado had journeyed in 1541, and the written
accounts produced from these two expeditions make up the only first-hand
information we have about the Plains north of Texas during the first two
centuries of European contact. After Oñate,
aside from a small handful of individuals who allegedly travelled to Quivira
but left us no written accounts, more than a hundred years passed before any other European saw the Wichita country
and wrote about it—this person was the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la
Harpe, who travelled up the Arkansas River in 1719 seeking trade alliances
between the Plains Indian tribes and the nascent French colony of
Louisiana. This century-long lacuna in
the historical record means that
information about the 17th century Wichita has to be interpolated from
the information was gathered by Oñate and La Harpe.
First,
a few words concerning the Wichita. This
tribe belongs to the Caddoan language family—meaning that they're related to
the Caddos of the Red River, though the Wichitas themselves happen to be much
more closely akin to the Pawnee and Arikara of the northern Plains. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Wichita
were not yet a single, united people in the political sense—rather, they
existed as a number of separate, autonomous bands, each of whom spoke a
separate dialect of the Wichita language.
These bands included: the eponymous
Wichita-proper (also known as the Guichita or the Kirikirʼis),
the Tawakoni, the Tawehash (or Taovaya), and the Iscani. In addition to these, there were the Adeco
and the Honecho bands, of whom very little is known, and probably others as
well that got lost to history; (another band, the Waco, emerged later on, but
probably didn't have autonomous band status in the 17th century).¹ One should also mention the Kitsai (or
Kichai) tribe: these people were not Wichitan, but they spoke a closely related
Caddoan language and seem to have spent a lot of time hanging around with the
Wichitas—the Kitsai can probably be thought of as "para-Wichitan".
 |
| Route of Oñate, 1601 - based on Schroeder (1962) & Vehik (1986), with corrections from Blakeslee (2017) |
Back
to Oñate. After traversing the Texas
panhandle (which lay within the dominion of the Apache), Oñate's expedition
encountered two groups of people who were said to be actively hostile to each
other. The first were the Escansaques, a
nomadic people who were then inhabiting a large, mobile tepee camp (Craddock
2013: 5).
The second was a group of Wichitas located several day's travel beyond
the Escansaques—the exact distance isn't quite clear—and resided within a vast
settled community of houses which the Spaniards dubbed the "Great
Settlement" ("Gran Población").
This settlement was estimated as housing some 20,000 individuals, and in
recent years has been identified with archaeological remains located at the
confluence of the Walnut River, near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Scholars associate the Wichitas with the
Great Settlement with extremely high confidence, although the textual evidence
is a little indirect: nowhere do the Oñate documents name them as
"Wichita" or as "Quivira".
The Spaniards' Pueblo Indian guides called them "Jumanes", but
that's probably more confusing than anything, because we know that they weren't
Jumanos.² According to Todd Smith (2000: 13), the Great Settlement was inhabited by the
Guichita or Wichita proper.
As
for the Escansaques, they were so named by the Spaniards for the way they
greeted visitors:
"And when they had gone about 120 leagues from the said
post at San Gabriel from which they had set out, they saw no more Indians of
the apache nation or of any other for more than 60 leagues, and when they were
at almost 200 leagues from the said post at San Gabriel they began to see
Indians, whom they called Escanxaques, because they came forward to offer a
peaceable greeting, raising both hands toward the sun and then laying them on
their breasts, saying "Escanxaque," which is a sign of peace..."
(Interrogatory of Don Francisco de Valverde [1602], in Craddock 2013)
The
Escansaques are famous in American frontier history for being one of those enigmatic,
elusive peoples whose tribal identity is a mystery (like the Massawomeck of
Virginia, or the various Gens de... from
the La Vérendrye account). If you read
about this era, you will probably see their name mentioned at least once, and
there's a good chance it'll be followed by a bunch of dithering speculation on
who exactly they were: the Apaches, the Wichitas, the Tonkawas, etc. I think the earliest theory had it that they
were the Kansa:
"If the 'Escansaques' or 'Excanjaques' are identical
with the Kansa, and there is every reason for believing them to be the same,
then the first mention of the tribe was made in 1599 [sic], by Juan de Oñate, who encountered them on an expedition to
find the 'Quivira' of Coronado..." (F. W. Hodge [1897], qtd. in Morehouse
1906)
Hodge may have been wrong, by the way,
about this being the first mention of the Kansa—many scholars now identify the
Kansa with the "Guas" or "Guaes" mentioned in the accounts
of the Coronado expedition (Wedel 1982). [Correction March 2019: The "Guaes" were the "Awahi", one of the names for the Pawnee.]
Most
of these hypotheses are arguments from phonetic similarity. This kind of argument is usually par for the
course for early frontier history, where you have to squint your eyes a bit to
recognize that "Quitxix", "Quidehais", and
"Chicaes" all refer to the Kitsai, for instance... but with the
Escansaques this can get a little silly.
So, for example, one theory says they were Kansa because
"Escansaque" = "es-Kansa-que". Another theory counters that no, they were
members of the Iscani band of Wichitas, because "Escansaque" = "Iscani-saque". Yet another theory observes that the Apaches
were called "Canceys" by La Harpe—from kinne:s, the Wichita name for the Apache (Wedel 1982, Armik
Mirzayan pers. comm.)—and so they must have been Apaches, because
"Escansaque" = "es-Cancey-que".
When I started doing research on this era, I
kept seeing the Escansaques being mentioned, and was concerned how all of the
explanations of their identity given by various authors were completely
contradictory. The ~Mystery Of The
Escansaques~ made for entertaining frontier history, but wasn't very
helpful from the perspective of my map project—I started to worry that I might
have to just throw my lot in with one of the competing hypotheses and then run
with it. But, then, I found out that it the mystery had been solved thirty-five years ago!
In
1982, T. N. Campbell (whom I shamelessly lauded in my previous post) along with
W. W. Newcomb, Jr. published an article called Southern Plains Ethnohistory: A Re-Examination of the Escanjaques,
Ahijados, and Cuitoas, in which they critically re-investigate the alleged
provenances of each of those three mysterious tribes mentioned in the Alonso de
Posada report. This article was extremely useful, to say the least, and
is the nucleus around which this entire blog post is based.
Newcomb
and Campbell point out that it makes no sense trying to find some name buried
within "Escansaque" or one of its variants, since this was neither
what the people called themselves, nor was it a name applied to them by a
neighboring tribe—rather, it was the phrase they uttered when greeting the
Spaniards, accompanied by the aforementioned hand gesture. In other words, it was how they said
"hello". So all that
"es-Cancey-que" business was as though someone had called the French
the "Boju", or the Germans the "Goontok", and then someone
else came along and started comparing those words with the names of various
European ethnicities to try to identify them.
This seemingly obvious point was missed, according to Newcomb &
Campbell, because earlier scholars had only consulted the official report of
the Oñate expedition—the "Relación Cierta y Verdadera" or "True
and Accurate Account" as it's called, which uses the name
"Escansaque" without explanation.
