The enumeration of the southern linguistic stocks winds up with the Atákapa; but it comprises only the families the existence of which is proved by vocabularies. Tonica and the recently-discovered Taensa furnish the proof that the Gulf States may have harbored, or still harbor, allophylic tribes speaking languages unknown to us. The areas of the southern languages being usually small, they could easily escape discovery, insomuch as the attention of the explorers and colonists was directed more toward ethnography than toward aboriginal linguistics.
The southern tribes which I suspect of speaking or having spoken allophylic languages, are the Bidai, the Koroa, the Westo and Stono Indians.
BIDAI.
Rev. Morse, in his Report to the Government (1822), states that their home is on the western or right side of Trinity river, Texas, sixty-five miles above its mouth, and that they count one hundred and twenty people. In 1850 a small settlement of five or six Bidai families existed on Lower Sabine River.
The Opelousas of Louisiana and the Cances of Texas spoke languages differing from all others around them.[37]
KOROA.
The earliest home of this tribe, which figures extensively in French colonial history, is a mountainous tract on the western shore of Mississippi river, eight leagues above the Natchez landing. They were visited there, early in 1682, by the explorer, C. de la Salle, who noticed the compression of their skulls (Margry I, 558. 566). They were a warlike and determined people of hunters. In 1705 a party of them, hired by the French priest Foucault to convey him by water to the Yazoos, murderously dispatched him with two other Frenchmen (Pénicaut, in Margry V, 458). A companion of C. de la Salle (in 1682) noticed that the "language of the Coroa differed from that of the Tinsa and Natché," but that in his opinion their manners and customs were the same (Margry I, 558).
Koroas afterward figure as one of the tribes settled on Yazoo river, formerly called also River of the Chicasa, and are mentioned there by D. Coxe, Carolana (1742), p. 10, as Kourouas. They were then the allies of the Chicasa, but afterward merged in the Cha'hta people, who call them Kólwa, Kúlua. Allen Wright, descended from a grandfather of this tribe, states that the term is neither Cha'hta nor Chicasa, and that the Koroa spoke a language differing entirely from Cha'hta.[38] A place Kolua is now in Coahoma county, probably far distant from the ancient home of this tribe. The origin of the name is unknown; the Cha'hta word: káⁿlo strong, powerful, presents some analogy in sound.