Note 263 — Chapter V · —Geographical Location

Not only are villages and encampments widely dispersed, but also the tribal territories. The Tupis were found by the Portuguese explorers along the coast of eastern Brazil and in the interior from the mouth of the La Plata to the lower Amazon, while two distant tribes of the Tupis were dropped down amid a prevailing Arawak population far away among the foothills of the Andes in two separate localities on the western Amazon.263 [See map page 101.] The Athapascans, from their great compact northern area between Hudson Bay, the Saskatchewan River, and the Eskimo shores of the Arctic Ocean sent southward a detached offshoot comprising the Navajos, Apaches and Lipans, who were found along the Rio Grande from its source almost to its mouth; and several smaller fragments westward who were scattered along the Pacific seaboard from Puget Sound to northern California.264 The Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and the Tuscaroras of eastern North Carolina were detached groups of the Iroquois, who had their chief seat about the lower Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Virginia and North Carolina harbored also several tribes of Sioux,265 who were also represented in southern Mississippi by the small Biloxi nation, though the chief Sioux area lay between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan rivers. Similarly the Caddoes of Louisiana and eastern Texas had one remote offshoot on the Platte River and another, the Arikaras, on the upper Missouri near its great bend. [See map page 54.] But the territory of the Caddoes, in turn, was sprinkled with Choctaws, who belonged properly east of the Mississippi, but who in 1803 were found scattered in fixed villages or wandering groups near the Bayou Teche, on the Red River, the Washita, and the Arkansas.266 Their villages were frequently interspersed with others of the Biloxi Sioux.