Page:A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages.djvu/18

 within a short time.” In 1758 governor De Kerlérec reports that “for some years some Indian families of the offogoula nation, the remains of a fairly numerous nation which the Chikachas have not ceased to persecute, have established themselves [at Natchez]; they are housed under the cannon of the fort, and in war expeditions they join our troops in order to pursue our enemies.” He gives the number of their warriors as fifteen, In 1784 Hutchins states that they had a small village of about a dozen warriors on the western bank of the Mississippi, eight miles above Point Coupée, and it is evident that Baudry de Lozières is only recalling earlier conditions when at about the same period he puts them back in their old situation along with the Koroa and Yazoo. On March 22, 1764, it is recorded that “The Ossogoulas, Chaktas, Avoyelles, and Tonicas,” to the number of thirty men, attacked an English convoy of pirogues, and in two somewhat in advance of the rest killed six men and wounded seven, thereby causing the expedition to be abandoned. The reason assigned for this attack was their refusal to give up a slave who had fled to them.

After 1784 no mention of this tribe appears in histories or books of travel, and it was naturally supposed that it had long been extinct, when in November, 1908, the writer had the good fortune to find an Indian woman belonging to this tribe, of which she is the last representative, who remembered a surprising number of words of her language, when it is considered that the rest of her people had died when she was a girl. She appears to have learned most of these from her old grandmother, who was also responsible for the positive statement that the name of their tribe was Ofo. This woman, Rosa Pierrette, is living with the Tunica remnant near Marksville, La., and her husband belongs to the Tunica tribe. Already in May, 1907, the writer had heard from the Tunica chief of the comparatively late existence of representatives of the Ofo, but from the fact that the one word this man could remember contained an initial f, it was assumed that it belonged to the Muskhogean linguistic family. It was therefore a surprising and most interesting discovery that the Ofogoula of French writers must be added to the Biloxi as a second representative of the Siouan family in the region of the lower Mississippi. In the use of an f it is peculiar, but its affinities appear to be first with the Biloxi and the eastern Siouan tribes rather than with the nearer Quapaw and the other Siouan dialects of the West.