The Kiowa and the Quiohuan (Part 1 of 2)

[This is part 1 of a 2-part series of posts about the identity of the Quiohuan Indians.  Click here for part 2.]

In a previous post on this blog, I examined the question of who the aboriginal inhabitants of Central Texas were at the beginning of the frontier era (or approximately 1600 A.D.).  In it I came to the conclusion that, in the absence of better sources, the best I can do is rely on the account of Alonso de Posada, who reported that in the mid-1600's a tribe lived in western Central Texas (henceforth "WCT") whom he called the Cuitoa.  I then updated my work-in-progress map as follows:

Texas ca. 1600

That still leaves two gaps: one mostly covering the Edwards Plateau, and the other covering eastern Central Texas (henceforth "ECT").  Regarding ECT, I further concluded the Tonkawa—who lived in ECT in later centuries—can be ruled out, as in 1600 they lived much farther to the north.  As a note on that point: I have since learned new information which has forced me to change my conclusions a bit.  It now seems that the Tonkawa were not in central Kansas, as I wrote, but were actually in northern Oklahoma.  Either way, they were not in Central Texas.

However, the question remains: who were the peoples of ECT in 1600?  That question will... not be answered in this post, nor in Part 2.  The purpose of this post, rather, is to discuss which tribe was not in ECT in 1600.  (Spoilers: it's the Kiowa.)

The literary sources for ECT are various and confusing for a layman like myself—especially when they're in untranslated French, a language that I can't read.  They also tend to be late (ca. 1680's onward), at least when compared to the Spanish documents that describe WCT.  So instead of discussing those documents right now, just for the moment let's look at some early maps of North America and see what they have to say.  Here is one from 1703 (I've outlined the ECT area in red):

Here's another from 1718 (which is a more nicely-drawn version of an earlier map from 1716):

These maps were both created by the famous cartographer Guillaume Delisle, patron saint of North American mapmakers.  I happen also have another of his maps in hardcopy, this one from 1722, and I might as well show it as well:

It's difficult to interpret these maps, created as they were long ago, from very limited data, with contradictions regarding the locations of rivers and of Indian tribes, all of which are given under obsolete names.  However, the first two maps contain a similar cluster of names for the tribes dwelling somewhere along (or above or north/northeast of) the "Rivière Maligne" and west (or above) the "Rivière des Cenis".  The Cenis is the modern Trinity River, and the Maligne may be either the Brazos or the Colorado (cf. Hendrickson 2010, Foster 1998:33).  In no particular order, the names of these tribes are:

Canoatinno/Kanoatino[s], Chouman[s], Cannesi, Quichesse, Canoüaouana/Kanouhanan, Quiohouhahan/Quiohouan, Iouhouhouane/Ionhouannez

I will have much more to say about these names in the future (some are easier to deal with than others), but for now I only want to focus on one: Quiohouhahan/Quiohouan.  Variants of this name appear in several French documents from the colonial period (e.g. "Quiouaha" in the journal of Henri Joutel), and it appears to be the same as the "Quiguaya" mentioned in a Spanish document from 1691 (Casañas 1941[1691], Joutel 1998[1684-7]:246).

It is also the same as another name I've discussed previously on this blog: "Quichuan", a tribe who Sieur du Rivage, Benard de la Harpe's aid, located just south of the Red River in 1719.  "Quichuan" is how this name is spelled in Ralph Smith's English translation of La Harpe's journal, and in the French version found in volume 6 of Pierre Margry's Découvertes et Établissements des Français dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale.  However, in another account of La Harpe's voyage—allegedly edited (or written?) by Jean Chevalier de Beaurain and published in 1831—the name is spelled like "Quiohuan".

Interestingly, I was also able to find another Guillaume Delisle map—this time from 1717—which uses the <c> spelling, so the confusion over how to spell this name is quite old:

This I think proves that the the names "Quichuan" and "Quiohouan"(etc.) are supposed to be the same.  It also shows that there was confusion over whether to spell it with <c> or <o> already by the early 1700's.  The weight of evidence now seems to strongly come down in favor of the <o> spelling.  In a previous post, I speculated that La Harpe's "Quichuan" might be the same as the Cuitoa and/or the Quitaca: it now seems that I was wrong.

Now, having just said that I was previously wrong about the identity of the Quiohuan, I am going to stick my neck out and risk being wrong again, because I've decided that I disagree with the scholarly consensus on this.  Almost every author who I have seen mention the Quiohuan has identified them as the Kiowa.  At first glance, this identification seems pretty obvious.  For one, the two names are already almost identical, modulo French spelling.  For another, the recorded location of the Quiohuan (somewhere in northish-centralish Texas roundabout the vicinity of the Red River) is reasonably close to the Kiowas' territory later, in the 1800's:

Based on map in Handbook of North American Indians.  Note that the Kiowa territory as shown here severely overlapped with that of their allies the Comanche.

