Tawasa Erotic

The Tawasa were a small Native people of the Gulf South, recorded from 1540 into the early 1800s in what is now central Alabama and the Florida panhandle, who did not die out so much as fold into the Alabama towns of the Creek Confederacy. Their descendants are counted today among the Alabama-Coushatta of Texas, the Coushatta of Louisiana, and the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town in Oklahoma. What marks them out is how much of their story hangs on one man. In 1707 a Tawasa named Lamhatty walked into the Virginia settlements. He had been seized by slave raiders, marched north, traded to Shawnee captors, and had escaped on foot. The colonists who questioned him kept a map he drew and a list of about sixty words. That list is the entire surviving record of the Tawasa language. Lamhatty himself later slipped away from Virginia and was never heard of again.

Linguists have argued over those words ever since. Many line up with Timucua, the language of northern Florida, which would make Tawasa the only known relative, or an outlying dialect, of a tongue otherwise without kin. Others look Muskogean, close to Alabama, which may reflect borrowing or towns of mixed speech. Sixty words cannot settle it.

The Spanish met them first. Hernando de Soto's army stopped in 1540 at a town the chroniclers wrote as Toasi, generally placed on the upper Alabama River near present Montgomery. By the late 1600s they are usually placed farther southeast, toward the Apalachicola country on the edge of Spanish Florida's mission provinces. It was a bad place to be. In the first years of the 1700s, English-armed raiders out of Carolina and their Native allies swept the region taking captives for the slave market, and the Tawasa towns, which Lamhatty numbered at ten, were broken. Survivors went to the French at Mobile, who settled them nearby. After the French built Fort Toulouse at the head of the Alabama River in 1717, the Tawasa moved back upriver and lived beside the Alabama, keeping a town under their own name into the era of the Creek War.

The record says little about daily life that would set them apart from neighboring river towns, which farmed corn in the bottomlands and governed themselves town by town. After the Treaty of Fort Jackson took that land in 1814, the Tawasa moved with the Alabama, some west to Louisiana and Texas, others later to Indian Territory under removal. No community carries the name today. What remains is a captive's hand-drawn map and sixty words that still give specialists something to argue about.