The Tangipahoa were a Native American tribe that lived just north of Lake Pontchartrain and between the Pearl River and the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...

Etymology

The name Tangipahoa is derived from the

Muskogean Muskogean ( ; also Muskhogean) is a language family spoken in the Southeastern United States. Members of the family are Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Typologically, Muskogean languages are highly synthetic and agglutinative. One docume ...

words ''(tonche pahoha)'' which translates to "corncob people" or "people of the corn" or "corncob". It is from this Native American tribe that the modern Tangipahoa Parish gets its name, as well as the Tangipahoa River and the village of Tangipahoa.

Population

Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville (16 July 1661 – 9 July 1706) or Sieur d'Iberville was a French soldier, explorer, colonial administrator, and trader. He is noted for founding the colony of Louisiana in New France. He was born in Montreal to French ...

wrote that in the year 1650 the population of both the Acolapissa and Tangipahoa combined consisted of 250 families and around 150 men. However the research by

James Mooney James Mooney (February 10, 1861 – December 22, 1921) was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great ...

determined that a more accurate count was proposed by

Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe (4 February 1683 in Saint-Malo – 26 September 1765) was a French explorer who is credited with using the name "Little Rock" in 1722 for a stone outcropping on the bank of the Arkansas River used by early travele ...

when he found that the tribe population was around 1500 people.

Language

The Tangipahoa language was closely related to

Choctaw The Choctaw ( ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States, originally based in what is now Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The Choctaw language is a Western Muskogean language. Today, Choct ...

and

Chickasaw The Chickasaw ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, United States. Their traditional territory was in northern Mississippi, northwestern and northern Alabama, western Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. Their language is ...

, which are both

Muskogean languages Muskogean ( ; also Muskhogean) is a language family spoken in the Southeastern United States. Members of the family are Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Typologically, Muskogean languages are highly synthetic and agglutinative. One documen ...

History

On March 31, 1682

Henri de Tonti Henri de Tonti (born Enrico Tonti; – September 1704) was an Italian-born French military officer and explorer who assisted René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle during the French colonization of the Americas from 1678 to 1686."A tour of M ...

on a journey with

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (; November 22, 1643 – March 19, 1687), was a 17th-century French explorer and North American fur trade, fur trader in North America. He explored the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada ...

wrote that they camped at Maheoula, a Tangipahoa settlement.

claimed that the Tangipahoa settlement was an Acolapissa settlement and that they were of the same tribe. The Tangipahoa settlement was destroyed sometime in the 17th century. When La Salle reached the village he said he saw that it was burned and that there were bodies laying in the village. La Salle wrote that when he asked the Bayogoula tribe what had happened they claimed that the Tangipahoa village was destroyed by the Houma people. The remaining Tangipahoa tribe members are believed to have reunited with the Acolapissa and eventually merged with the Bayogoula and then the Houma.

Etymology

Population

Language

History

References

Further reading