If this theory is true, then that would make the Kiowa one of the tribes in ECT during the late-1600's and perhaps earlier, meaning that I could write "Kiowa" into that blank space on that map of mine.  However, I believe that the identification of the Quiohuan as the Kiowa is wrong.  Explaining why I think it's wrong, why the experts think it's right regardless, and why I still think they're wrong double-regardless, will be the topic of Part 2.  Before I get to that, however, I need to lay out some preliminaries—I need to discuss the origins of the Kiowa.

A good way to figure out a people's origin is to look at their language.  The language that the Kiowas speak belongs to the Kiowa-Tanoan language family, meaning that it (/they) shares a common ancestry with the Tanoan languages (/peoples) of the Pueblo region, in northern New Mexico.

The Pueblo Region ca. 1600 (from John (1975)).  I've color-coded the settlements by language group: cyan=Tanoan, scarlet=Keresan, purple=Zuni, orange=Hopi (Uto-Aztecan), and yellow=Unknown.

According to an analysis of the names for various flora and fauna as reconstructed in the Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan language, the common ancestors of the Kiowas and Tanoans lived reasonably close to the Pueblo region: meaning that the Kiowas are the ones who moved out and the Tanoans are the ones who (mostly) stayed put.  One might conclude, therefore, that the Kiowas reached their historic location via a quick jaunt to the east:

This, as it turns out, is not the case.  According to tribal tradition, as documented by James Mooney in 1898, the ancestral Kiowa homeland lay far to the north, in the mountain valleys of southwestern Montana near the headwaters of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, whence they subsequently moved eastward and into the Black Hills.  Further testimony from the Arapaho, Crow, and Lakota tribes confirms that the Kiowas formerly occupied the region between the Yellowstone River and the Black Hills.  Mooney estimated this residence as lasting roughly from just-before-1700 to just-after-1775.

So, the trajectory of the Kiowas' from the Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan homeland actually looks like this:

So how did they get way up there, and how do we know it?  In order to be any more specific, I have to talk about archaeology, which is something I never like doing because I don't really understand archaeology [and because no 2 authors can ever agree on dates...].  But I'll do my best.  My chief sources of information here are the works of Scott G. Ortman (2012 & 2017).

With that said, here is—as far as I can manage—a brief history of the Kiowa to 1806:

*   *   *

If there ever was a "Golden Age" of Native American civilization north of Mexico, I suppose it would be from ≈1000 to ≈1300 A.D.  It was during this period that, almost simultaneously, you have both the Anasazi cliff-dwelling cultures in the Southwest and the moundbuilding cultures of Cahokia-and-environs in the eastern woodland.  Both of these cultures are prominent enough that they get mentioned pretty often in mainstream publications—you've probably heard of them.  To some extent this Golden Age existed on the Plains as well, since this is also when you get the (Panian-speaking) Central Plains Village culture in Nebraska-Kansas.

Archaeological cultures of the Southwest during the Golden Age. (I forgot the source for this.)

This Golden Age came to an end during the 14th century: ca. 1300 for the Anasazi, and a little later for the Moundbuilders (note that this is over a century before Columbus was born).  I don't think people entirely know what caused the collapse.  For Cahokia, I've seen it said that they succumbed to political instabilities inherent to the paramount chiefdom-style of government.  The collapse of the Anasazi has been blamed on foreign invasion, drought, overexploitation of natural resources, and political turmoil—one expert I contacted compared their situation to that of modern-day Syria.

By the way, I can't mention the Anasazi without mentioning that they were something of a meme back in the 1990's.  For some reason, and I don't know why, people kept wanting to find something supernatural involved in their disappearance.  There was an episode of The X-Files about the Anasazi, as well as an episode of In Search Of hosted by Leonard Nimoy.  I also remember an episode of The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest where it was implied that the Anasazi had been abducted by aliens.

It's generally assumed that the Anasazi were the ancestors of the modern day Pueblo peoples: the Tanoans, Keresans, Hopi, and Zuñi... though there may have been other groups as well that have since vanished to history (it's been suggested that the Piro were one such group, but cooler heads seem to think that they were Tanoan).  These ancestral Puebloans were once more spread out, but after the Anasazi collapse they concentrated into the Pueblo region.

As I said, the Kiowa are related to the Tanoans, and an analysis of the reconstructed Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan lexicon points to the Pueblo region as their ancestral homeland—actually a bit to the north of the Pueblo region proper, in the zone between the San Juan and Colorado Rivers (Ortman 2012).  But the Kiowa were never in the Pueblo region in historic times, meaning that when the Tanoans moved south following the Anasazi collapse, the Kiowa did not accompany them.  So where were they, and where did they go?