Supplementary materials concerning the Oñate expedition were neglected—most
significantly, the Valverde Interrogatory of 1602. This document gave the description of the
Escansaques' customary salutation, and thus the origin of their name... but,
perhaps even more importantly, it also contained something else: a map.
The
Escansaques and the "Gran Población" were bitter enemies, and—once it
became clear to both tribes that Oñate and his men weren't there to assist
either of them in their conflict—relations grew sour between the Indians and
the Spanish, as the latter were guilty in the eyes of both tribes of cavorting
with the enemy. One thing led to another...
there was a fight... and Oñate's men ended up taking several Indian captives,
including one man from the Escansaque camp whom the Spaniards nicknamed
"Miguel". This Miguel was
taken back with them to Mexico City, and was one of several individuals
interrogated by Don Francisco de Valverde concerning the Oñate expedition. During this questioning, Miguel drew a map:
The
deposition had Miguel draw this map because the Spaniards wanted to know where
the Indians were hiding all of their gold (obviously...). You can imagine how well that worked out for
them, but for us the map itself is worth much more than gold: a map, drawn by
the very hand of a Great Plains Indian himself, of a region hundreds of miles
from any European colony, over a hundred years before any other Europeans would
begin to explore it—pretty cool!
Miguel's map includes the names and locations of several Native
settlements, as well as major rivers and Indian trails, complete with
annotations indicating the distances between them; Miguel himself was obviously
illiterate, and the labels were added at his direction by a Spanish notary.
The
"Miguel Map", and the Valverde Interrogatory describing its creation,
had been available in print since 1953, so it's something of a mystery why it
took until 1982 for scholars to become generally aware of it. Subsequent studies such as Susan Vehik, 1986
and Donald Blakeslee, 2017 have reviewed and corrected Newcomb & Campbell
on a number of points, but (in my view) the major conclusions from their 1982
paper all remain standing. The first
conclusion concerns the identity of the Escansaques.
Miguel
drew the map of his homeland with 12 circles, representing 11 settlements,
pronouncing the name of each one, which the notary then wrote upon the
page. These names, written in colonial
hispanic orthography, were: Eguasapac, Aguacane, Cochpane, Cochizta, Ahacapan,
Yuhuanica, Ahaccache, Yahuicache, Tancoa, Vyana,³ and Etzanoa. Out of these, "Etzanoa" refers to
the vast "Great Settlement" along the Walnut River, and
"Aguacane" refers to the Escansaque encampment. The Escansaques' name, their real name,
was Aguacane.
 |
| The Miguel Map, redrawn and oriented such that up = north (from Vehik 1986) |
If
that were all there was, it wouldn't be of much help. It's nice to know what the Escansaques called
themselves, but aside from that all we've done is replace one name for a
mysterious Indian tribe with another, right?
Wrong!—we've replaced one name for a mysterious Indian tribe with eleven names, which means we have a corpus, and that means we can use linguistics. No one knows the Wichita language better than
linguist Dr. David Rood—not since its last native, fluent speaker sadly died
two years ago—and this is what he had to say about the placenames from the
Miguel Map:
"Except for the m
in Auyam [note: this name is now
read as "Vyana,"
which conveniently doesn't have an m], the sounds apparently
represented in these names are all what I would expect to find in an older
variety of Wichita. Moreover, the
Wichita grammatical prefixes can be identified, and they are in the right
sequences. For a variety of complex
reasons, I cannot translate the names, but the prefixes are all used today in
personal names and to describe geographical phenomena. I think it is therefore quite safe to
conclude that these names are from a language closely related to modern
Wichita—either its direct ancestor, or the direct ancestor of one of the
dialects that has not survived. (David Rood [1981], qtd. in Newcomb &
Campbell 1982)
I
should mention that when I contacted Dr. Rood about this, he seemed somewhat
less sanguine about the matter than in 1981. However, it's probably safe to say that the Escansaque were Wichitas, or at least Wichitans of some kind. Furthermore, the "Aguacane" have been mentioned in other historical documents, in contexts suggesting a Wichita affiliation: they appear as the "Aucanis" in a French map from 1720, as the "Aquajuani" in a Spanish document from 1754, and possibly as the "Huanchane" in a French document from 1719 (Vehik 1992).⁴ For a little orthographic context, here are some of the ways that other Wichita bands have been spelled in the historical documents:
Wichita — Ousitas,
Ouitsitas, Ouachitas, Guachitas, Ouedsitas, Ovedsitas, Ovagitas
Kirikirʔi:s — Quirasquiris, Quicasquiris, Quiraquirit, (maybe) Quivira
Tawakoni (Tawa:kháriw) —
Teucarea, Touacaru, Tuacana, Tahuacanas, Taguacanes, Chaguacanes, Tabancamas,
Tavakavas, Taovacanas, Tawakenoes, Towiachs, Towacarro
Tawehash — Taovayas, Toayas, Touajas, Tabas, Tauaïasés, Taoüiaches,
Taouaiazés, Tavoyache, Tahuayas, Taobayaces, Tabuayases, Taouayaches,
Tahuaiasses, Tamayacas, Towaahack, Towiache, Toweaches, Towiash, Toyash,
Towoashe, (maybe) Teguayo, (maybe) Ahouaho
(mostly Newcomb 2001)
Or the names of these Pawnee groups:
Awa:hi [the Wichitas' name for the Pawnee tribe] — Harahey, Arahe,
Arae, Arache, Aguaje, Aguages, Aovages, Aavajes, Guahes, Quaji, Ahuachés,
Ouacee, Ouass, Ovaes, Ollaés, Aiiaes, Arche, Haxa, Axa
axtárahi — Astaray, Rhtarahé, Ḣtadhahé
tuhka:tákux
— Toucatacaux, Tuchkataku, Tukátuk
nahu:ká:ta — Naucat, Laocata, Rahokata, Nhukát
(Parks 1979 & 2001)
I
could go on and provide many other examples, but hopefully you see my
point: that these names can vary a lot in how they're spelled in the historical
documents. In fact, there are two other
names from the Miguel Map that look familiar as well, but I'll get to them
later.
So,
the Escansaques were Aguacane, who were probably Wichitan. Does that confirm the theory that the Escansaque were the Iscani? According to Newcomb & Campbell: Yes...
sort of... Their theory is that the
Aguacane were originally a distinct Wichita band, but eventually merged into the Iscani
over the 1700's. Susan Vehik (1992 &
2006), more directly, simply identifies the Aguacane as the Iscani, though for non-linguistic
reasons. It's also possible that the
name "Aguacane" is linguistically the same name (though mayhaps not
referring to the same people) as "Tawakoni", which—if you glance back up at that list—you'll see has also been spelled "Taguacane". This alternation between word-initial /t/ and
/Ø/ makes perfect sense, according to David Rood:
"An initial /t/ in Wichita and Pawnee usually signals
and indicative verb... Using a verb to name something is quite common in these
languages, [and] a form without the initial /t/ could be another version of the
same verb, a generalized or timeless tense.
