"Among the aboriginal tribes of the United States perhaps none is more enigmatical than the Apalaches. They are mentioned as an important nation by many of the early French and Spanish travellers and historians, their name is preserved by a bay and river on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and by the great eastern coast range of mountains, and has been applied by ethnologists to a family of cognate nations that found their hunting grounds from the Mississippi to the Atlantic and from the Ohio river to the Florida Keys; yet, strange to say, their own race and place have been but guessed at." The derivation of the name of the Apalaches "has been a 'questio vexata' among Indianologists." We must "consider it an indication of ancient connections with the southern continent, and in itself a pure Carib word. 'Apáliché' in the Tamanaca dialect of the Guaranay stem on the Orinoco signifies 'man,' and the earliest application of the name in the northern continent was as the title of the chief of a country, 'l'homme par excellence,' and hence, like very many other Indian tribes (Apaches, Lenni Lenape, Illinois), his subjects assumed by eminence the proud appellation of 'The Men.' ... We have ... found that though no general migration took place from the continent southward, nor from the islands northward, yet there was a considerable intercourse in both directions; that not only the natives of the greater and lesser Antilles and Yucatan, but also numbers of the Guaranay stem of the southern continent, the Caribs proper, crossed the Straits of Florida and founded colonies on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; that their customs and language became to a certain extent grafted upon those of the early possessors of the soil; and to this foreign language the name Apalache belongs. As previously stated, it was used as a generic title, applied to a confederation of many nations at one time under the domination of one chief, whose power probably extended from the Alleghany mountains on the north to the shore of the Gulf; that it included tribes speaking a tongue closely akin to the Choktah is evident from the fragments we have remaining. ... The location of the tribe in after years is very uncertain. Dumont placed them in the northern part of what is now Alabama and Georgia, near the mountains that bear their name. That a portion of them did live in this vicinity is corroborated by the historians of South Carolina, who say that Colonel Moore, in 1703, found them 'between the head-waters of the Savannah and Altamaha.' ... According to all the Spanish authorities, on the other hand, they dwelt in the region of country between the Suwannee and Appalachicola rivers--yet must not be confounded with the Apalachicolos. ... They certainly had a large and prosperous town in this vicinity, said to contain 1,000 warriors. ...