In 1760 Skunnemoke (“Short Arrow”) sold the land on which his village stood along with a wide strip between Bayou Teche and Vermillion village, the group did not abandon their site until the early 19th century. Other lands of the Atakapa were steadily sold and the villages moved and combined to survive the advance of the Europeans.
In 1787 the principle Atakapa village was at the “Island of Woods” later known as the “Island Lacasine”. It was abandoned about 1799 when they moved to a village on the Mermentau. This was the last village of the Eastern Atakapa and is said to have been occupied as late as 1836. Some of the Indians united with the Western Atakapa around Lake Charles, but others scattered as far as Oklahoma. The last village of the Western Atakapa was on “Indian Lake”, later called “Lake Prein”, which was occupied until after the middle of the 19th century.
In 1885 a considerable vocabulary of Atakapa was gathered from two women living in Lake Charles who had belonged to this last Atakapa town. A later survey disclosed a few former residents of the old town were still living in 1907-1908 but, by 1942 all known villagers of the last Atakapa town were dead.
Opelousa—
Probably a divergent group of Atakapa. They lived in the vicinity of the present city of Opelousas and acted as middlemen in trade between other Indians in the South. They bought fish from the Chitimacha and Atakapa which they exchanged for flints from the Avoyels. Some of these flints were passed on to the Karankawas from the Texas coast for globular or conical oil jugs. They traded such items as Caddo pottery, Texas pots, stone beads, arrow points and salt along routes from the interior of Texas to the coast and inland through Caddo country in northern Louisiana and onward through Arkansas. (737)
The last representatives of this tribe apparently joined the Atakapa to whom they were probably related.
CHITIMACHA
Chitimacha—
The Chitimacha are the only Louisiana Indians known to currently live in the vicinity of their ancestral homelands. It is evident they were one of the largest tribes in Louisiana. Their large population was probably the result of a favorable environment which provided an abundant food supply of plants, animals and marine life without the necessity of extensive hunting or fishing expeditions, or the necessity to periodically abandon their village sites for lack of food. The men did the hunting and fishing.
Although the women planted such crops as maize and sweet potatoes, many of their foods grew wild. Foods such as beans, wild potatoes, pond lily seeds, palmetto grains, rhizoma of common sagittaria and large leaf sagittaria, persimmons, strawberries, blackberries, mulberries, white berries, many kinds of tree fruits, pumpkins, and several others grew close to their villages.