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inconsiderable band in the
Creek confederacy, and
are known as a distinct family, not from political organization, but from their singularly harsh and guttural language.
When first discovered, they were but a remnant,—bewildering the inquirer by favoring the conjecture, that, from the north and west, tribe may have pressed upon tribe; that successions of nations may have been exterminated by invading nations; that even languages, which are the least perishable monument of the savages, may have become extinct.
VII.
The
Natchez, also, are now merged in the same confederacy; but they, with the Taensas, were known to history as a distinct nation, residing in scarcely more than four or five villages, of which the largest rose near the banks of the
Mississippi.
That they spoke but a dialect of the Mobilian, is an infer-
ence which the memoirs of
Dumont would have war ranted, and which more recent travellers have con-
firmed, without reservation,—while the diffuse
Du Pratz represents them as using at once the Mobilian and a
radically different speech of their own. The missionary station among them was assigned to Franciscans; and the Jesuits who have written of them are silent
respecting the tongue, which they themselves had no
occasion to employ.
The opinion of the acute Vater was in favor of its original character; and, by the
persevering curiosity of
Gallatin, it is at last known that the
Natchez were distinguished from the tribes around them less by their customs and the degree of their civilization than by their language, which, as far as comparisons have been instituted, has no etymological affinity with any other whatever.
Here, again, the imagination too readily kindles to invent theories; and the tradition has been widely received, that the dominion
