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THE HASINAIS. Southern Caddoans as Seen by the Earliest EuropeansTHE HASINAIS. Southern Caddoans as Seen by the Earliest Europeans. Herbert Eugene Bolton. Paperback, (1987), repr. 2002, Illus., Index, 208 pp.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Herbert Eugene Bolton became the preeminent historian and bibliographer of the Spanish Borderlands, renowned for his many scholarly works on the Spaniards in the American Southwest. It is not as well known, however, that at the outset of his illustrious career, at the University of Texas, Bolton planned a comprehensive study of the Indians of Texas. In 1906 - 1908 he completed a work on the Hasinais, a little-known Caddoan group of east Texas (the tribe, incidentally, whose word for greeting gave Texas its name). At that stage the Indian history project was shelved, when Bolton left Texas first for Stanford University and then for the University of California at Berkeley. Over the years fellow scholars urged Bolton to publish "The Hasinais," but other endeavors intervened, and until the present edition the manuscript remained in relative obscurity amid his other papers in California�s Bancroft Library, where they have reposed since his death in 1953. Bolton�s work, an account of the Hasinais from the late seventeenth century through the 1770s, was the result of prodigious research in the then little-mined Spanish archives in Texas and Mexico. Bolton soon realized that the Spanish documents shed light not only on the history of the region but also on the Indians and their culture. He found that bits of extinct Indian languages and lifeways could be reconstructed from the Spanish records. And so Bolton the historian became Bolton the ethnologist. In writing this account, Bolton used original diaries, reports, and correspondence, some of which has since been published. #SE-04 |