The earliest home of this tribe, which figures extensively in French
colonial history, is a mountainous tract on the western shore of
Mississippi river, eight leagues above the Natchez landing. They were
visited there, early in 1682, by the explorer, C. de la Salle, who
noticed the compression of their skulls (Margry I, 558. 566). They
were a warlike and determined people of hunters. In 1705 a party of
them, hired by the French priest Foucault to convey him by water to
the Yazoos, murderously dispatched him with two other Frenchmen
(Pénicaut, in Margry V, 458). A companion of C. de la Salle (in 1682)
noticed that the "language of the Coroa differed from that of the
Tinsa and Natché," but that in his opinion their manners and customs
were the same (Margry I, 558).
Koroas afterward figure as one of the tribes settled on Yazoo river,
formerly called also River of the Chicasa, and are mentioned there by
D. Coxe, Carolana (1742), p. 10, as Kourouas. They were then the
allies of the Chicasa, but afterward merged in the Cha'hta people, who
call them Kólwa, Kúlua. Allen Wright, descended from a grandfather of
this tribe, states that the term is neither Cha'hta nor Chicasa, and
that the Koroa spoke a language differing entirely from Cha'hta.[38] A
place Kolua is now in Coahoma county, probably far distant from the
ancient home of this tribe. The origin of the name is unknown; the
Cha'hta word: káⁿlo _strong, powerful_, presents some analogy in sound.
[Footnote 38: This is corroborated by the fact that the sound R
did exist in the Koroa language: Jefferys (1761), I, 163.]