SOUTHEAST TEXAS INDIAN HOMELAND:
THE BURIAL MOUNDS OF OLD PORT NECHES
By W. T. Block
Reprinted from Beaumont ENTERPRISE, June 30, 1977; February 5, 1984.
Sources: Consult footnotes in W. T. Block, A HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, TEXAS, FROM
WILDERNESS TO RECONTRUCTION (Nederland: 1976), Ch. II, fns. 1-54; W. T. Block, SAPPHIRE
CITY OF THE NECHES: A HISTORY OF PORT NECHES, TEXAS, FROM WILDERNESS TO INDUSTRIALIZATION
(Austin: Eakin Press, 1987). Ch. I, fns. 1-18.
If one were driving today in the vicinity of the rubber industry of
Port Neches, Texas, it would take an imaginative mind to conjure up a vision of Indian
teepees and burial mounds at that site. Yet 200 years ago, that was the location of the
only Indian village in Jefferson County, and nearby stood the mounds where they had buried
their dead for centuries. By 1800, the six huge mounds, comprised of clam, conch, and
oyster shell, were each about fifty feet wide, 15 to 20 feet high, and about 100 yards
long when viewed by the first French fur traders along the Neches River.
Thomas F. McKinney, the river's first cotton keelboatman and
steamboatman, discovered the weed-covered burial mounds while moving bales of cotton from
Nacogdoches County to Sabine Lake. His 7-square-mile, Mexican land grant at Port Neches,
dated April 26, 1831, mentions nothing about the mounds or the presence of Indians,
leaving one to surmise that the Indians had migrated or become extinct before McKinney
arrived.
Tribal traditions held that the Attakapas tribe once inhabited central
Louisiana, and the early Frenchmen named the area around Lafayette "Poste des
Attakapas." After being sorely defeated in battle in that vicinity, the tribesmen
fled westward, occupying the mosquito-infested, marsh regions between Vermilion Bay, La.,
and the San Jacinto River in Texas to a depth of about 30 miles inland. From descriptions
of skeletons in the Port Neches mounds, the Attakapas apparently displaced members of the
Karankawa tribe, causing them to move farther southwest near Galveston. Although speaking
dialects of the same language, the Attakapas were subdivided into six minor tribes, as
follows: the Orcoquisas, Deadose, and Bidais on the Trinity; the Nacazil, or Naquize, on
the lower Neches and Sabine rivers; and the Carcashus,Cocos and Apelusas in Southwestern
Louisiana.
The habitat of the Karankawa tribe after 1800 was the coastline from
Galveston Island to Corpus Christi, but a Spanish source of 1777 maintained that they
accompanied the Attakapas "whenever they can on their robberies." However, a
pitched battle between the Karankawas and about 200 of Jean Lafitte's pirates in 1818
caused the Indians to desert Galveston Island and move farther to the southwest.
Although both tribes possessed a stone-age culture in a hunting
environment, their physical attributes were poles apart otherwise except for their flat
heads. The best source for the Indians of Texas described the Attakapas as possessing
"bodies stout, stature short and heads of large size placed between their
shoulders." The same source described the Karankawas as being "tall, well-built
(and) muscular." That the latter description very nearly matches another, which
follows, suggests that Karankawas were buried at Port Neches as well, and indeed must have
antedated the Attakapas tribe at that location.
Capt. Jack Caswell of Beaumont, who made several trips to Grigsby's
Bluff (Port Neches) to haul shell from the Indian mounds aboard his steamboat, published
this description in the Galveston "News" of Dec. 28, 1896, as follows:
"We brought these shells up on the old steamboat "Rabb."
It took us a long time to handle them, and we made some curious discoveries. We found
several perfect skeletons in the banks, and the people that once lived in them must have
been seven feet tall. We took a bone from a lower leg and held it by Captain Rabb's (leg),
and he is six feet, and the bone was six inches too long for him. We supposed they were
the old Flathead Indians, as the skull from about an inch above the eye socket turned
straight back and was as flat as a pancake clear to the rear end of the head. The
skeletons were arranged in such a manner as to indicate that they were all buried at once
and that Grigsby's Bluff (Port Neches) was a favorite happy hunting ground for the once
extensive tribe of Flathead Indians . . ."
