Migratory dispositions seem to have inhered to the Tonica or Tunica
tribe in a higher degree than to their southern neighbors, for in the
short lapse of two centuries we see them stationed at more than three
places.
In a letter addressed by Commander Lemoyne d'Iberville to the Minister
of the French Navy, dated from Bayogoulas, February 26th, 1700, he
states that an English fur-trader and Indian slave-jobber had just
visited the Tonica, who are on a river emptying into the Mississippi,
twenty leagues above the Taensa Indians, at some distance from the
Chicasa, and 170 leagues from the Gulf of Mexico. When d'Iberville
ascended the Yazoo river in the same year, he found a village of this
tribe on its right (or western) bank, four days' travel from the
Natchez landing. Seven villages were seen upon this river, which is
navigable for sixty leagues. The Tonica village, the lowest of them,
was two days' travel from Thysia, the uppermost (Margry IV, 180. 362.
398; V, 401). La Harpe mentions the establishment of a mission house
among the Tonica on Yazoo river.[30]
[Footnote 30: French, Hist. Coll. III, 16; cf. Margry V, 525.
The names of these villages to be given under Chicasa, q. v.]
In 1706, when expecting to become involved in a conflict with the
Chicasa and Alibamu Indians, the Tonica tribe, or a part of it, fled
southward to the towns of the Huma, and massacred a number of these
near the site where New Orleans was built afterwards (French, Hist.
Coll. of La., III, 35). The "Tunica Old Fields" lay in Tunica county,
Mississippi State, opposite Helena, Arkansas. Cf. Cha'hta.
They subsequently lived at the Tonica Bluffs, on the east shore of the
Mississippi river, two leagues below the influx of the Red river. T.
Jefferys, who in 1761 gave a description of their village and chief's
house, states that they had settled on a hill near the "River of the
Tunicas," which comes from the Lake of the Tunicas, and that in close
vicinity two other villages were existing (Hist. of French Dominions,
I, 145-146).[31] Th. Hutchins, Louisiana and West Florida, Phila.,
1784, p. 44, locates them a few miles below that spot, opposite Pointe
Coupée and ten miles below the Pascagoulas, on Mississippi river. So
does also Baudry de Lozières in 1802, who speaks of a population of
one hundred and twenty men.
[Footnote 31: This was probably the place where Le Page du Pratz
saw them (about 1720 or 1725): "vis-à-vis de la Rivière Rouge,"
II, 220-221.]
In 1817, a portion of the tribe, if not the whole, had gone up the Red
river and settled at Avoyelles, ninety miles above its confluence
with the Mississippi. A group of these Indians is now in Calcasieu
county, Louisiana, in the neighborhood of Lake Charles City.
A separate chapter has been devoted to this tribe, because there is a
strong probability that their language differed entirely from the rest
of the Southern tongues. Le Page du Pratz, l.l., in confirming this
statement, testifies to the existence of the sound R in their
language, which occurs neither in Naktche nor in the Maskoki dialects
or Shetimasha (II, 220-221). We possess no vocabulary of it, and even
the tribal name belongs to Chicasa: túnnig _post, pillar, support_,
probably post of territorial demarcation of their lands on the Yazoo
river. The only direct intimation which I possess on that tongue is a
correspondence of Alphonse L. Pinart, who saw some Tonica individuals,
and inferred from their terms that they _might_ belong to the great
Pani stock of the Western plains.