The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 62, July 1958 - April, 1959 Page: 86
617 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
March 1st, Father Manuel, head of the mission of the Adayes
[Adai],21 came to say mass at Natchitoches; it was through him
that I learned that Don Martin de Alarc6n had given the order
to settle the Nassonites [Nasonis],22 on the Red River, at two
leagues above the Cadodaquious [Kadohadacho] ;25 that hastened
my voyage.
I got the necessary supplies and took as guide the war chief of
the Natchitoches with twelve of his warriors. This call in port
cost 2,000 livres.
[to be continued]
21The Adai were a sub-tribe of the Caddoan confederacy. D'Iberville on ascending
the Red River (1699), heard of them, and said that they lived on the Red River
near the Yatasi village. The Adai villages, in La Harpe's time, extended from the
Red River southward beyond the Sabine River into Texas. A trail connecting the
villages came to be known infamously as the "contraband trail," used by traders
and travelers between French Louisiana and Spanish Texas. One of their villages
was at present Robeline, Louisiana, on the camino real. In 1716 the Spaniards estab-
lished Mission San Miguel de Linares there. In 1719 Blondel, commander at
Natchitoches, with the Natchitoches and other Caddoan allies, attacked the mission
only shortly after La Harpe's above mention of it. In 1721 the Marquis de Aguayo,
governor of Coahuila and Texas, restored the mission. Presidio Nuestra Sefiora
del Pilar de los Adaes was added and served as the capital of Texas until 1773,
when the Spaniards abandoned East Texas temporarily. They took fourteen Adai
families to San Antonio with them, where their identity disappeared. Wars, whiskey,
and new diseases thinned them so that by 1805 only twenty men and a larger
number of women were reported in a little settlement near Lake Macdon, near
the Red River.
22The Nasonis were a Caddoan tribe. Their main village was about twenty-seven
miles north of Nacogdoches, Texas. The Spaniards had founded Mission San JosA
de los Nazones among them in 1716, near an eastern branch of the Angelina River.
A second village, in which La Harpe says Alarc6n had given orders for Spaniards
to be settled, was in the extreme southeastern corner of Oklahoma on the Red
River. La Harpe was soon to arrive there, and to found his own "Nassonite Post."
28This word seems to have signified the "Caddo proper." This tribe is often
referred to as the "Greater" Caddos, and consequently confused with the Caddo
confederacy itself. The tribe apparently developed in the Red River vicinity, and
seems never to have migrated far from it. In 1541 De Soto probably stopped with
some of its sub-tribes on the Ouachita River. In 1687 some of La Salle's survivors
passed through the village on their way to Canada. La Harpe found them living on
the north bank of the Red River in Little River County, Arkansas, about two
leagues east of the Nassonite village and not far from present Ogden, Arkansas.
They later moved across the river to La Harpe's trading post, where the French had
established a little flour mill. It was here that the Kadohadacho lived in the 1770's.
Osage hostility, French-Spanish disturbances, enmity from tribes pushed westward
among them by the advancing line of white settlement, and smallpox, measles,
and other diseases new to them, reduced their population. Later in the eighteenth
century, they settled in Natchitoches Parish near their kinsmen of that name. By
1805 their identity as a distinct tribe was gone.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 62, July 1958 - April, 1959, periodical, 1959; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101173/m1/106/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.