TONKAWA, tong-1:5.'1yd (from Hueco tonkaweyn, many staying together). A peculiar tribe, apparently constituting a distinct linguistic stock, originally occupying the coun try about the Lower Colorado and Guadalupe rivers in southeastern Texas. They call them selves Titskan-walieh, 'indigenous men.' They were chiefly noted for their cannibalism. They roved from place to place. built circular, thatched houses, lived entirely by hunting and wild fruits, and were at war with almost all their neighbors, by whom they were hated and despised as eaters.' appear to have had the elan tem and to have paid special reverence to the wolf, whom, it is said, they claimed as their an cestor or teacher. Aceording to their tradition they came from the south, somewhere farther down the coast. having been cut off from the rest of their people by an invasion of the sea. In 1760 some of theni were attached to the San Antonio missions. In 1849 they were reported to number 600 o• 700, who had been driven to the Upper Brazos on account of their depredations among the American settlements near the coast. In the fall of 1855, with several other small Texas tribes, a part of them, to the number of 170, were gathered upon 3 reservation on the Brazos, a few miles below Fort Belknap, hut they were re moved in 1859 to a new reservation on the Wash ita, near the present Anadarko, Oklahoma. Here they remained until the outbreak of the Civil War, when, on the pretext that they were about to enter the Confederate service through the per suasions of their agent, who held a Confederate commission, the other tribes took the opportunity to wipe out old scores. With guns procured from
Fort Gibson a force of about 200 Shawnee, Dela ware, Caddo, and other Indians attacked the agency and the neighboring Tonkawa village near Anadarko on the night of October 25, 1862, and killed one or two of the agency employees and 137 out of a total of about 320 Tonkawa men, women, and children. The Tonkawa made a stout resist ance and inflicted severe loss upon the enemy. The fugitive survivors were gathered up by the Con federate authorities, and for several, years after the war led a vagrant existence in northern Texas, most of the men enlisting as scouts against the Comanche, Kiowa, and other wild tribes, who took every occasion to retaliate, and forced the Tonkawa to keep close to Fort Griffin on the Brazos for protection. In 1875 they were reported to number but 119, in a miserable condition and dependent entirely on the pay of the able-bodied men serving as scouts. In 1882 they were put in charge of a special agent who reported them as numbering then only 93, indolent, poor, honest, and tolerably healthy, living in brush shelters and dependent upon the whites. Two years after wards they were removed to a reservation in northern Oklahoma. Tn 1903 they were reduced to about 50„ and derived their principal income from the leasing of their surplus lands.