Cayas

The Cayas were the people of a province on the Cayas River, now the Arkansas, reached by De Soto's expedition in 1541. Tanico held salt-makers who turned salty sand into brine, evaporated it and traded across the Mississippi valley. Tanico later named the Tunica, whose language is regarded as an isolate; linguists count the Cayas among the Tunican chiefdoms of the Mississippian world.

Epidemics and a century and a half of silence followed. When French travelers descended the Mississippi in 1682, the Tunica had left the Arkansas for the Yazoo mouth, old lands held by the Quapaw.

A French mission began among the Tunica around 1700; they prospered as salt and horse middlemen, trading with Caddoan villages to the west. Chickasaw wars and Anglo settlement drove them to the lower Mississippi in 1731 and Louisiana's Red River by the 1790s, where a commissioner counted only about twenty-five Tunica men in 1806.