More on the Cacaxtles

I said in the last post that the only Indian group I can find associated with the far northern Coahuila region was the Cacastes, as shown on William B. Griffen's map.  I had recognized the name, and knew that they're also known as "Cacaxtles", but nothing more—I tried to find some more information (either corroborating or discorroborating) on the Cacastes, but couldn't find anything.

I guess I didn't look as hard as I could have, however, because it turns out there is a very detailed article out there: "The Cacaxtle Indians of Northeastern Mexico and Southern Texas" by the inimitable Thomas Nolan Campbell.  "Very detailed" is a relative term, since the Cacaxtles [I'm gonna use his spelling] are all but unknown to the historical record except for two Spanish punitive expeditions from the 1660's.  Their presumed territory, according to Campbell:

"[D]uring the period 1663-1693 the Cacaxtle were associated with the large lowland area to the north and east of the mountain front that passes diagonally across the Mexican states of Nuevo León and Coahuila.  This lowland area extends from the mountain front northward across the Rio Grande to the southern margin of the Edwards Plateau of Texas.  Within this large lowland area the Cacaxtle can best be linked with a more restricted area on both sides of the Rio Grande in which today one finds the communities of Guerrero, Coahuila, and Eagle Pass, Texas."

Or, the shaded region labeled "A" on this map:

The name "Cacaxtle" is from Nahuatl, and Campbell says that they may be identical to another group known to history under another name.  He doesn't speculate who this other group might be, but I don't suppose there'd any point: Campbell has elsewhere written that the exact same area associated with the Cacaxtle—the north and south banks of the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass to Guerrero—was occupied by at least four separate Coahuiltecan groups: the Terocodame, the Ocana, the Yorica, and the Hape (Campbell 1979).  Maybe these four were bands of a single tribe, maybe they weren't, maybe they were the Cacaxtle, maybe not, who knows?

Eagle Pass and Guerrero are far from the northern Coahuila locality where Griffen put the "Cacastes" on his map.  Campbell says that people first started putting the Cacaxtle there in the 1940's, due to a misinterpretation of the primary account of the 1660's punitive expeditions.  After then, scholars spent several decades just copying each others' errors... as it goes.  Campbell also says that the Cacaxtle were never numerous or important, and that people have inflated their importance over time—unless one is making a high-resolution map of the Coahuiltecan area, there's really no reason to include them on a map at all.

On account of this, I've removed the "Cacastes" from my map:

That sets me back a bit, since I once again don't know who lived in northern Coahuila.  I suspect, however, that the answer is nobody: the region is extremely barren.  Nearly the entire population of the administrative municipality, Acuña, is stuffed into one city located at the far eastern edge, on the Rio Grande, and aside from that the region has a population density of 0.5.  Hunter-gatherer folk can be mighty resourceful, but for the time being I'm going to assume that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, far northern Coahuila was more-or-less uninhabited.

References

T. N. Campbell, Ethnohistoric Notes on Indian Groups Associated With Three Spanish Missions at Guerrero, Coahuila (1979).

— "The Cacaxtle Indians of Northeastern Mexico and Southern Texas." In La Tierra: Journal of the Southern Texas Archaeological Association Vol. 11 No. 1 (1984).