The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 27, July 1923 - April, 1924 Page: 304
344 p. : maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
The casting away at Mal-Hado was at the division line between two
different stocks of Indians, both of which used canoes, and sustained
themselves mainly on fish, oysters and seacane roots; and who did not
eat tunas. Attempts to make their way "toward Panuco" led them
among other tribes-a coastal people, who used canoes, moved about
little, and fed principally on fish; and an interior people, who wintered
on or near a river, or rivers, within ten leagues of the coast, where there
were many nuts; and who journeyed, each summer "more than forty
leagues," toward Pnuco to eat tunas during a ripening season of fifty
or sixty days. They escaped from these last Indians in the tuna region,
and joined others who lived "further on," among the tunas, and who
also fed on the mesquite, in its various stages; but who, in winter, sub-
sisted entirely on roots, and not on mescale, or any form or species of
lechuguilla or maguey. After a forward journey among a similar people,
inland, but still within speaking distance of the coast, they turned
away, directly to the north, and journeyed eighty leagues along the
skirts of the first mountains they had seen, until they met people of
another stock, who gave them, besides tunas, buffalo hides and piiones.
Thence they journeyed, amongst a similar people, first through thirty
leagues of valleys and plains thence across fifty leagues of barren moun-
tains, to a big river, the water of which came to their chests, and for-
ward to a plain where they met another roving people from "afar";
thence thirty leagues or more to the west to a nation of buffalo hunters;
who lived on a river which flowed between mountains where, in ordi-
nary seasons, they planted crops; the most settled people they had found
since leaving Aute. These Indians guided them for seventeen days "up
that river toward the north," and for a journey of the same length west-
ward to a settled people who grew abundant crops of melons, pumpkins,
maize, and beans among whom they traveled until they heard news of
other Spaniards, on a river previously discovered by Diego de Guzman.
The division line between the Attacapan and Karankawan tribes was
in the region of Galveston Bay; and La Salle, in 1686, found Cabeza
de Vaca's weeping Indians, on a river in that region. The coastal people
on the islands westward were the Karankawan tribes on the Texan islands,
whose habits, customs and mode of life changed little from those de-
picted by Oviedo and Cabeza de Vaca prior to their extermination by
the American colonists in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth
century; their inland neighbors, who made annual journeys from
nuts to tunas, certainly wintered on the Guadalupe and San Antonio
rivers and summered among the tunas south of the Nueces and north
of the sand; the absence of mezcale and other products of the maguey
family of plants among the Avavares and their neighbors definitely
locates those tribes within well defined limits on either side of the Rio
Grande delta; the mention of piiones and buffalo robes among the next
tribes encountered requires a northerly journey of many leagues to a
meeting with people who had them; the semi-settled people who hunted
buffaloes and grew corn and maize on a river that flowed among moun-
tains, could only have been the Jumanos, who then dwelt on the Rio
Grande at its junction with the Conchos and northward; the settled
villages where abundant crops were regularly grown, were, definitely,
the Opata settlements in what is now Sonora.304
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 27, July 1923 - April, 1924, periodical, 1924; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101086/m1/310/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.