Actually, several tribes scattered out between Texas and Alabama have
been called "Flathead Indians" derisively because of tribal practices of lacing
head boards too tightly and thus disfiguring the skulls of newborn infants. Although it
has achieved a patina of truth, tales of Attakapas cannibalism all stem from a single
source, Simars de Belle Isle, whose stories were published 250 years ago in Europe at a
time when sensationalism about the New World was in vogue. The French naval officer was
stranded on Galveston Island between 1719 and 1721. He was later captured by the Orcoquisa
tribe, and he claimed that they made him eat dried human flesh. Other French officials, A.
de Mezieres and J. B. de Bienville, supported Belle Isle's account, but apparently were
quoting from old French publications. At any rate, they sent their French fur traders to
trade among the Attakapan tribes for years.
Two Louisiana historians take exception to the tribe's reputation as
wandering cannibals. Fred Kniffen claimed they were "undeserving" of their
anthropophagic reputation, and Lauren Post asked, "How did Belle Isle avoid the pot
and the spit and live to write about them?" And indeed, French and English fur
traders lived on the Attakapan rivers for 100 years with apparently no fear of gracing the
Indians' stew pot!
Bernardo de Galvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, reported in 1779
that the 140 Attakapas warriors, recruited into his army during his incursions against the
English on the Mississippi River, "created no disturbances."
The Rev. Fr. Augustin Morfi, a Spanish priest and author of the first
history of Texas to 1779, visited the Port Neches village in 1777 and also drew a crude
map showing the Nacazil village on the west side of the Neches and another on the Sabine
River. Morfi wrote much in his journal about their backward, non-agrarian culture, their
bent for plundering shipwrecks, and their trade with the English, but he said nothing
about cannibalism.
The Port Neches village was maintained principally as a year-round base
for pregnant squaws, the infirmed, and the elderly, and as a winter home due to its
adequate supply of firewood and fresh water. Otherwise, the tribe broke up into family
units during the warmer months, occupying the coastal areas around Sabine Pass and
Johnson's Bayou, La., where alligators, fur animals, sea food, and shell fish flourished.
The Attakapans' diet consisted principally of alligators; flounders,
mullet, and red fish; and oyster, clam, and conch shell fish (hermit crabs), plus any
other small game, such as marsh rabbits, that they might snare, spear, or shoot. In the
winter months, the warriors filled their cypress, dug-out canoes with a variety of shell
fish and paddled them back to Port Neches. After boiling and eating them, the refuse shell
became garbage and the staple ingredient of their burial mounds.
The Indians also slew larger game as well, for great herds of deer, as
well as bears, panthers, and wolves, roamed the sea rim marshes of Sabine Pass and the sea
cane brakes and 'cheniers' of Southwest Louisiana before 1850. John Prescott, during his
1970 excavations of Attakapas fire pits at Johnson's Bayou, La., has revealed a great deal
about their eating habits.
The Attakapas warrior knew no peer at spear-fishing, raking oysters, or
killing alligators. The latter was cooked on beds of charcoal and heated stones, and the
oil was collected by incising cavities along the backbone. The Attakapans rubbed the oil
on their bodies to repel mosquitoes, causing them to emit a particularly offensive odor.
Tribal structure was very lax, each chief ruling his village and the
adjacent waters. They were not subservient to any centralized authority. Around 1775,
Calcatchouk (or "Crying Eagle"), Mermentau, Laccasine, and Celestine le Tortue
were the principal chiefs of the Louisiana branches. Chicouansh was chief of the Nacazil
tribe, whereas Canos, El Gordo, Mateo, and Calzones Colorados were chiefs of the Trinity
villages.
House-building was also quite primitive. In the Lake Charles, La.,
vicinity, the tops of small trees in a circle were bent over and tied together with deer
thongs. Then deer skins, sewn together, were tied down in umbrella fashion to provide for
only minimal protection from the elements.
According to the Houston "Telegraph" of June 2, 1841, the six
burial mounds at Joseph "Grigsby's plantation, twelve miles below Beaumont,"
contained a variety of artifacts, weapons, pottery shards, and bones, and no similar
mounds were known to exist anywhere in Texas except "Bradshaw's Mound near
Nacogdoches." Grigsby's slaves leveled one mound for use as a foundation for the
plantation house and slave cabins. The second mound was leveled for construction material
when Confederate Fort Grigsby was built nearby in October, 1862. Between 1865 and 1893,
three more mounds disappeared, as shell hauled to Beaumont by steamboat to build the
streets and railroad rights-of-way throughout the county.
