Tahue

The Tahue were the farming people of central Sinaloa, between the Piaxtla and Mocorito rivers, around the later city of Culiacán. Their villages were grouped into small nations held together by shared speech and tradition. They grew maize, beans, squash and cotton, wove cotton into clothing, and played the Mesoamerican ballgame.

Their Tahue language is poorly recorded and extinct, counted among the lost Uto-Aztecan tongues perhaps related to Cahita. In 1531 the conquistadors Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán and Lázaro de Cebreros overran the valley and founded the Villa de San Miguel, the future Culiacán, on Tahue land, drawing the region into the Spanish province of Nueva Galicia.