So yes, it is quite possible that aguacane and taguacane are forms from
the same root, different not because the Spanish scribes mis-heard one of them,
but because they were given two different grammatical forms on different
occasions." (David Rood, p.c.)
This same alternation might
also explain "Ahouaho" ~ "Tawehash".
That
the Escansaques/Aguacanes and the Guichitas of Etzanoa were at war with each
other also isn't quite a wrench in this theory.
Remember that the "Wichita Nation" was not yet a single,
unified entity during this period—the various bands of Guichitas, Iscanis,
Tawakonis, etc. would have spoken dialects of a single language, but of course
American Indians are no less capable than anyone else is of going to war with
people who happen to speak the same language as them.
Considering
that the Escansaques were more-or-less proven to be Wichitas way back in 1982,
it's a little puzzling that one still sees them written about as though they
were still the elusive, unfathomable Tribe Of Mystery that they once were. For example, here's Ronald Breth in 1986:
"The next possible mention [of the Kansa] is in Onates
records of his explorations of 1601, if the 'Escanjaques' are the Kansa out on
their summer bison hunt."
And
Kendra Burns, in 1996:
"The Escanjaques'
exact identity has not been determined, but it is known that they were enemies
of the Wichita Indians. Newcomb
(1961:106) believes that the Escanjaques
were Apache. Hammond and Rey (1953
2:752) have suggested that they were either Kansa or Osage, who were known to
attack the Wichita during this time.
Forbes (1960:101,145) offers that the Escanjaques were Tonkawas." (p. 45)
And
Nancy Hickerson, in 1996:
"I concur with Hyde (1959: 43) in favoring a link
between the Gatacka [Kiowa-Apaches] and the Escanjaque, whose presence in the
Plains is first noted at the time of Oñate's expedition to Quivira." (p.
82)
And
Jeffrey Carlisle, in 2001:
"The Escanjaques were apparently either Kansa or Osage,
or more likely a Tonkawan group. In any
case, they were not Apaches." (p. 71)
Maybe
these people know something that I don't, though, I dunno...
So
much for the Escansaque. What about the
second name from the Posada report: the Aijados? The Spaniards gave this name (variously
spelled Ahijados, Ayjados, Aixaos, Aijaoz, etc.) to another Tribe Of Mystery,
who supposedly lived a considerable distance off... somewhere... usually near
Quivira or thereabouts. The historian
George E. Hyde, evidently relying on Posada's report and assuming the "Rio
de las Nueces" to be the Red River, placed them in between the Jumanos and
Quivira, somewhere in north-central Texas or southern Oklahoma (Hyde 1959:
13,43). More recently, Susan Vehik
located the Aijados in northern Oklahoma, taking the peculiar stance that
Posada's "Rio de las Nueces" refers to the Arkansas River. She also (tentatively) equates the Aijados
with the Tawehash band of Wichitas, as well as with "Uayam" [Vyana]
from the Miguel Map (Vehik 2006).
 |
| Central & Southern Plains, ca. 1650-1700 A.D., according to Vehik (2006) |
However,
Newcomb & Campbell note that there are no really credible accounts of any
European directly encountering a member of the Aijado nation. The name "Aijados" almost always
referred to some vague, far distant kingdom beyond the horizon, elusive and
powerful. Take, for instance, this
account, from the 1630 Memorial of
Fray Alonso Benavides:
"Even so, we know by evidence and eyesight that there
exists in this kingdom [Quivira], and in that of the Aixaos which borders upon
it, very great quantity of gold. And
each day we see their Indians, who trade with ours, who testify to it. [...]
Even so, well testifies the Captain and great pilot Vicente Gonçales, of the
nation of Lusitania, who from Havana went to coast the coast of Florida. And he entered into that great river where
the English are settled. And entering to
the interior he saw the Indians of Quivira and Aixaos, with earrings and
necklaces of gold, very bulky and so soft that with the fingers they made of
them whatever they wished. The Indians
assuring [him] that there existed in their Kingdom of Quivira and Aixaos much
of that [metal]. So, in order that Your
Majesty enjoy all this, it is fitting in any event that this Kingdom of
Quivira, and that of the Aixaos, be settled, and that those Indians be
Christians." (Benavides [1630] 1916: 64)
That
is not a story that inspires confidence.
Newcomb & Campbell also remind their readers that
"ahijados" is a word in the Spanish language: the past participle of
the verb ahijar, "to
adopt".⁵ That this is not just a
chance phonetic resemblance is proven by the fact that whenever the name
"Ahijado" occurs in the earliest Spanish documents, it plainly does
not refer to an ethnic group, but is used to describe Miguel and the other
young Indians who were captured by Oñate's men in 1601. Miguel was not a native of Escansaque:
according to the Valverde Interrogatory, he had been born among another tribe,
the Tancoas, and was captured by an Aguacane war party when he was about 12
years old (Craddock 2013: 189-90). Per
the rules of conduct governing Native American tribal warfare, the child Miguel
was taken in and raised by his captors as an adoptee, an ahijado.
Thus,
according to Newcomb & Campbell, there never was an Aijado tribe. The name originated as a common Spanish noun
referring to a few adopted war captives, and over time its etymology was
forgotten such that people began to speak of an exotic "Kingdom of the
Aixaos" that was ridiculously wealthy in gold (obviously...), and
whose location was only ever vaguely alluded to. Newcomb & Campbell therefore
"suggest that the essentially fictitious name Ahijados be dropped from the
list of valid American Indian ethnic units".
Returning
now to the Alonso de Posada report... (forget
about the Cuitoas for now—I'll return to them later): the men of the Castillo and Guadalajara
expeditions in the 1650's could not possibly have encountered Aijados along the
Colorado River, or any other river for that matter, because there never existed
any such people as the "Aijados".
But what about the Escansaques?
They existed. Do the findings of
Newcomb & Campbell (and Vehik and Blakeslee) mean then that the Spaniards
ran into a group of Aguacanes east of the Jumanos on the Colorado River? It's not impossible, but in my opinion the
evidence doesn't really point to that conclusion. Remember the etymology of
"Escansaque": the Spaniards would not have been told, by the Jumanos
or by any other Native guide or interpreter, that any band of Indians they
encountered were called "Escansaques". They could only have heard this word from the
Aguacanes themselves, if they happened to approach the Spanish and used their
customary greeting described in the Oñate documents. However, if this gesture was a "sign of
peace" as the Oñate documents say, it's not likely they would have used it
to salute a group of Spaniards accompanied by the Jumanos, their enemies.
It
seems likely that someone on the Castillo expedition or the Guadalajara
expedition was told about an enemy tribe living downstream from the Jumanos,
and for some reason assumed that they were the same as the Escansaques and
Aijados, whom they had heard about before.
