In 1721, the mission San Miguel Linares de los Adaes and the presidio of Nuestra Senora del Pilar de los Adaes were established in eastern Louisiana approximately fifteen miles from the French fort and settlement of St. John Baptiste des Natchitoches. Although few records exist from Los Adaes, later census records from Nacogdoches list thirteen of our families as “natives of the extinguished mission of Los Adaes.” The mission and presidio existed until 1773, when the Spanish government no longer considered it necessary or financially feasible to keep it in operation. With only days notice, the inhabitants were forced to abandon Los Adaes and to move to San Antonio. As an old aunt said, “we were vassals of the crown”, so the people had very little choice in the matter.

     Unable to find land on which to farm, the Adaesanos (as they came to be known) petitioned the Spanish government to allow them to move back to Los Adaes. This request was denied, but they were allowed to establish themselves on the Trinity River at Bucareli. Flooding of the river, and attacks by the Comanche, once again led to requests to be allowed to move, but with no response forthcoming from the Spanish…the people took it upon themselves to reestablish the abandoned mission at Nacogdoches. Once there, the Spanish government did not interfere and they pursued the livelihood they knew best, trade. Trading is what prevented them from being allowed to return to Los Adaes since their trading partners were the French of Natchitoches. Spanish laws forbid trading with the French and this was a constant source of problems for the people of Los Adaes. However, with the nearest Spanish settlement being San Antonio, it was almost essential that they have a trading relationship with Natchitoches. So, illegal or not they traded with the French up to and following their removal to Texas.

     At Nacogdoches, one important trading partner of the Adaesanos was the Lipan Apache. Apache slaves had been sold at Natchitoches and Los Adaes, primarily women and children, and were taken as concubines or wives, and they became an integral part of the Adaesanos families. Four additional Lipan families joined the thirteen Adaes families while in Nacogdoches, bringing the total number of families to seventeen.

     After the Louisiana Purchase, Dr. John Sibley became Indian Agent for the region and he settled families, groups, and bands of various tribes between the Mississippi and Sabine Rivers. Four of those families were Choctaw who he moved to the area that was our ancestral lands. The Adaesanos, returning to Louisiana after 1835, found that these four families had intermarried with our people who had remained in the area, and this brought our total to twenty-one families. Oral histories of the four Choctaw families state that they had come from Mississippi.

     The first U.S. census done in Sabine Parish, 1850, listed all but a few of our families on the eastern side of the Sabine, but by the 1870 census all twenty-one families were accounted for.    This is where they have remained to this day, and according to anthropologists…they became “an endogamous enclave”. In other words, they kept to themselves, avoided outsiders, and kinship ties became so strong that at one time (prior to WWII) kinship was upwards of seventy-five percent. After the war, more of what some of our ancestors called “Americans” or “white faces” came into the area and it was inevitable that some mixing occurred. Still, kinship and knowledge of who one’s kin are remain strong.

     Misidentified as Mexican because of general physical appearance, surnames, and a language that was heavy with Spanish, our people suffered a long period of discrimination by outsiders. The language they spoke, however, has been characterized by linguists as an archaic form of Spanish, one that is not spoken either in Mexico or Spain. It is thought that it is what was learned from the missionaries and was added to by Nahuatl and Coahuiltecan, as well as other Indian words, to form a “lingua franca” or trade language. Little remains of the language today, aside from a few words spoken by an ever-shrinking group of elders.

     In the past, healers and medicine people were common but the crafts were not passed on to younger generations. What remains are knowledge of a few medicinal plants, potions, and remembrances…but there are no active practitioners.

    Having been impacted by the Catholic religion nearly three hundred years ago, much of the culture of our people is gone. Again, anthropologists describe us as “racially Indian” but “culturally Spanish-speaking Catholics”. Assimilation had done its part and many of our older people denied that they were Indian. Whether this was due to the facts that Indians could not own property, had no voice in local politics, or any number of other things denied to Indians, is a matter of conjecture. Too, our grandparents were very closely associated, in time, to the Indian wars and removals. And as another old aunt once said, “I am not saying anything about being Indian because I don’t want to be moved to Oklahoma.”