19Called also Itás.
I found reports of the former existence of Negritos in the Karága River Valley at a place called Sukipin, where the river has worn its way through the Cordillera. An old man there told me that his grandfather used to hunt the Negritos. The Mandáyas both of that region and of Tagdauñg-duñg, a district situated on the Karága River, five days' march from the mouth, on the western side of the Cordillera, show here and there characteristics, physical and cultural, that they could have inherited only from Negrito ancestors. One interesting trait of this particular group is the use of blowpipes for killing small birds. In the use of the bow and arrow, too, they are quite expert. These people are called taga-butái--that is, mountain dwellers--and live in places on the slopes of high mountains difficult of access, their watering-place being frequently a little hole on the side of the mountain.
THE BANUÁONS
The Banuáons,20 probably an extension of the Bukídnons of the Bukídnon subprovince. They occupy the upper parts of the Rivers Lamiñga, Kandiisan, Hawilian, and Óhut, and the whole of the River Maásam, together with the mountainous region beyond the headwaters of these rivers, and probably extend over to the Bukídnons.
20Also called Higaunon or Higagaun, probably "the Hadgaguanes--a people untamed and ferocious"--to whom the Jesuits preached shortly after the year 1596. (Jesuit Mission, Blair and Robertson, 44:60, 1906.) These may be the people whom Pigaffetta, in his First Voyage Around the World (1519-1522) calls Benaian (Banuáon ?) and whom he describes as "shaggy and living at a cape near a river in the islands of Butuán and Karága--great fighters and archers--eating only raw human hearts with the juice of oranges or lemons" (Blair and Robertson, 30:243, 1906).
THE MAÑGGUÁÑGANS
This tribe occupies the towns of Tagusab and Pilar on the upper Agúsan, the range between the Sálug and the Agúsan, the headwaters of the Mánat River, and the water-shed between the Mánat and the Mawab. The physical type of many of them bespeaks an admixture of Negrito blood, and their timidity and, on occasions, their utter lack of good judgment, brand them as the lowest people, after the Mamánuas, in eastern Mindanáo. One authority, a Jesuit missionary, I think, estimated their number at 30,000. An estimate, based on the reports of the people of Compostela, places their number at 10,000 just before my departure from the Agúsan Valley in 1910. The decrease, if the two estimates are correct, is probably due to intertribal and interclan wars.