It's also possible that Alonso de Posada altered their names when he
wrote his 1686 report, changing them to names he assumed were synonymous and
with which his readers would have been more familiar. This is the conclusion Newcomb &
Campbell reach:
"It appears more likely that Posada, or those from whom
he obtained information, assumed that certain groups of western Texas were the
same as some of the Indians encountered by the Oñate expedition farther to the
north."
As an
aside: it might seem reckless or irresponsible for Posada to "tamper with
the evidence" like this, but modern historians still do this kind of
thing: assuming the identity of an
enigmatic historical tribe, and replacing its name with some other name that's
more easily recognizable. This is
especially common with scholars writing for a popular audience. For example, take this map from Todd Smith's The Wichita Indians (2000):
Smith refers to "Iscanis" along the upper
Canadian River in 1541 and along the Salt Fork in 1601, more or less without
comment. I'm not questioning the quality
of Smith's scholarship, since he explains in the notes at the back of the book
that this refers to the "Teyas" of Coronado and the "Escansaques"
of Oñate. But most people aren't going
to check in the notes at the back of the book, so my beef here is with Smith's
transparency: the main body of the text doesn't tell you any of this, nor that
the identities of the Teyas and Escansaques are both somewhat
controversial. I assume that Smith
considered this to be extraneous information that would have only distracted
his readers and hurt the flow of his book.
The
most gracious interpretation of the Posada evidence is that somebody, either
Posada himself or someone from the Castillo or Guadalajara expeditions,
recognized these tribes to be Wichitan in some way—on what grounds, we cannot
know—and so called them by names previously used for tribes closely associated
with the Wichita. Thus, it may (may!)
indicate that the tribes to the east of the Jumanos were Wichitan. It's a possibility at least worth
considering.
What
about the third name, though: the Cuitoa?
In Posada's account of the Guadalajara expedition, the Cuitoa are
implied to be the only tribe actually controlling territory along the Colorado
River, and the only tribe whom Guadalajara's men directly interacted with—the
Aijados and Escansaques being known only through hearsay. This makes their existence in Texas appear
much more plausible than that of the Escansaques or Aijados. The only problem is that the these
"Cuitoas" are not mentioned in any other historical document, so we
cannot easily connect them with any other known, historical tribe.⁶ The name is a hapax legomenon—appearing in
the report of Alonso de Posada and nowhere else.
Thus, we
have only the method of phonetic similarity to fall back on for determining who
the Cuitoa were. A number of hypotheses
have been put forth. Albert H. Schroeder
(1962) proposed that they were the same as the "Quisita" people
reported by Bénard de La Harpe in 1719, however I can't find any other article
or document that refers to these "Quisitas". It seems to be a misreading or miscopying (by
Schroeder or one of his sources) of "Ousitas" (La Harpe [1718-20]
1958-9), which I think clearly refers to the Wichitas. So that theory is thrown out. Another, proposed by T. N. Campbell (2010),
is that the Cuitoa are the same as the "Quitaca", one of 19 Indian
groups said to have accompanied Juan Domínguez de Mendoza on his 1683-4
expedition to the Concho River. Most of
the other 18 tribes named by Mendoza are also hapax legomena, but
"Quitaca" happens to re-appear in a 1771 document, in a context
implying it refers to a Wichita group.
If true, this would mean that all three of Posada's names—Escansaque, Aijado,
and Cuitoa—can be (tenuously) connected to the Wichita.
La
Harpe probably never mentioned "Quisitas", but there are two tribes
he does mention which may be connected to the Cuitoa. (By the way: warning: original
research ahead.) The first
are the "Quichuan", who were said to be "situated at two leagues
from the Red River, on the left, in going up to the environs of the place where
M. Du Rivage had found these nomadic
nations." The "nomadic
nations" that Du Rivage found were a war party of men from 6 tribes, most
or all of which were Kitsai or Wichita bands; and depending on how far up Du
Rivage was at the time, this places the Quichuan somewhere in north-central
Texas, south of the Red River... which is not a great distance from where
Posada's Cuitoas may have been located.
I find the similarity in names between "Cuitoa" and
"Quichuan", combined with their apparent proximity to each other, to
be at least somewhat suggestive of a connection.
The
second tribe, "Quataquois", is named by La Harpe as one of 9 nations
cohabitating a large village on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma. Of the other 8 names, all except one (the
"Caumuche" who may be the Comanche⁷) refer to bands of the
Wichita. Ralph Smith's commentary of the
La Harpe account interprets the "Quichuan" to be the Kiowa and the
"Quataquois" to be the Kiowa-Apache—the latter often called by the
name "Gattacka" (from Pawnee katahkaaʼ,
meaning a Plains Apache tribe or "any tribe west of the Pawnees"
(Parks & Pratt 2008)). The
Quichuan=Kiowa interpretation is almost certainly wrong, as the Kiowa were
located much, much further north in this period—in western South Dakota or
thereabouts. The Quataquois=Gattacka
theory holds a bit more water, especially since La Harpe probably wouldn't
refer to the same group twice under two different names. Nevertheless, I think the name's similarity
with "Cuitoa" and "Quitaca" is worth at least thinking
about.
To
repeat: the Cuitoa were listed by Alonso de Posada alongside two other tribes
vaguely associated with the Wichita. The
Quitaca are mentioned in 1771 alongside several Wichita
bands. The Quichuan were said by M.
Du Rivage to be allied with a group comprising mostly Wichita bands. The Quataquois were said by La Harpe to be
cohabitating a village mostly consisting of Wichita bands. Do you see a pattern here?
So,
am I saying that we should interpret the Posada report to mean that a band of
Wichitas inhabited Central Texas, east of the Jumanos? Well, perhaps not. You see, there's still one more problem with
Alonso de Posada's account of the 1650 Castillo expedition and the 1654
Guadalajara expedition. According to
Newcomb & Campbell, the entire thing
may be a fraud. As in, Posada may have
made them up... lied... forged the entire thing:
"It is very puzzling to learn that no one has ever
found copies of the primary records of these two expeditions. It does not appear reasonable to believe that
the commanders of these expeditions failed to prepare formal reports of their
activities, or that copies of the reports, if actually prepared, were not
forwarded to Mexico City and on to Spain." (Newcomb & Campbell 1982)
They
also suggest, echoing Jack Forbes, that Posada may not have been the forger,
but rather Mendoza, and that Posada based his report partially on his
fraudulent testimony. In either case, it
is implied that that the name and people of "Cuitoa" may have been
invented entirely out of thin air.
I
don't know personally how suggestive it is of forgery that we have no primary
documentary records of the Castillo and Guadalajara expeditions. I mean, I'm kind of surprised that we still
have the documents for any of these
early historical periods, so I'm not the person to ask. I also don't know how strong the conclusions
are for the forgery hypothesis—are Newcomb & Campbell saying that the
Castillo and Guadalajara expeditions literally never happened? That Castillo, and Guadalajara weren't even
real people? Or did the expeditions
really happen, but we just can't trust the accounts of them regarding the
details—particularly their battle with the Cuitoas? I don't know.
