In a letter addressed by Commander Lemoyne d'Iberville to the Minister of the French Navy, dated from Bayogoulas, February 26th, 1700, he states that an English fur-trader and Indian slave-jobber had just visited the Tonica, who are on a river emptying into the Mississippi, twenty leagues above the Taensa Indians, at some distance from the Chicasa, and 170 leagues from the Gulf of Mexico. When d'Iberville ascended the Yazoo river in the same year, he found a village of this tribe on its right (or western) bank, four days' travel from the Natchez landing. Seven villages were seen upon this river, which is navigable for sixty leagues. The Tonica village, the lowest of them, was two days' travel from Thysia, the uppermost (Margry IV, 180. 362. 398; V, 401). La Harpe mentions the establishment of a mission house among the Tonica on Yazoo river.[30]
In 1706, when expecting to become involved in a conflict with the Chicasa and Alibamu Indians, the Tonica tribe, or a part of it, fled southward to the towns of the Huma, and massacred a number of these near the site where New Orleans was built afterwards (French, Hist. Coll. of La., III, 35). The "Tunica Old Fields" lay in Tunica county, Mississippi State, opposite Helena, Arkansas. Cf. Cha'hta.
They subsequently lived at the Tonica Bluffs, on the east shore of the Mississippi river, two leagues below the influx of the Red river. T. Jefferys, who in 1761 gave a description of their village and chief's house, states that they had settled on a hill near the "River of the Tunicas," which comes from the Lake of the Tunicas, and that in close vicinity two other villages were existing (Hist. of French Dominions, I, 145-146).[31] Th. Hutchins, Louisiana and West Florida, Phila., 1784, p. 44, locates them a few miles below that spot, opposite Pointe Coupée and ten miles below the Pascagoulas, on Mississippi river. So does also Baudry de Lozières in 1802, who speaks of a population of one hundred and twenty men.
In 1817, a portion of the tribe, if not the whole, had gone up the Red river and settled at Avoyelles, ninety miles above its confluence with the Mississippi. A group of these Indians is now in Calcasieu county, Louisiana, in the neighborhood of Lake Charles City.
A separate chapter has been devoted to this tribe, because there is a strong probability that their language differed entirely from the rest of the Southern tongues. Le Page du Pratz, l.l., in confirming this statement, testifies to the existence of the sound R in their language, which occurs neither in Naktche nor in the Maskoki dialects or Shetimasha (II, 220-221). We possess no vocabulary of it, and even the tribal name belongs to Chicasa: túnnig post, pillar, support, probably post of territorial demarcation of their lands on the Yazoo river. The only direct intimation which I possess on that tongue is a correspondence of Alphonse L. Pinart, who saw some Tonica individuals, and inferred from their terms that they might belong to the great Pani stock of the Western plains.
ADÁI.
Of this small and obscure Indian community mention is made much earlier than of all the other tribes hitherto spoken of in this volume, for Cabeça de Vaca, in his Naufragios, mentions them among the inland tribes as Atayos. In the list of eight Caddo villages, given by a Taensa guide to L. d'Iberville on his expedition up the Red river (March 1699), they figure as the Natao (Margry IV, 178).
The Adái, Atá-i, Háta-i, Adayes (incorrectly called Adaize) seem to have persisted at their ancient home, where they formed a tribe belonging to the Caddo confederacy. Charlevoix (Hist. de la Nouvelle France, ed. Shea VI, p. 24) relates that a Spanish mission was founded among the Adaes in 1715. A Spanish fort existed there, seven leagues west of Natchitoches, as late as the commencement of the nineteenth century. Baudry de Lozières puts their population at one hundred men (1802), and Morse (1822) at thirty, who then passed their days in idleness on the Bayou Pierre of Red river. Even at the present time they are remembered as a former division of the Caddo confederacy, and called Háta-i by the Caddo, who are settled in the southeastern part of the Indian Territory.
A list of about 300 Adái words was gathered in 1802 by Martin Duralde, which proves it to be a vocalic language independent of any other, though a few affinities are traceable with the Pani dialects. The orthography of that vocabulary cannot, however, be fully relied on. The original is in the library of the American Philosophical Society, in Philadelphia. Rob. G. Latham, in his "Opuscula; Essays, chiefly philological," etc., London 1860; pp. 402-404, has compared Adahi words with the corresponding terms of other North American languages, but without arriving at a definite result.