According to Scott Ortman, the ancestors of the Kiowa were not among of the classic-period Anasazi people.  Rather, they were in the Fremont region in Utah, north of the Anasazi (see map).  Ortman's argument has to do with dates, so let's talk dates.  Here is a rough chronology of archaeological phases in the Anasazi region, at least according to some sources:

Basketmaker II:   ≈ 1 – 500 A.D.

Basketmaker III:   ≈ 500 – 700 A.D.

Pueblo I:   ≈ 700 – 900 A.D.

Pueblo II:   ≈ 900 – 1100 A.D.

Pueblo III:   ≈ 1100 – 1300 A.D.

Pueblo IV:   ≈ 1300 – 1540 A.D.

[Prior to Basketmaker II is the Archaic period.  There apparently isn't a "Basketmaker I".]

At what point in this sequence did the Kiowa first separate from the Tanoans?  Estimates using glottochronology usually date the Kiowa↔Tanoan split to several millennia ago: Davis estimated the it at ≈2250 B.C.; Hale and Harris revised this to ≈1000 B.C. (qtd. in Shaul 2014:104).  But glottochronology is messy, and these numbers apparently seem off according to the experts.  For example, Davis estimated that nearly 2,000 years separated the Kiowa↔Tanoan split from the first internal split of Tanoan (Towa↔Tiwa-Tewa), but Hale, Harris, and Laurel Watkins all write that the Kiowa language does not seem that much more different from the Tanoan languages, than the Tanoan languages are from each other, for the Kiowa departure to have predated the internal Tanoan split by very much time, if at all.

Scott Ortman, more-or-less throwing glottochronology out the window, recalculated the timeline of the Kiowa-Tanoan family using the apparently more reliable Wörter-und-Sachen method ("Words-and-Things").  He describes the method thus:

"The principle behind this method is that when one can reconstruct a word for a cultural item in a protolanguage, one can also assume that the associated item was known to the speakers of that language.  If it is also possible to date the initial appearance of the item using archaeological evidence, one can argue that the protolanguage diversified after the introduction of that item.  Terms for cultigens and material culture are most useful for this type of analysis, and together provide one of the strongest and most direct links between archeology and language." (2012:162)

So, for example, Proto-Tanoan can be reconstructed as having words for the bow-and-arrow and various appurtenances of advanced maize agriculture, but Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan can only be reconstructed as having words for simpler maize agriculture, with no bow-and-arrow.  I believe this same method has also been used to estimate when Proto-Indo-European was spoken, based on the various vocabulary for chariot technology that can and can't be reconstructed in PIE.

Using this method, Ortman calculates that the Proto-Kiowa-Tanoans were a people of the Eastern Basketmaker II phase, and the Proto-Tanoans were of the Eastern Basketmaker III phase.  He dates the transition between Basketmaker II and III to around 450 A.D.:

The Kiowa-Tanoan language family, with forking dates estimated using the Wörter-und-Sachen method.  Based on Ortman (2012).

So the ancestors of the Kiowas broke off from their Tanoan kinsmen at some point before 450.  This is coincident with several lines of evidence that show a migration of Eastern Basketmaker II people from the Anasazi region into the Fremont during the first half-millennium A.D.:

"Many lines of evidence support this association.  First, Eastern Basketmaker II sites pre-date and overlap spatially with Fremont sites, and archaeologists have noted that several elements of Fremont culture, including cultigens, pit houses, and pottery spread into the Fremont area from the Pueblo area (Simms 2008).  In addition, mtDNA haplogroup frequencies suggest ancient Fremont populations and present-day Jemez people derive from the same maternal lineage (Carlyle et al. 2000).  Importantly, the Towa language spoken at Jemez Pueblo is also the language most closely related to Kiowa.  Third, Fremont coiled basketry [...] also exhibits continuities with both Late Archaic and Eastern Basketmaker II coiled basketry. [...] Finally, continuities between Eastern Basketmaker II and Eastern Fremont rock art suggests that the latter is dscended from the former, at least in part." (Ortman 2017)

Putting it all together, Ortman says that the ancestors of the Kiowa moved north from the Pueblo region into the Green River drainage, Uinta Basin, and Great Salt Lake areas of the Fremont region sometime between 250 and 450 A.D.

The Fremont culture collapsed along with the Anasazi in 1300 A.D., and the Tanoans (as well as the Keresans, who according to David Shaul controlled the prize locations of Pueblo Bonito and Cliff Palace) moved south into the historic Pueblo region, while the Proto-Kiowas moved north into the vicinity of Yellowstone Park.  It is around this time that a style of rock art called "Castle Gardens" appears in the Wind River and Bighorn basins—rock art which, again according to Ortman, is highly reminiscent both of Fremont rock art and of historical Kiowa art and regalia.  And that completes the circle, as that is the region which James Mooney's informants identified as the original Kiowa homeland.

