MOONEY]

ORIGIN OF THE KIOWA APACHE

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Apache from New Mexico are now living with them, and individuals of the two tribes frequently exchange visits, but this friendly intimacy is a matter of only sixty or eighty years' standing, resulting from the peace between the Kiowa and Comanche, as already recorded. They have not migrated from the southwest into the plains country,

FIG. 58-Gray.eagle, a Kiowa Apache subchief but have come with the Kiowa from the extreme north, where they lay the scene of their oldest traditions, including their great medicine story. Their association with the Kiowa antedates the first removal of the latter from the mountains, as both tribes say they have no memory of a time when they were not together. It is probable that the Kiowa

Apache, like the cognate Sarsi, have come down along the eastern base of the Rocky mountains from the great Athapascan hive of the Mackenzie river region instead of along the chain of the Sierras, the line followed by the kindred Tototin, Wailaki, Navaho, and Apache proper, and that, finding themselves too weak to stand alone, they took refuge with the Kiowa, as the Sarsi have done with the Blackfeet.

In regard to this northern origin and early association Clark says, in his valuable work on the sign language: "Tradition locates the Kiowas near and to the southwest of the Black Hills, Dakota, and without doubt they had previous to that time lived near the Missouri river. The Apaches with whom they are now associated were at this time with them." In another place he states that an old Apache told him, about 1881, that he was then about seventy years of age and had been born near Missouri river, northeast of the Black Hills (Clark, 10). Keim chooses to call them Lipan, in which he is mistaken, the Lipan being still another Athapascan tribe living farther south, and states that "these people are improperly known as Apaches and so called in the official documents of the government. They say of themselves that they are not Apaches, that the Apaches live away to the west." He says that they have a tradition of having formerly lived in the Bad-lands of Dakota, whence they drifted to the south, but adds somewhat naively that there is no other authority for this than their own story (Keim, 4).

As the Apache are practically a part of the Kiowa in everything but language, they need no extended separate notice. Curiously enough their authentic history begins nearly seventy years earlier than that of the dominant tribe with which they are associated. They are first mentioned by the French explorer La Salle, in an undated letter of 1681 or 1682, under the name of Gattacka. Writing from a post in what is now Illinois, he says that the Pana (Pawnee) live more than 200 leagues to the west, on one of the tributaries of the Mississippi, and are "neighbors and allies of the Gattacka and Maurhoet, who are south of their villages, and who sell to them horses, which they probably steal from the Spaniards of New Mexico." In another fragmentary letter of 1682, written from the same place, he proposes to make an overland journey by means of horses, "which may easily be had, as there are many with the savages called Pana, Pancassa, Manrhout, Gataea, Panimaha, and Pasos, who lie somewhat remote, it is true, but yet communication with them is very easy by means of the river of the Missourites, which flows into the river Colbert" (Margry, 1). In modern terms Pana, Pancassa (or Paneassa), Gataea (for Gataca), Panimaha, Missourites, and Colbert are respectively Pawnee, Ponca (?), Kiowa Apache, Pawnee-Maha orMissouri, and Mississippi. Paso is problematic, and Manrhoet or Manrhout, which in both letters is mentioned in connection with the Kiowa Apache, may possibly be some obsolete name for the Kiowa themselves.