Chapter II: The Southern Taensa

In early colonial times a portion of the Northern Taensa, driven from their homes on the Taensa river by the rage of the Chicasa, fled to the Mobilians. The French settled them on the western side of Mobile bay, below Fort St. Louis, and thirty miles above Fort Condé, which stood on the site of the present city of Mobile.[24] The French called them "les petits Taënsas" in contradistinction to the "great (or northern) Taënsas," on Mississippi and Taensa rivers. About the middle of the eighteenth century one hundred of their cabins stood _north_ of the French fort St. Louis, and also north of the Tohome Indian settlement. The Taensa were then speaking their native language and, besides this, a corrupt Chicasa dialect, called the Mobilian language by the French.[25] Subsequently they must have removed from there to the eastern channel, for Bartram, Travels, pp. 401. 403, describes Taensa there as a "pretty high bluff, on the eastern channel of the great Mobile river, about thirty miles above Fort Condé, or city of Mobile, at the head of the bay ... with many artificial mounds of earth and other ruins." During the wars of 1813-15 the adjacent country is called the "Tensaw country."

[Footnote 24: At that time they were warring unsuccessfully
against the Huma (1713); Pénicaut (in Margry V, 508. 509) saw
them at Manchac.]

[Footnote 25: T. Jefferys, Hist. of French Dominions in America;
London, 1761; I, p. 162, sq.]

It is not unlikely that these Taensa were identical with the "petits Taënsas" seen by Lemoyne d'Iberville at the Huma town in March 1700, and described by him as migratory, but living most of the time at three days' distance west of Huma, and then warring against the Bayogoulas. They gained their sustenance by hunting, though buffaloes were scarce in their country, and were men of a fine physique (Margry IV, 408). In 1702 they defeated the Bayogoulas and burnt their village on Mississippi river; the Bayogoulas fled to the French fort on that river, then commanded by Mr. St. Denis. If identical with the Taensa on Mobile river, these fights of theirs must have occurred during their passage from the North to the bay of Mobile.