Of this small and obscure Indian community mention is made much
earlier than of all the other tribes hitherto spoken of in this
volume, for Cabeça de Vaca, in his _Naufragios_, mentions them among
the inland tribes as Atayos. In the list of eight Caddo villages,
given by a Taensa guide to L. d'Iberville on his expedition up the Red
river (March 1699), they figure as the Natao (Margry IV, 178).
The Adái, Atá-i, Háta-i, Adayes (incorrectly called _Adaize_) seem to
have persisted at their ancient home, where they formed a tribe
belonging to the Caddo confederacy. Charlevoix (Hist. de la Nouvelle
France, ed. Shea VI, p. 24) relates that a Spanish mission was founded
among the Adaes in 1715. A Spanish fort existed there, seven leagues
west of Natchitoches, as late as the commencement of the nineteenth
century. Baudry de Lozières puts their population at one hundred men
(1802), and Morse (1822) at thirty, who then passed their days in
idleness on the Bayou Pierre of Red river. Even at the present time
they are remembered as a former division of the Caddo confederacy, and
called Háta-i by the Caddo, who are settled in the southeastern part
of the Indian Territory.
A list of about 300 Adái words was gathered in 1802 by Martin Duralde,
which proves it to be a vocalic language independent of any other,
though a few affinities are traceable with the Pani dialects. The
orthography of that vocabulary cannot, however, be fully relied on.
The original is in the library of the American Philosophical Society,
in Philadelphia. Rob. G. Latham, in his "Opuscula; Essays, chiefly
philological," etc., London 1860; pp. 402-404, has compared Adahi
words with the corresponding terms of other North American languages,
but without arriving at a definite result.