It's noteworthy that it was the Yellowstone Park region which the Kiowa remembered as their homeland, and not, say, the Great Basin or Colorado Plateau.  Some have said that it was during their residence of southwest Montana that the Kiowa experienced their process of national ethnogenesis: when "the ancestors of the Kiowa" (who may have been several different groups) became "the Kiowa" themselves.

On the other hand, maybe it isn't that surprising that they didn't remember Fremont.  The Kiowa of Mooney's day were separated from their ancestors' flight from Utah by nearly 6 centuries.  Many people have said (and I tend to agree) that this far exceeds the time-depth to which oral tradition can be looked on as trustworthy.  In other words, they forgot.

...except maybe they didn't all forget.  In the 1990's, William Meadows recorded an oral family history as relayed by Parker P. McKenzie, a Kiowa linguist and former colleague of John P. Harrington's, who was then nearly a hundred years old (Meadows 2016).  This account was "codified" by McKenzie's great great great great great great great grandmother, who was likely born sometime in the mid- to late-1600's, and had been passed down through the maternal line.  According to Meadows and McKenzie's exegesis, the story describes a northbound exodus from the Colorado Plateau, to the Great Basin ("where people used jā́ugàu [tɔ́:gɔ̀]¹, or wooden rabbit hunting sticks"), through the "Ute Mountains" (the central Colorado Rockies), and across an enormous canyon which was either the Snake River or Green River Canyon.

This itinerary puts them in the mountain valleys of southwest Montana: the traditional Kiowa urheimat.  I'm usually pretty down on the reliability of oral histories this old, but the McKenzie narrative seems pretty plausible.

At this point the story is picked up by James Mooney in his much-cited Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, published in 1898.  Mooney had access to informants several generations elder to Parker McKenzie—folks who'd lived in the "Buffalo Days"—and he dealt mostly with the time period after 1700, so I consider him to be trustworthy:

"...the earliest historic tradition of the Kiowa locates them in or beyond the mountains at the extreme sources of the Yellowstone and the Missouri [River], in what is now western Montana.  They describe it as a region of great cold and deep snows, and say that they had the Flatheads (Á´daltoñ-ká-igihä´go [Ɔ́l-tʰǫ́-kʰɔ̀y-k'ì-hà:-gɔ̀]¹, 'compressed head people') near them, and that on the other side of the mountains was a large stream flowing westward, evidently an upper branch of the Columbia.  These mountains they still call Gâ´i K'op [Kɔ́yk'òpʰ]¹, 'Kiowa mountains.'" (Mooney 1898:153)

At some point which Mooney dated to 1700 or slightly before, the Kiowas left their mountain refuge and moved onto the plains, making allies with the Crow along the way.  They drifted eastward, crossing the Yellowstone River (or following "along" the Yellowstone, according to the Arapaho), and ultimately settled in the Black Hills of South Dakota, with the Crow as their neighbors to the west.  The Kiowa may have cohabitated the Crow territory at this time, since according to Mooney:

"The northern Cheyenne informed [George Bird] Grinnell that on first coming into their present country they had found the region between the Yellowstone and Cheyenne rivers, including the Black Hills, in possession of the Kiowa and Comanche (?), whom they drove out and forced to the south." (Mooney 1898:157)

"?" is right, as it would be strange to find the Comanche that far north in the 18th century (or ever).  Grinnell's informants probably meant to refer to the Shoshone tribe, close kinsmen of the Comanche, who terrorized the Northern Plains throughout the 1700's.  The other northern tribes called the Shoshone "Snakes" and were not overly fond of them.  According to the Handbook of North American Indians, "Snake People" (Séʔsenovotsétaneoʔo) was also the Cheyennes' name for the Comanche, so the confusion is understandable.

It occurs to me, by the way, that the Shoshone may also have been the ones responsible for the Kiowa leaving the mountains in ≈1700.  The Shoshone formerly resided (and many still do) in the Great Basin, and in crossing onto the Northern Plains it is likely they would have had to pass through the Kiowas' home in Montana, possibly driving them out.  The Comanche in the south first emerged from the mountains in the first decade of the 1700's, empowered by horses newly acquired.  It's likely that the Shoshones in the north did about the same thing at about the same time (or a bit later, depending on when they got horses in the north).

That, at least, is the conventional view.  Nowadays, archaeologists like to push that date further back.  Sally Greiser (1994) says the Shoshone may have been on the Plains as early as the 1400's.  She still says that the Shoshone may have been the ones to drive out the Kiowas—if so, that would mean Mooney was off in his chronological assessment by 200 years.  Although it's worth saying that according to Mooney the Kiowas had been on good terms with the Shoshone "so far as they can recollect".  But I digress.

