Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/142

HH> A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. subjugated or destroyed by the Seminoles. The Coloosas, the last remnant of those Florida Indians, had been driven to some of the Keys lying near the southern extremity of the peninsula. "Even here the water did not protect them against the inroads from the Creeks; and, in 1763, the remnant of this people, consisting of about eighty families, left this last possession of their native land and went to the Havanna."

The accounts of the attempt by the French, in the years 1562-1567, to make a settlement on the coast of Florida and Georgia, prove also clearly that the Indians in that quarter, instead of being united under a confederate government, were divided into a number of small, independent tribes, always at war with each other. None of those now remains, unless some may have been incorporated in the Creek confederacy. The few words which have been preserved of their language appear, with two exceptions, foreign to the Muskhogee and to the Choctaw. Those two are Antipola, Bonnason, by which the Indians greeted the French, on their arriving amongst them the second time, and which meant "Friends." Itapela in Choctaw means "allies," literally, "They help each other." In the Muskhogee inhisse is "his friends," and ponhisse, "our friends."

If we were to place implicit faith in the accounts given by Garcilaso de la Vega of the number of Indians in various places, we should infer a greater population than was found to exist one hundred and fifty years later. Considering the sources from which he derived his information, the proneness of common soldiers to swell the number of enemies, and the habitual and notorious exaggerations of the Spaniards of his time, we will in that respect give the preference to the more sober statements of the Portuguese narrator, who kills only two thousand five hundred Indians by the fire and sword at the storming of Mauvila, whilst Garcilaso swells the number to eleven