So,
to summarize, the Alonso de Posada report is problematic for the following
reasons:
1: It is unknown whether his "Rio de
las Nueces" refers to the Concho-Colorado, the Canadian, the Red, or the
Arkansas. Each possibility significantly
alters how one interprets the data.
2: If, as most believe, the
"Nueces" is the Concho-Colorado, then his statement that the Tejas
(Hasinai) controlled 100 leagues along its middle section is highly anomalous.
3: The Escansaques of 1601 were Aguacane
Wichita, but none of the Jumanos or other Native interpreters would have given
"Escansaque" as the name of the tribe attacking them downriver.
4: The Aijado nation never existed.
5: The Cuitoas may or may not have been the
same as the Quitaca, the Quichuan, and/or the Quataquoi—any one of which may
have been a Wichita-affiliated group, or possibly Kiowa-Apache, or possibly
something else entirely.
6: The entire thing might be bogus.
That's
a lot of uncertainty to wade through. I
agree with the Newcomb & Campbell quote from earlier, that some Spaniard
"assumed that certain groups of western Texas were the same as some of the
Indians encountered by the Oñate expedition" and so called them by the
names Escansaque and Aijado. That still
means, however, that the Spaniards encountered somebody east of the
Jumanos in 1654, i.e. the episode wasn't totally fabricated. In the Posada report, the only such people
directly encountered—the Indians that the Spanish had their day-long battle
with—are those called the Cuitoas. Since
this name isn't obviously fraudulent like the others, it may be reasonable to
conclude that a tribe called the Cuitoa
lived east of the Jumano, in Central Texas, in 1654.
 |
| Texas, ca. 1600 A.D. |
That's about all I can say
about the western half of Central Texas.
What about the other half, east of the Cuitoa, west of the Caddo and
north of the Sanans? Who lived in
eastern Central Texas at the beginning of the 17th century?
I
won't be able to answer that question entirely in this post. However, the usual response to that question
is the Tonkawa, whom I've mentioned a couple times already. If you're familiar at all with Native Texas
history, you probably know the Tonkawa as living somewhere in this part of
East-Central Texas—as shown, for instance, in the popular William C. Sturtevant
map of "Early Indian Tribes, Culture Area, and Linguistic Stocks":
Or in
the Ives Goddard map of "Native Languages and Language Families of North
America":
Goddard
and Sturtevant were both cramming 350+ years of history into a single image, so
their maps are anachronistic by necessity and by design. That's why they look so different from my
map, with Comanches and Apaches and Wichitas all over the place. The exact placement of the Tonkawas also
differs considerably between the two, as you can see. A more reliable source here would presumably
be something like Jason C. Abbott, A
History of the Tonkawa Indians to 1867 (1996):
"TONKAWA
RANGE: Until 1855": That would include the year 1600, so this might be
what I'm looking for. If I overlay that
shape onto my map-in-progress, it looks like this:
That
doesn't perfectly fill the space I need, but there's no reason I should expect
it to. It also overwhelms the core of the East Sanan zone and almost
all of the Bidai, but tribal territories could sometimes overlap like that. So,
can I add the Tonkawa to Central Texas?
[ Note March 2019: some of the conclusions in the
following section I now believe to be false, due to information I have learned
since writing it. I will eventually make
a correction-and-emendation post, but to be honest that probably won't be for a
while. ]
I'm not entirely sure, but... probably not. The
reason, once again, lies in the Valverde Interrogatory and the Miguel Map of
1602. Recall that the captive Miguel, the ahijado, had been
captured by the Aguacanes and taken from his home country when he was
approximately 12 years old. He told the Spaniards that this original
home of his was called "Tancoa". According to Newcomb
& Campbell, this "Tancoa" is the same as "Tonkawa". On
the Miguel Map, Tancoa appears to be north of the Arkansas River, possibly
between the Little Arkansas River and Cow Creek (Vehik 1986, Blakeslee 2017):
 |
| Arkansas River archaeological sites—probable Tancoa location circled |
So if
we accept this, that means in 1601 A.D. the ancestors of the Tonkawa were not
in Central Texas, nor even in Texas at all, but far to the north—in central or
south-central Kansas. Over the following
centuries, they (like their Wichita neighbors) drifted southward, eventually
landing in their historical south-central Texas range. The next time we can locate them in the
historical record is in 1719, when they were residing somewhere near the Red
River dividing Texas and Oklahoma. Over
the rest of the 1700's, they gradually established themselves in south-central
Texas, where they were presumed to have been all along. Or, as T. N. Campbell put it:
"It was assumed that, as the Tonkawa ranged over the
Bastrop area after the first Anglo-American settlers arrived, they must have
been native to the area and therefore were probably related to other Indian
groups of the same area." (Campbell 1986)
...sigh...
Yep. Tell me about it.
As is
the case with the Escansaques, this discovery about the Tonkawa is curious for
how unsuccessfully it seems to have become common knowledge. I know two friends from Texas, both of them
with a more-than-passing interest in Native American history, and neither of
them had ever heard that the Tonkawa were originally from the north. One scholar as late as 1996 (fourteen years
after Newcomb & Campbell's paper) wrote an entire M.A. thesis on the
history of the Tonkawa, and even he said this:
"The history of the Tonkawas prior to the eighteenth
century is speculative. They undoubtedly
lived in what were presently the geographical boundaries of Texas during the
fifteenth century." (Abbott 1996: 1)
The
author's source for that statement is an outdated publication by W. W. Newcomb
from 1961; his co-authored 1982 paper is nowhere mentioned, not even to dispute
its findings.
One
scholar who has disputed them is Donald Blakeslee:
"When the plains portion of the Miguel map is oriented
correctly, as per Susan Vehik, it becomes clear that Tancoa was upstream from
Etzanoa along the Arkansas River and probably represents the large Quiviran
communities in Rice County. It would be
surprising to find Tonkawas that far north." (in Craddock 2013: 2016
addendum)
"Newcomb and Campbell ... who did not realize that
north was not at the top of the map as Miguel drew it, assumed that the Tancoa
on the map was a reference to the Tonkawa tribe. This might seem reasonable to an English
speaker, but in Spanish, the accent would fall on the second syllable of
Tancoa, making it sound like tan-COH-ah.
For Tonkawa, the accent is on the first syllable ... In Spanish, the
word would have been spelled something like Tóncoa ... Furthermore, there are
no protohistoric archaeological remains in Kansas north of Etzanoa that might
identify a Tonkawa presence." (Blakeslee 2017: 16n7)
Blakeslee
is an eminent scholar and, unlike me, is actually
an expert in this stuff, so his objection is worth serious
consideration. Nevertheless, I'd like to
respond to his criticisms if I can, and try to defend the Tancoa=Tonkawa
thesis. I can't really dispute his point
about there being no identifiable Tonkawa archaeological sites in Kansas, but
since Prof. Blakeslee himself is an archaeologist even he might agree that this
is the least significant objection: "pots aren't people" and so
on. Then there's the second point,
regarding whether Newcomb & Campbell were relying too much on what
"might seem reasonable to an English speaker." I can't speak for W. W. Newcomb, but T. N.