When William Kennedy, the Texas state geologist, visited Grigsby's
Bluff in 1893, he reported that the single Indian mound there was "about 150 yards
long, from 15 to 20 yards wide, and from 10 to 15 feet high," and contained
"remains of human workmanship in the shape of broken pottery, arrow heads, etc."
(AMERICAN GEOLOGIST, 1893, XIII, 269). In 1905, a published biography of Grigsby recorded
that the shells at Grigsby's Bluff "were carried there by the aboriginal settlers of
the land. Pieces of human bones and animals have been found there, and specimens of broken
pottery, blackened by fire, are found among the shells." F. Stratton's STORY OF
BEAUMONT recorded how the Beaumont pioneers often searched for arrow heads at Grigsby's
Bluff, and the Galveston "News" of 1885 and 1886 described the excursion voyages
of steamboats from Beaumont, Orange, Sabine Pass, and Johnson's Bayou which came to
Grigsby's Bluff each July 4th to picnic, fish, fry fish, play baseball, and hunt Indian
artifacts.
After 1700, the decline and extinction of the Attakapas tribe seemed to
have been predestined. The Attakapans numbered about 3,500 then, dwindling to 175 in 1805
in Louisiana, and to only nine in 1908. In 1806, the Louisiana tribes petitioned the
Spanish governor to resettle in Spanish Texas, but there is no record in Pichardo's
TREATISE ON THE LIMITS OF LOUISIANA of that year that any such migration took place.
Likewise, there is no record of any Texas Indian treaty with any
Attakapas tribe at either Bird's Fort of Tehuacana Creek in 1843 and 1844. Most of the
Deadose and Bidais tribes died of small pox about 1800, and the 30 or 40 survivors had
been absorbed into the Brazos Reservation tribes, and were later resettled in Oklahoma.
In 1820, Juan A. Padilla, a Spanish official, claimed that the
Orcoquisa, Bidais, and Nacazil tribes still contained 800 Indians, a figure grossly
inflated because Padilla was quoting from Morfi's journal of 1777. However, Padilla did
leave the only record which describes the Neches River Indians by tribal name, but at a
time after they were already long extinct, as follows:
"The Nacazil live on the Neches River near the lagoons where it
empties into the sea. They number about two hundred. Their customs are simple. They are
fond of hunting and fishing; they frequent the sea coast and visit Atascosita when our
troops are stationed there.They are skilled in the management of canoes and they go in
them to Opelousas and Calcasieu with their products. They drink all kinds of liquors of
which they are very fond."
Concerning the ultimate demise of Port Neches' Nacazil tribe, the
century-old mystery remains unsolved. Certainly one possibility was the hurricane of 1780,
acknowledged as the worst Caribbean killer of all time. Striking almost every island in
the Antillean chain and destroying two entire British and French naval fleets, preparing
to do battle, the storm killed 50,000 people, mostly in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santa
Domingo, before blowing itself out on the Texas Coast. In June, 1785, at a time when the
Nacazil warriors would be at the sea coast, Don Jose de Evia's expedition mapped and
sounded Sabine Lake and its tributaries. His journal noted the presence of some Indians on
the Calcasieu River, but it made no mention of Indians near Sabine Lake and the Sabine and
Neches Rivers. About 1962, machinery grading a new road bed in south Cameron Parish, near
Grand Chenier, plowed up thousands of Indian skeletons, buried altogether in a sandy marsh
ridge. Obviously, they had met death by some violent means, probably drowned by a tidal
wave of a hurricane. Hence, some unknown act of God probably accounted for the abrupt
disappearance of the Nacazil tribe as well.
For lack of any evidence to the contrary, as well as the fact that no
presence of Indians is recorded in the earliest Jefferson County archives, the Mexican
land grants after 1825, or the Atascosita Census of 1826, the writer concludes that the
Attakapas tribesmen in Jefferson County were extinct by the time of the first Anglo
settlement here in 1824. One pioneer, Gilbert Stephenson, crossed Jefferson and Orange
counties on foot in 1824 without seeing a single human. And William Fairfax Gray, a
straggler of the Runaway Scrape, spent a night at Grigsby's Plantation on April 20, 1836,
a visit well-recorded in his diary, but he made no mention of the presence of Indians
there.
Today, only occasional arrow heads and pottery shards remain to be
found, usually along the shores of Sabine Lake, mute testimonials indeed to the
highly-skilled fishermen who occupied Port Neches, Texas, more then two centuries ago.