As Mooney continues: the Kiowa were forced out of the Black Hills and driven south by the combined forces of the Sioux and Cheyenne.  A Lakota winter count records that the Sioux first arrived in the Black Hills in 1775.  Lewis and Clark found the Black Hills to be held by the Cheyenne in 1805.  They had been told by the Mandan the previous winter that the Kiowa were living on the North Fork of the Platte River, south of the Black Hills.  According to Mooney:

"This agrees with statements of old men of the Dakota confederacy, who informed the writer that within their early recollection that tribe [the Kiowa] had lived between the North Platte and the Niobrara, having been expelled from the Black Hills by the Dakota of the preceding generation." (Mooney 1898:166)²

So the Kiowa were driven out of the Black Hills sometime between 1775 and 1804.  They reported to Mooney that while they lived in the Black Hills, they had the Comanche as their neighbors to the south.  Fleeing south from the combined Cheyenne and Lakota advance, the Kiowas were forced to press upon the Comanches' northern frontier, which they did: pushing from the North Platte river to the South Platte, to the Republican and Smoky Hill, and to the Arkansas.  It was while the Kiowas and Comanches were on opposite side of the Arkansas River that the two tribes finally agreed to a peace and a permanent alliance.  Thereafter, the Kiowas and Comanches shared much of their territory in common.  Mooney dated this ceasefire to 1790.  Elizabeth A. H. John (1985) later revised that estimate to 1806.

Movements of the Kiowa and pre-Kiowa. Dates are given roughly as termini post quos.

At some point during all of this, the Kiowas formed a close association with a group of Apacheans known as the "Kiowa-Apache".  No one knows for sure just when where and why this alliance was established.  A group of northern Apaches ("Apaches del Norte") reportedly told a Spanish official in 1801 that their people had been cut off from the rest of the Apaches when the Comanche stormed the Plains—according to Elizabeth A. H. John, these Apaches del Norte were the Kiowa-Apache, and their association with the Kiowas therefore began no earlier than the 18th century.  William E. Bittle (cited in Opler 1983) calculated based on lexicostatistics that the Kiowa-Apache language separated from the other Apachean dialects in the 16th century.  Scott Ortman (2017) believes that the Kiowa-Apache became entangled with the Kiowa way back during the Fremont era.  I'm agnostic on the issue, for now.

[continued in part 2]

Notes:

1.  Whenever James Mooney or William Meadows cites a word in the Kiowa language, I provide a standard phonemic transcription in square brackets.  Mooney's citations use the old-fashioned pre-Swadesh orthography which is difficult to interpret, and Williams' citations use the McKenzie orthography of Kiowa which is, in my opinion, unnecessarily eccentric and not very useful.

2.  Terminological Note:  Nowadays the term "Dakota" properly refers only to the Santee Sioux of Minnesota and thereabouts.  In Mooney's day, however, "Dakota" was often used synonymously with "Sioux": encompassing the totality of the Santee, Teton, and Yankton-Yanktonai divisions.  Mooney's Sioux consultants were most likely from the Teton group, and in modern parlance would be referred to as Lakota.

[bibliography in Part 2]

The Blank Pages of History

Evolving Moloch recently tweeted an account of the Bloody Falls Massacre of 1771, a historical event in which a group of (mostly) Chipewyans attacked a group of Copper Inuit in modern Nunavut, Canada.  The event was witnessed by Samuel Hearne, who was travelling with the Chipewyans at the time, and who left us a written description of the massacre.  His account reads:

"By the time the Indians had made themselves thus completely frightful, it was near one o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth; when finding all the Esquimaux quiet in their tents, they rushed forth from their ambuscade, and fell on the poor unsuspecting creatures, unperceived till close at the very eves of their tents, when they soon began the bloody massacre, while I stood neuter in the rear.

In a few seconds the horrible scene commenced; it was shocking beyond description; the poor unhappy victims were surprised in the midst of their sleep, and had neither time nor power to make any resistance; men, women, and children, in all upward of twenty, ran out of their tents stark naked, and endeavoured to make their escape; but the Indians having possession of all the landside, to no place could they fly for shelter.  One alternative only remained, that of jumping into the river; but, as none of them attempted it, they all fell a sacrifice to Indian barbarity!