Campbell spent a significant portion of his career buried neck-deep in colonial
Spanish documents pertaining to Christian missions in Texas and Coahuila. In the words of Thomas R. Hester, "all
one has to do is to flip through the pages of the New Handbook of Texas to realize how many hundreds of Native
American groups have been identified, indeed rescued, from the thousands of
scribbed pages of Spanish documents studied by Campbell" (in Wade 2003:
xiii). Considering Campbell's obvious
familiarity with the historical documents, it is a little strange that Donald
Blakeslee would accuse him of not being familiar enough with Spanish to know how
its stress works.
I would also comment that different languages have different kinds of accent systems-- stress vs. pitch, etc.-- and this can cause confusion if you're not familiar with it. With Russian words, I "hear" the accent being in the "wrong" place all the time. Something like that could easily explain why there's no acute written in "Tancoa". And besides, go back and take another look at the list of spelling variants for the names of Wichita bands... do we really need to be this persnickety about one little accent marker?
Thirdly, there's Blakeslee's
geographical objection: "It would be surprising to find Tonkawas that far
north." Simply put: I
disagree. Daniel Prikryl (2001) analyzed
the earliest mentions of the Tonkawa in the historical documents, and—even
ignoring the Oñate materials—he was able to present evidence of a southward
migration of the tribe over the course of the 1700's: from the Red River valley
of northern Texas in 1719 to their historical location in south-Central Texas
by the early 1800's. And while a
southbound trajectory during the 18th century doesn't prove a southbound
trajectory in the 17th century, it doesn't preclude it either.
 |
| Tonkawa southern migration (based on Prikryl 2001) |
It is also worth pointing out
that during this same period—the 17th and 18th centuries—the Wichitas also
migrated from their home in Kansas southward across Oklahoma and into
Texas. This Wichita migration is usually
explained as them fleeing from more powerful and aggressive Native tribes
further north: the Apaches, the Comanches, and especially the Osage.⁸ If the Tonkawas' migration was also a flight
from northern raiders, then that threat would certainly have existed as early
as the 1600's—especially from the Apaches.
This makes a 17th-century southern migration of the Tonkawa, and
therefore a northern location in 1601, highly plausible.
I can be more specific on this
point. Consider the following: according
to the testimony of Miguel, in 1601 the Tancoa inhabited the Rice County
district of Kansas. Six decades earlier,
during the time of the Coronado expedition, this same district was inhabited by
two bands of Wichitas, one of them the "Teucarea" or Tawakoni (Wedel
1982). By 1719, these same Tawakonis
were in the Three Forks area of eastern Oklahoma, and by the 1770's had moved
to south-Central Texas, between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers. Do you know who else was living in
south-Central Texas between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers in the 1770's,
practically next-door neighbors of the Tawakoni? The Tonkawa.
If the Tawakoni Wichita were able to make this exodus from Quivira to
Texas in 230 years, what was there to stop the Tancoa/Tonkawa from making it in
170 years?
 |
| Tawakoni and Tonkawa migrations, 1541-1770 (Prikryl 2001, Vehik 1992) |
There
is also another matter: the Tonkawas are mentioned not once, but twice, on the
Miguel Map. Kind of. Let me explain: the Tonkawa in Texas didn't
originate as one single people, but were a congeries of several smaller tribes that
had originally been distinct. The exact nature
of this confederation isn't precisely known, nor is the list of all its tribal constituents. However, that list is usually said to include
the Ervipiame (a Coahuiltecan tribe from Coahuila that fled north into Texas to
escape the invading Spaniards and Apaches), and the Emet, Cava, Cantona,
Mayeye, Sana, Toho, and Tohaha (who may have been among the "Eastern
Sanans" indigenous to south-Central Texas—see my previous post.) Then there was the eponymous constituent: the
Tonkawa proper, or "Titskanwatits" (Tickanwá·tic) as they called themselves.
In
addition, there was one other constituent of the Tonkawa nation: the Yojuane,
who were neither natives of south-Central Texas nor refugees from
Coahuila. Like the Wichita and the
Tonkawa, the Yojuane had spent the 18th century gradually drifting southward
from an original location near the Red River in the early 1700's (Campbell 2010). And in the 1600's, they must have been
further north still, because when the Indian Miguel drew his map in 1602 he
positioned half a dozen settlements along a river (which Blakeslee identifies
as the Salt Fork in northern Oklahoma), one of which was called
"Yuhuanica". Newcomb &
Campbell interpret the Yuhuanica as being the Yojuane, and as far as I know
Donald Blakeslee doesn't contest this.
 |
| The Miguel Map, re-oriented, with locations identified on a modern map of Kansas-Oklahoma (from Blakeslee 2017) |
An
important point is that, according to Newcomb & Campbell's interpretation
of the Oñate documents, these Yojuane were originally yet another band of
Wichitas:
"One of the Aguacane sub-groups named by Miguel is
Yuhuanica, which may signify the people
later known as Yojuane, who have generally been identified as a Tonkawan
group. Miguel's data suggest that
perhaps the Yojuanes of later times were a Wichita group that became associated
with the Tonkawas and were eventually absorbed by them."
It
appears, then, that not only do we have one tribe (the Tawakoni) moving from
Rice County, Kansas to the vicinity of south-Central Texas; but we have another
tribe (the Yojuane) moving from northern Oklahoma to the vicinity of
south-Central Texas and becoming a member of the Tonkawa-et-al. tribal
conglomeration. And I haven't even
talked about the Kitsai, who also
migrated south from Oklahoma into south-Central Texas, but I think I've made my
point. The idea that the Tonkawa were as
far north as Kansas at the dawn of the 17th century is not at all implausible.
