Taneks

The Taneks, or Biloxi, were a Siouan-speaking people of the Gulf Coast near the Pascagoula River, where an epidemic devastated their villages shortly before the French arrived.

The French encountered the Biloxi in 1699. Survivors of the epidemic gradually moved west from Mississippi, reaching central Louisiana by the mid-eighteenth century. In 1806 Biloxi villages stood on the Red River and Lake Avoyelles; some families later moved to Texas.