Note 99 — Chapter III

The Karankawa (Carancahua) were a tribe of Texan Indians whose habitat was the bays and river-openings of the coast south and west from Galveston. They were first known to Europeans through contact with La Salle's colonists, whose remnant they captured. In the eighteenth century the Spanish attempted several missions to this people, but without much success; their contact with whites appeared to have made them more sanguinary and ferocious, and increased their tendencies to cannibalism. Bad treatment by Lafitte's pirate colony made them hostile to the Austin settlers, who in 1825 rallied and inflicted upon them a severe defeat. They made part of the Mexican army in the attack on the Alamo, and after the conclusion of the war kept peace with the Texans through fear of the latter's revenge. Successive hostilities, however, weakened their strength and numbers, and after 1836 the few survivors took refuge in Mexico. There a remnant existed for some years, an attack upon them by some rancheros of Texas, in revenge for robbery, being noted as late as 1858. The tribe is now extinct, but a vocabulary and a knowledge of their manners and customs have been preserved. Consult Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Papers (Cambridge, 1891), i, no. 2.—Ed.