The shrieks and groans of the poor expiring wretches were truly dreadful; and my horror was much increased at seeing a young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of age, killed so near me, that when the first spear was stuck into her side she fell down at my feet, and twisted round my legs, so that it was with difficulty that I could disengage myself from he dying grasps.  As two Indian men pursued this unfortunate victim, I solicited very hard for her life; but the murderers made no reply till they had stuck both their spears through her body, and transfixed her to the ground.  They then looked me sternly in the face, and began to ridicule me, by asking if I wanted an Esquimaux wife; and paid not the smallest regard to the shrieks and agony of the poor wretch, who was twining round their spears like an eel!  Indeed, after receiving much abusive language from them on the occasion, I was at length obliged to desire that they would be more expeditious in dispatching their victim out of her misery, otherwise I should be obliged, out of pity, to assist in the friendly office of putting an end to the existence of a fellow-creature who was so cruelly wounded.  On this request being made, one of the Indians hastily drew his spear from the place where it was first lodged, and pierced it through her breast near the heart.  The love of life, however, even in this most miserable state, was so predominant, that though this might justly be called the most merciful act that could be done for the poor creature, it seemed to be unwelcome, for though much exhausted by pain and loss of blood, she made several efforts to ward off the friendly blow.  My situation and the terror of my mind at beholding this butchery, cannot easily be conceived, much less described; though I summed up all the fortitude I was master of on the occasion, it was with difficulty that I could refrain from tears; and I am confident that my features must have feelingly expressed how sincerely I was affected at the barbarous scene I then witnessed; even at this hour I cannot reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears."

Read enough about the past, and after a while you stop being surprised by such things.  Wikipedia says that Hearne's original manuscript is lost, and the version that survives is possibly embellished.  If true, then I suspect that embellishment lies less in the levels of violence and butchery depicted, and more in the description of brave Hearne heroically standing up to the Chipewyan man, demanding a mercy kill.  That sounds like maybe what Hearne had -wished- had happened.

But it does bring to mind another account, very similar, also of a fight between two Indian groups as witnessed by a lone white guy.  During the 1850's—I'm not certain of the date—Texas Ranger Nelson Lee witnessed a skirmish out on the open plains between the Comanche (who were holding him captive) and the Apache.  He later wrote a book about the experience:

"In the afternoon of the third day we struck a wide rolling prairie.  Dividing it nearly in the center was a high, smooth ridge—its summit reached from both sides by an easy, gradual ascent.  As we crossed the prairie and approached this ridge, our scattered cavalcade extended, perhaps, a quarter of a mile, moving forward, carelessly, and in no order whatsoever.  I was at the extreme rear, by the side of the Spotted Leopard, and surrounded by the pack mules.  As the foremost horsemen reached the height they halted suddenly, making hurried signs, while two or three of the braves galloped back down the slope, riding eagerly to and fro among their brethren, as if urging them to push forward without delay.  The whole band, thereupon, dashed up the hill, except the Spotted Leopard and myself, who remained with the mules in the rear, and on reaching the summit deployed into line.  By this time I had heard the cry of 'the Apaches, the Apaches,' and knew at once there was hot work near at hand.

As yet, however, I had seen nothing of an enemy, and only drew the inference there was one present from the cries I had heard, and the general commotion that prevailed.  In the course of two or three minutes after our line formed on the ridge, the air was rent with the noise of the war whoop, and up the opposite ascent, at full speed, came the Apaches in solid body, like a black cloud.  As they approached, a shower of arrows were discharged from both lines, when they rushed upon each other in a hand to hand encounter.

From the position I occupied I had a fair, unobstructed view of the battle.  It was fierce and terrible.  The horses reared, and plunged, and fell upon each other, their riders dealing blow for blow, and thrust for thrust, some falling from their saddles to the ground, and others trampling madly over them."

... and so on.  Lee's description of this skirmish is memorable not so much for the encounter itself, but for the observation he makes of it afterward:

"The Comanches lost in this battle seventeen warriors; the Apaches, probably, as many more.  Had the combatants belonged to a civilized people, who keep a record of their wars, it would have furnished a thrilling page of history; but thousands of such sanguinary struggles take place on the lonely prairies, of which the world knows not.  That same season, however, they buried the tomahawk and danced the pipe dance, and henceforward were at peace."

Comments like that get to the heart of the difficulty in trying to reconstruct the history of nations which lie far beyond the frontier.  Because it is true—and ought to be obvious—that history happens regardless of whether anyone around bothers to write it down.  Or: if someone does write it down, but their writings later get lost.  Richard Miles, in Carthage Must Be Destroyed, describes how when Gustave Flaubert wrote his novel Salammbô, set in ancient Carthage,

"One critic indignantly wrote, 'How do you want me to be interested in this lost war, buried in the defiles of sands of Africa . . . ?  What is this to me, the duel between Tunis and Carthage?  Speak to me rather of the duel between Carthage and Rome!  I am attentive to it, I am involved in it.  Between Rome and Carthage, in their fierce quarrel, all of future civilization is already in play.'  The point was that any aspect of Carthaginian history that was not associated with Rome was of no real interest or importance for an educated audience." (p. 10)

