SW.ANTOX] INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 17

moved farther south and settled on a small bayou at the head of
Grand lake which came to be known by their name. Some after-
ward interinarried with tile Chitimacha, and Chitimarcha of Tainsa
blood are still living, but the tribe, as such, has disappeared from
sight, whether by death or migration being unknown. lBrinton is
mistaken, therefore, regarding the possibility of linguistic material
having been collected from them in 1827 or 1828. The improbable
part of the story is that a tribe which numbered lbut 25 men iln 15'.
should, twelnt-two years later, and after all had been living together
for a hundred years. retain two distinguislable dialects. There were,
indeed, two tribes called Taensa, though as yet the writer has
found but one reference to the second under that name, but the state-
nments of the grammar regarding them do not fit the facts. (atschet,
with strange inlconsistencvy, strives to identify one division with the
Tangipahoa, though at the same time admitting that these probably
spoke a dialect of Choctaw." The second Taensa tribe, or "little
Taeinsas," spoken of 1) I lerville were another people wlo lived west
of the Mississippi and were evidentl identical with the Avoyel.1' But
while the languages spoken by the Talnsa proper and the Avoyel
may have been two dialects of the same tongue, the tribes speaking
them correspond not at all with those described by the grammar. Ac-
cording to that authority the northern dialect was current among
those who spent most of their time in hunting and were less refined.
while the southern dialect was among the more refined Tainsa living
along the Mississippi. On the contrary, the more refined of these two
tribes, Taensa and Avoyel, were the former, who lived to the north
but whose home was not along the Mississippi but on an oxbow
cut-off west of it now known as Lake St. Joseph. The Avoyel, on
the other hand, lived to the south and west on Red river. There
is no evidence, however, that the Tainsai and Avoyel lived together
in historic times, and in 1805 Sibley states that all that remained of
the latter were 2 or 3 women on Washita river. The chance in
1827 of collecting the more polished southern dialect," on which
more stress is laid than on the other, would thus seem to have been
very slight. As we have seen, it developed in the course of the con-
troversy that all of the manuscripts could not have been in Spanish,
but that even a small part of them should be in that language is sur-
prising. During the Spanish occupation of Louisiana it is true that
many Spaniards settled in the country, but the presence of a Spanish
Taensa manuscript in Europe would almost necessitate the supposi-
tion that it had been written by an intelligent Spanish traveler, and
the records do not teem with instances of intellectual Spaniards
burying themselves in the canebrakes of Louisiana after its cession
 La Langu, e Taensa, xvii-xix, Paris, 1882. See p. 26.
 83220-- nll.4--10--2