'eight' some more

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 2 May 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> Maj. General Abraham Wood wrote to John Richards in 1674, "Now ye king
> must goe to give ye monetons a visit which were his friends, mony
> signifiying water and ton great in theire language.  Ye monyton towne
> situated upon a very great river att which place ye tide ebbs and
> flowes...."  (Alvord and Bidgood, 1912, 221)  Although there is no
> further reference to this tribe, it seems clear that they were Siouan,
> since maNiN' ~ moNniN' is Tutelo, and indeed common Siouan, for 'water'
> while itâ is 'great, big', with an equally good Siouan pedigree.
> Apparently the trip to the Monytons involved going West over the
> mountains.  The river they lived on is identified as the Kanawha, in WV.

Since I know the old Northwest area like the back of my head, I thought
I'd do a little looking at a map before commenting on the issue of the
proximity of Miami-Illinois and Tutelo or Ioway-Otoe.  I've attached this
somewhat arbitrarily to Bob's reference placing the Moneton town on the
Kanawha.  The Kanawha comes out of southwest Virgina and runs across the
bottom half of West Virginia to join the Ohio.  I don't really have any
problem with this being a pointer to the path of the Tutelo-related groups
eastward or an indicater that they were on both sides of the Appalachians
and perhaps new east of it at contact.  The Tutelo language certainly
didn't originate in Virginia.  It can only have moved there.  The only
question is when and where they might have been at various points before
that.

As I understand Michael, the Miami-Illinois are thought to have moved
west from the Maumee River, which runs east into Lake Eirie at about the
Michigan line, i.e., at Toledo, Ohio.

The Ioway - and so a linguist presumes, the whole Ioway-Otoe-Missouria
complex - are thought to have been associated with the Oneota Orr Focus -
a rather fuzzy older subdivision of Oneota which turns out to refer
generally to the area east and west of the Mississippi and north and south
of the Minnesota-Iowa line.  Archaeologists don't think quite the same way
about lingistic connections that linguists do and spread things even
further by assuming somewhat implausibly that the Ioway-Otoe-Missouria
division goes back to 1000 AD or earlier and assinging Otoe and Missouria
to other divisions of Oneota further west and south.  It's not that
unlikely that there was an Ioway-Otoe-Missouria variant of Mississippi
Valley Siouan in 1000 AD with multiple political subdivisions, of course.
But I don't really see the modern divisions as say, 600 years old at
contact.  Some merging and redividing over time seems more likely.

Ioway-Otoe-Missouri, of course, is extremely close to Winnebago, which
Michael would like to place in the Chicago area, though there are a number
of competing versions and anti-versions of Winnebago origins.  In general
there is a recent tendency to see Illinois as full of Oneota and therefore
possibly Mississippi Valley Siouan groups after about 1400.  One presumes
these groups spoke something like Ioway-Otoe, or Winnebago, or Dhegiha,
and possibly the antecedents of some of these divisions of MVS.

With that set of geographical observations made, I would like to point out
that the mouth of the Maumee (Toledo) is somewhat closer to Chicago than
it is to the mouth of the Kanawha.

There's another problem, too, which is that southern Ohio, including the
mouth of the Kanawha, is within the area of the Ft. Ancient Culture, which
is often associated with Shawnee.  I believe Shawnee isn't (currently)
reported to exhibit any Tutelo influence, and it would seem to be in the
way of the most direct sort of Tutelo-Illinois interactions.  Of course,
if Ft. Ancient is actually Tutelo, things would be more convenient.  Or if
the Tutelo had actually spread south from western Pennsylvania into West
Virginia and western Virginia, rather than west from southern Ohio.  Not
that Pittsburg is really any closer to Toledo than Toledo is to Chicago.

I think that the Tutelo are sometimes associated with the Monongahela
Culture, which was located roughly in western Pennsylvania and northern
West Virginia.  This, of course, is the area where were are more or less
reduced to a collection of placenames (Shawnee, Siouan, and ???) as far as
pre-contact inhabitants and a depopulated wilderness by the time Europeans
were passing through the area.  I have never read any literature directly
on Monongahela.  I have impression it exists to be assigned irrelevant
materials not belonging to a culture from a surrounding area.

It doesn't help a whole lot to see early Ioway-Otoe as confined west of
the Mississippi if Illinois is still mainly Siouan, unless perhaps this
Siouan is Dhegiha.  If it's Winnebago or "unidentified," then we have to
wonder how they said 'eight'.  Modern Winnebago doesn't use anything
relevant, but Illinois is a lot of space, and we might expect some
variation over a Winnebago that filled even northern Illinois.

If the presumed Siouan speakers in Illinois were Tutelo, then we have a
fairly impressive migration on our hands.  Not for a small group, of
course, but certainly for a fairly large and influential one, and we have
to ask why they travelled the direction they would seem to have in the
1400-1650 time span.