Flaubert published Salammbô in 1862, but nothing has changed.  The written history of the Apaches begins in 1541 when Coronado met them and called them "Querechos," and it becomes more detailed after 1598 when the Spanish founded New Mexico.  Over the centuries, Apaches fought with Spaniards, Pueblos, Wichitas, Tonkawas, Jumanos, Comanches, and others.  And yet if you happen upon a book about "the Apache Wars" in almost any bookstore, it will most likely begin its narrative around 1849.  Why?  Because that's when the war began between the Apaches and the United States.  "What is this to me, the duel between Apache and Jumano?  Speak to me rather of the duel between Apache and Rome America!"

Or consider this.  Medieval Persian folklore includes mention of two outstanding conquerors who invaded Iran from opposite directions: Eskandar of Rum, and Afrāsīāb of Turan.  Eskandar is known to be Alexander the Great ("Rūm" = "Rome" i.e. Greece).  But who on earth is this Afrāsīāb person?  "Turān" is the old Persian name for the Central Asian steppe.  But we know nothing of the Achaemenids' dealings with the people on their eastern borders; almost all of our knowledge comes from Greek writers who focused on the western portion of the empire.  Some think that Afrāsīāb is a fictional character (like another villain of the Shahnameh: the demon-king Zahhāk, who derives from the mythical dragon Aži Dahāka).  But I think it's also possible that he was a real person—perhaps some Scythian warlord—who fought against Persia and was remembered for it in Persian mytho-history.

A good comparison here is with Attila the Hun, another would-be conqueror from the steppe.  Like Afrāsīāb, Attila was remembered and commemorated in the folk traditions of the local people—in this case, Germanic poems like Widsith, the Nibelungenlied, and the Poetic Edda.  The difference is that in Attila's case, we also have contemporary, reliable historical accounts which historians can use to corroborate (or not) the references to Attila in poetry: no need to uselessly speculate on who this mysterious "Atli" figure was or whether he existed.  No such corroborating witness exists for Afrāsīāb.  So we can't even know if he was real or mythical.

A modern Persian wanting to learn about the earliest history of his or her civilization is much better served by reading Herodotus than Ferdowsi.  Likewise, a modern Greek is going to get much better information about earliest Greece from the records of the Egyptians and Hittites than from the poetry of Homer.  Adopting a discerning eye towards different sources of historical evidence often means that the most accurate and reliable history of a culture doesn't come from that culture at all, but from outsiders—this is a point which modern commentators of Native American history often don't want to accept.  Who knows the most about the early Alaskan Tlingit?  People who can read Russian, that's who.

The flipside, however, is that when documentation for a period is sparse, people can start to confuse lack of evidence for lack of incidence: "we don't know a lot about the eastern Persian Empire, so not a lot must have happened."  But that's not going to be the perspective of someone from ancient Persia—certainly not if they're from one of the eastern satrapies after their village has been sacked.  To assume that everything of significance that happened in Persia happened with Greece is to make the same mistake as that critic ("What is this to me, the duel between Iran and Turan?").  Modern histories of Persia ignore Afrāsīāb; they can only go where the evidence takes them.  But the Shahnameh apparently puts Afrāsīāb on roughly the same level as Eskandar—that fact might (might!) be a clue that something big did happen out on the eastern Persian frontier, which could be compared to Alexander's invasion.  Maybe.  The record is silent.

[Ehsan Yarshater's article over on Encyclopedia Iranica says that if Afrāsīāb represents a historical figure, he was more likely from the Parthian period, and not from the earlier Achaemenid period.  But that makes little difference to my point—it's not like we know a lot about the eastern border of the Parthians, either.]

This kind of stuff, by the way, is why I am initially skeptical towards theories like Mark van de Logt's, which says* that the monstrous beasts from Caddo mythology are symbolic representations of the wrath inflicted upon the Caddos by the entrada of Hernando de Soto in 1541-2.  I'm not skeptical of the idea that some real history (including the conquistadors) is contained in Caddo mythological stories—this is almost certainly the case.  But I am skeptical of the idea that anything of note that was remembered by the Caddos centuries after the fact must have involved the Spaniards in some way.

The oral traditions of the Caddos no doubt does contain encoded memories of events from early Caddo history... but just what is that "Caddo history"?  Surely it isn't limited to their interactions with Europeans, any more than Carthage's history was limited to its interactions with Rome.  For every "Eskandar" in the guise of a Spanish cavalryman from the south, was there also an "Afrāsīāb" in the guise of an Osage warchief from the north?  Probably.  Which of the two would have left a stronger impression on contemporary Caddos, to later become immortalized in myth?  I don't know.  The De Soto expedition is just one page from the early history of the Caddo.  All of the other pages are blank.  But the contents of those blank pages are surely under no obligation to only contain material that seems important to us ("What is this to me, the duel between Caddo and Osage?").  The historic Caddos had other priorities.