Before
I finish on the Tonkawas, there's one more thing I want to mention. Allegedly, the name "Tonkawa" comes
from a Waco-dialect Wichita word tonkawéya,
meaning "they will stay together" (Hoijer 1933).⁹ In the Caddo language, the word for the
Tonkawas is tankaway (Wallace Chafe,
pers. comm.). Assuming the name is
originally from a Wichita construction, then Caddo tankaway would appear to be a borrowing and not a native Caddo
construction. However, if the Tonkawas
have always lived in Central Texas as the Caddos' next-door neighbors, then why
would the Caddos have used a word borrowed from the Wichitas to refer to
them? Etymologies of proper names can be
a tricky business, so this doesn't exactly prove
anything, but in my opinion the Caddo designation "tankaway" is evidence that the Tonkawas are not native to
Texas.¹⁰
So that's
my rebuttal to Donald Blakeslee. Is he
wrong? Ehh.... I really don't know. There's actually good reason for thinking
he's right. If he is, then that means
the "Tancoa" were probably not Tonkawas, but were a Wichita group of
some sort. It's also not impossible, by
the way, for the same name to refer simultaneously to one Indian tribe as well
as to a sub-division of another: see the "Arikara" band of Kiowas, or the
"Blackfoot" band of Teton Lakotas, for example. Furthermore, the Miguel Map is not as informative
as one might think: of the 11 settlements named on the map, only 3 (Aguacane,
Yuhuanica, and Tancoa) can be identified with known, historical groups. The remaining 8 (Eguasapac, Cochpane,
Cochizta, Ahacapan, Ahaccache, Yahuicache, Vyana, and Etzanoa) are, as far as I
know, unidentifiable as tribal or band designations. The Miguel Map also has a 12th name I haven't
mentioned, "Encuche", but that one is very... iffy. Probably best just to ignore it (see
Blakeslee 2017). And notably, no
variants of "Tawakoni" or "Tawehash/Taovaya" appear to be
on the Map, even though the Coronado documents show that Wichita groups bearing
both those names existed as early as 1541 (Wedel 1982).
The
list of unknown names from the Miguel Map obviously contrasts with the list of
Wichita bands known a century later (which were, to recap: Wichita proper,
Tawakoni, Tawehash, Iscani, Adeco, and Honecho... plus, as we've seen: the
Aguacane, the Yojuane, and maaaybe the Tancoa). This might suggest that a consolidation or re-organization
of Wichita bands occurred in the 17th century.
Such a re-organization did occur in the 18th century, when the Aguacane
merged with the Iscani, the Waco split from the Tawakoni, the Yojuane left to
go join the Tonkawas, and the Adeco, Honecho, and Tancoa disappeared or
something. However, that's far from the
only conclusion one can draw from the Miguel Map. The map may list sub-divisions of Wichita
bands rather than bands themselves, or maybe the names aren't supposed to be
ethnic or clan designators at all. It's
a mystery.
So
were the Tonkawas in Texas in 1600?
I
have my own hypothesis (and, just to be clear, I'm not echoing the opinion of
any scholar here—this is just me, a layman, recklessly
speculating). I think
that the Tonkawa and the Titskanwatits were originally different people. I think that in the 17th century, there was a
band of Wichitas in Kansas—call them the "Tancoa". These Tancoas, along with their relatives the
Yojuane, eventually moved south into Texas and joined together with the Emet,
Cava, Yohaha, etc. to form a new tribal confederation—call this tribal
confederation the "Tonkawa".
Neighboring tribes like the Caddo and Wichita continued using the old
name for the Tancoa (tankaway, tonkawéya, etc.) to refer to this new
confederation (this name was eventually borrowed into English as Tonkawa),
even though the Tancoa were but one of several constituents making up the
Tonkawa. Meanwhile, the original
speakers of Titskanwatits were another constituent of the confederation—who
these original Titskanwatits were, I don't know, but they may have been one of
the other known Tonkawa bands (Emet, Cava, etc.) under a different name. Over time, both the language and the
self-designation of the Titskanwatits grew into general use within the Tonkawa
tribe, such that it was forgotten completely that the Tonkawas/Tancoas
themselves had ever spoken anything else.
In other words, Blakeslee is right: Miguel's "Tancoas" were a
Wichita band; but Newcomb & Campbell are also right: these "Tancoas"
were the very same people as the "Tonkawas" known later in history.
I
don't think it's implausible that a tribe can be named for one people but speak
the language of another. Think about it:
France is named for a Germanic people, but the French speak a Romance language;
Scotland is named for a Celtic people, but the Scots speak a Germanic language;
Mexico is named for a Uto-Aztecan people, but the Mexicans speak a Romance
language; Russia is named for a Scandinavian people, but the Russians speak a
Slavic language.
Also,
if you look at the first three times that the Tonkawa undisputably appear in
the historical record—as the "Tanquaay" in Fray Francisco Casañas'
account of 1691, as the "Tancahoe" in Louis de St. Denis's
declaration of 1717, and as the "Tancaoye" in Bénard de La Harpe's
account of 1719—the Tonkawa are never mentioned in isolation, but are always listed alongside several other tribes.
Most of the other names listed are of groups who either are, or have been
hypothesized to be, Caddoans of one stripe or another: all three accounts name
the Yojuane and Kitsai, for instance.
Importantly, however, none of these other tribes listed are ever the
Emet, Cava, or any other "proto-Tonkawa" constituent.¹¹
If these three documents were the only evidence we had of these
"Tanquaays", I think historians would probably suppose that they had
been Caddoans.
That's
my layman theory, anyway. I could be
wrong.
I
have to make a decision, however, on where to put the Tonkawas on my map. Were the Tonkawas in Texas in the year
1600? Notwithstanding Donald Blakeslee's
objections and my own loony theory, I think the best course of action is to
rely on the authority of W. W. Newcomb, Jr. and T. N. Campbell here, and decide
that no, the Tonkawas were not in Texas in the year 1600. More practically, the answer probably depends
on what you mean by the word "Tonkawa". If you mean the Tonkawa Tonkawas—the Tancoas,
Tanquaays, etc.—then the answer is probably no.
But if you mean the tribes which made up the core of the historic
Tonkawa tribe—the Emets and the Cavas and so on—then the answer is mostly yes,
aside from the tribes that came from Coahuila.
But that's too much nuance to fit on a single map label.
I
still have more to say about Central Texas, but I'll finish this post here—I
mostly just wanted to say everything I felt needed to be said about the
Escansaque and the Tonkawa, because an awful lot has been written about both of
them and much of it is unsatisfactory.
The eastern half of Central Texas will be the topic of a future post—that
will require going into the French sources, which I am still familiarizing
myself with.
Notes
[1] According to Susan Vehik (2006), the Waco
originated as a sub-band within the Tawakoni.
[2] "...y los yndios de paz de la comarca de
San Grabiel [sic] llaman a los d[i]chos yndios de la poblaçon los jumanes,
porque a todos los rrayados llaman asi" ~ "...and the pacified
Indians of the region of San Gabriel call the said Indians of the town Humanas,
because that is what they call all those who are striped," from the
Valverde Interrogatory [1602] (Craddock 2013: 95,181,335). This sentence is the reason why so many
people think the Jumanos (and the Teyas) were Wichitas.
[3] Blakeslee (2017: 16n8) comments: "Newcomb
and Campbell... read this name as Uayam.
Craddock (2013) has it as Avyam, but in the transcript of Miguel's
interview, it is clearly Vyana. Avyam
and Uayam are mistranscriptions." I
don't quite understand why a stenographer's transcript of an interview should
be more accurate than a name written directly on the map immediately after
Miguel pronounced it... but I'm gonna put my trust in Blakeslee here and accept
that it should be "Vyana".