[* - I should make it clear that I have not actually read van de Logt's book, and therefore my criticisms of it are unfair and founded upon total ignorance.  When I do read it—and I intend to—he may very well end up convincing me.]

One can assume a priori that the Caddos' northern border—like the Persians' eastern border and the Carthaginians' southern border—was a busy place.  But those parts of the world, in those periods of history, have gone dark.  They weren't dark to the people who were there, but they're dark to us.  For this reason, I am grateful for all the brief little flashes of light that illuminate the darkness: such as Miguel's map of Quivira, or Saukamappee's reminiscences of the Blackfoot-Shoshone war.

Trying to reconstruct the history of the frontier-beyond-the-frontier is a tricky business.  Sometimes you get lucky, like with the Kiowas (on whom more in a future post): where written history, oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and winter counts all come together to form a coherent picture of the Kiowa past which reaches back a thousand years.  And sometimes you get unlucky, like with the Arapahoes, who are invisible to the archaeological record and whose early history is a giant mystery.  And then there are enigmas, like the Suhtai, on whom all a person can really do is guess.  All of this is of course highly relevant to any attempt at making a map of peoples who lived beyond the reach of recorded history.  Crumbs...

And as for the Bloody Falls Massacre: the Wikipedia article tells me that "in 1996, Dene and Inuit representatives participated in a healing ceremony to reconcile the centuries-old grievance."  I can't really argue with that, I suppose.  Healing is good, reconciliation is good.

But it is hard to hold a healing ceremony for a massacre that nobody remembers.  Did you take notice of the fact that it has a name: "the Bloody Falls Massacre"?  Why?  Who named it that?  Do you suppose it would it have a name, or be remembered at all, among the Chipewyans, still to this day, after 248 years, if no one had been there to write it down?  Perhaps... but I'm inclined to think likely not.  It was just one raid, after all.  One among thousands of sanguinary struggles that took place on the lonely tundras, of which the world knows not.

Good Maps #1: Atlantic Colonies

This is the first in a series of posts wherein I share some of the maps that I have found while researching my project which are outstanding in quality.  As I've said before and will say again, there are an awful lot of unhelpful maps out there that purport to show this-or-that part of North America at this-or-that period of history, so if I can do my part to signal-boost some maps which are of actual quality, then that might be of use to... somebody.  My ultimate goal is to make maps of my own, but I'm a slow researcher and that still seems a long way off.  Also I'm not an expert, and I don't trust myself any more than you should.

So far the most detailed, helpful, and relevant set of maps I have found are from Herman R. Friis, A Series of Population Maps of the Colonies and the United States, 1625-1790, published in 1940.  These are a series of maps showing the locations and sizes of Euro-American settlements east of the Mississippi River for the years 1625, 1650, 1675, 1700, 1720, 1740, 1760, 1770, 1780, and 1790.  I would like to show all ten maps, but since they form the bulk of the article I'm not sure if that would be permitted by the copyright gestapo, so I'll just show four.  If you want to see the rest, the article is in Geographical Review, volume 30, no 3:

Friis' maps are useful because they show exactly what most colonial-era maps don't: just exactly where the colonists were, and what areas were under their jurisdiction.  In other words, what territories belonged to the British Empire in actuality, as opposed to on paper.  Territories located beyond the region of settlement can be assumed to belong to this-or-that Indian tribe.  There are still difficulties, however.  As far as I know, the British colonies were very agricultural in focus, so it's much easier to infer who-owned-what from who-lived-where when dealing with them than it is when dealing with New France, Louisiana, or Florida.  Friis' maps may not be very useful in mapping the latter.  In the future I would like to write a post specifically about the different definitions of territorial sovereignty one has to use when dealing with the British versus the French, Spanish, Dutch, sedentary Indians, and nomadic Indians.  But for now, the Friis maps are an excellent resource and I would like more people to know about them.

Another useful map of the Atlantic colonies is the following, from Ralph H. Brown, Historical Geography of the United States (1948).  It is based directly upon the Friis maps, but uses shaded regions with solidly delineated borders:

There is also this map of 1660, from The Settling of North America ed. Helen Hornbeck Tanner (1995).  The map projection used is a bit strange, though:

And this map from the same volume, showing the settled area of the British colonies in 1760:

I'm less enthusiastic about this one (same volume again), because it smears two decades of history into a single image, but it's certainly not terrible:

H. H. Tanner also edited another volume, the Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (1987).  I have quibbles with some of the maps from the two volumes, but they seem to mostly be good resources.