[4] The Aguacane = Huanchane connection is made
by Newcomb & Campbell, however it occurs to me that "Huanchane"
might also refer to the Honecho... unless the Honecho were also the same as the Aguacane.
[5] Wiktionary defines "ahijado" as
"godson" rather than "adoptee", so the meaning may have
changed over the past 400 years.
[6] "Cuitoa" is very similar to
"Cuitoat", the name of a Papago (O'odham) settlement in southern
Arizona recorded in 1775 (Hodge 1910), but that, I think, is obviously
unrelated.
[7] Newcomb (1993) gives this name as
"Caunuche", and says it "was the natives' term for
Frenchmen" (p 34). I can't find any
other reference supporting this, though it does resemble Caddo ká:nuš
'Frenchman', said by Chafe (2004) to derive from Tonkawa ka:nos 'Mexican'
(ultimately from Spanish mexicanos).
Regardless, however, it is next to impossible that a population of
Frenchmen would have been living among the Wichitas on the Arkansas River
already by the time La Harpe arrived, or that he would have failed to mention a
similar population of Spaniards in his account.
[8] The Wichitas eventually formulated a truce
with the Comanches in 1746 (Smith 2000: 26).
[9] Thomas Wier's Tonkawa sketch and edition of
Hoijer's Tonkawa texts translates this as "they stay together",
omitting the future auxiliary. I have no
idea why. Also, when I contacted David
Rood about this, he says that the word "tonkawéya" is unanalyzable
and phonologically-impermissible in the modern Kirikirʼis dialect of Wichita,
but also said that he didn't know enough about the Waco dialect to say anything
for certain.
[10] For what it's worth, when I contacted Wallace
Chafe about this, he said that he thinks the Tonkawa have always lived directly
west of the Caddo.
[11]
St. Denis does mention the Sana, Toho, Emet, and Ervipiame, but in a
separate section.
Primary
Sources
[anonymous],
"St. Denis's Declaration Concerning Texas in 1717" [1717], translated
in Charmion Clair Shelby (1923).
Alsonso
de Benavides [1630], translated by Emma B. Ayer (as "Mrs. Edward E.
Ayer"), in "The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides 1630,"
annot. Frederick Webb Hodge & Charles Fletscher Lummis (1916).
Francisco
Casañas de Jesus Maria, Letter and Report
of Fray Francisco Casañas de Jesus Maria to the Viceroy of Mexico [1691],
in John R. Swanton, Source Material on the
History and Ethnology of the Caddo Indians (1942); also translated in
Mattie Austin Hatcher, "Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians,
1691-1722" (1927).
Jean-Baptiste
Bénard de La Harpe [1718-20], translated in Ralph A. Smith, "Account of
the Journey of Bénard de la Harpe: Discovery Made by Him of Several Nations
Situated in the West" (1958-9).
Alonso
de Posada [1686], translated in S. Lyman Tyler & H. Darrel Taylor, "The
Report of Fray Alonso de Posada in Relation to Quivira and Teguayo" (1958).
Francisco Valverde y Mercado, "Official
Hearings Conducted by the Crown's Fiscal Agent Don Francisco de Valverde" [1602],
translated by John R. R. Polt, in Craddock (2013).
Secondary
Sources
Jason C. Abbott, A History of the Tonkawa Indians to 1867. M.A. thesis, Tarleton State University
(1996).
Donald J. Blakeslee, "The Miguel map
revisited" (2017). In Plains Anthropologist 63 (2018).
Ronald W. Breth, "Kansa Cultural Traits
and History" (1986).
Kendra June Burns, Cultural Transformation: A Study of Ethnohistorical and Archaeological
Data concerning the Wichita Indians.
M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington (1996).
Thomas N. Campbell, "Name All the
Indians of the Bastrop Area" (1986).
—, articles
in the Handbook of Texas Online
(2010): "Cuitao Indians"[sic], "Quitaca Indians,"
"Yojuane Indians."
Jeffrey D. Carlisle, Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations east of the Rio Grande. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas
(2001).
Wallace Chafe, The History and Geography of the Caddo Language (2004).
Jerry R. Craddock, The Expedition of Juan de Oñate to Quivira in 1601 as narrated in The
"True Report" and the "Valverde Interrogatory" (2013,
revised in 2016).
James Grime, "A meandering tale: the
truth about pi and rivers," The
Guardian, 14 March 2015.
Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains (1994).
Frederick Webb Hodge ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico
(1910).
Harry Hoijer, Tonkawa: An Indian Language of Texas (1933).
George E. Hyde, Indians of the High Plains (1959).
Bill Lockhart, "Protohistoric Confusion:
A Cultural Comparison of the Manso, Suma, and Jumano Indians of the Paso del
Norte Region." In Journal of the Southwest 39:1 (1997).
George P. Morehouse, History of the Kansa or Kaw Indians, address before the Kansas
State Historical Society (1906).
William W. Newcomb, Jr., "Historic
Indians of Central Texas." In Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society
64 (1993).
—, "Wichita." In Raymond J. DeMallie ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13:
Plains, Pt 1 (2001).
W. W. Newcomb & T. N. Campbell,
"Southern Plains Ethnohistory: A Re-examination of the Escanjaques,
Ahijados and Cuitoas." In Don G. Wyckoff & Jack L. Hofman ed., Pathways to Plains Prehistory:
Anthropological Perspectives of Plains Natives and Their Pasts (1982).
Douglas R. Parks, "Bands and Villages of
the Arikara and Pawnee." In Nebraska History 60 (1979).
—, "Pawnee". In Raymond J. DeMallie ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13:
Plains, Pt 1 (2001).
Douglas R. Parks & Lula Nora Pratt, A Dictionary of Skiri Pawnee (2008).
Daniel J. Prikryl, "Fiction and Fact
about the Titskanwatits, or Tonkawa, of East Central Texas." In Bulletin
of the Texas Archeological Society 72 (2001).
Albert H. Schroeder, "A Re-Analysis of
the Routes of Coronado and Oñate into the Plains in 1541 and 1601." In Plains
Anthropologist 7 (1962).
Lydia Lowndes Maury Skeels, An Ethnohistorical Survey of Texas Indians
(1972).
F. Todd Smith, The Wichita Indians (2000).
Susan C. Vehik, "Oñate's Expedition to
the Southern Plains: Routes, Destinations, and Implications for Late
Prehistoric Cultural Adaptations."
In Plains Anthropologist 31
(1986).
—,
"Wichita Culture History." In Plains Anthropologist 37 (1992).
—, "Wichita Ethnohistory", in
Robert J. Hoard & William E. Banks ed., Kansas
Archaeology (2006).
Maria F. Wade, The Native Americans of the Edwards Plateau: 1582-1799 (2003).
Robert S. Weddle, "Dominguez de Mendoza,
Juan," in the Handbook of Texas
Online (2010).
Mildred Mott Wedel, "The Wichita Indians
in the Arkansas River Basin" (1982).
