Were the Rah, the Agaltecas, and the Cholulatecas in NE Honduras the same?

Who Were the Rah and other Indians in the Mosquitia and What do we Know About them?

According to stories collected by Scott Wood, the Rah were very warlike, and loved to tell stories of war. If a Miskito spent the night in a Rah village,  if he told good war stories, he was welcomed and given food, and sent on his way in the morning. If he did not satisfy the interests of the listeners in war stories, the Rah might eat him. The Rah also had special beliefs in dogs, and if a dog died, the Rah and any Miskito who was visiting them had to stay up all night for the wake of a dog. Scott Wood mentions this, and also part Rah Miskitos like Erasmo Ordoñes. If the Miskito went to bed, he was put to death.  The Nahuas believed that dogs help the soul of the owner cross over to the other side of a river to get to the land of the rain god and the rainbow where they lived after they died, so this might be related to why  the Rah had wakes for dogs.  Not waking the dog might have made him come and get the soul of one of the Rah before they were ready. Many Indians in Honduras including the Pech have wakes so that the spirit of the dead does not come and take another Pech for company for the journey to the land of the dead.

The Miskitos tell a story about how a dog helped a man cross the river to get together with women to be able to create people. David Dominic translated the name of Chichimeca, the Indians who lived in Northern Mexico which would include the Yaqui and the Nahuas before they came to Central America as Dog People, but does not say why he translates it that way. According to the Pech language and Western science, dogs and coyotes are related species. In Pech coyote is paku and the dog, paku akaya, domesticated coyote or chuchu, a word of unknown origen, but related to the Honduran Spanish word for dog chucho. Coyote (a Nahua word) and Dogs both appear in modern Honduran stories or dances (La Coyota, Lenca) of witches (brujos or brujas) who change into animals, and also are related to cadejo stories in which black (bad) or white (good) dogs appear to people to either harm them or warn them. These dogs also can change size, have fire red eyes, and can jump over whole wide rivers like the Ulua in a singe bound.  So dogs are a relevant important of the folklore of much of Honduras, especially in areas with Nahua place names.

Nahua religious leaders were called “nahuat” (witch according to Alberto Membreño and shaman according to Lyle Campbell) and could change into their nahual or nagual (protective animal  spirit which in most cases they acquire at birth), probably an element of Mesoamerican religions since Olmec times, because the words which were borrowed into Honduran Chorti-Maya and in Lenca and into Honduran Spanish. Among Maya Chortis, the word for saint in the Catholic church in the Spanish language “nahualito” is also related to this concept.  The modern Mayan Chorti word for ancestor ceremony and head “tzikim” was used in the Agalta Valley among the Payas (not Pech) of Pacura, Tonjagua and also Catacamas,  to describe an idol made of  ground yucca with a face of amate bark paper in an 1807 religious ceremony of the Indians of the Agalta Valley who ran away from the mission according to the assistant of the Father Liendo y Goechochea.  This word has entered the Pech language as saint “sikin” and church “sikinko” the place of the sikin or saint. While kao is house in Pech, the ending –ko or –co seems to be related to the nahua word meaning place of like Ulanco, the place of rubber, or Gualaco, a village of “payas” in the Agalta valley and later haciendas and now coffee growing area. The fact that the Indians of places with Nahua place names Agalteca, Yoro, Texiguat, El Paraiso,  Ilamatepeque (the mountain of Ilama, grandmother, the female partner of the grandfather and from this pair descended all the Nicaraos), Santa Barabara and Isatepeque (mountain of obsidian), El Salvador were known in colonial documents as “grandes brujos”, great witches, may just the translation of the word “nahua” as witch instead of shaman. Among Nahua speakers the priests who did the religious ceremonies, the nahuats, also were the people who made poisons and did curses against their enemies and who made medicine to cure illnesses. The use of the Nahua word “pate” for fish poisin among Ladinos of Olancho, while “pate” is usually translated as “cure” or medicine like “siguapate”  (sigua woman, pate, cure) a medicinal plant used to treat women with menstrual cramps  seem to indicate that they considered the two things to be basically the same. The Pech do the same with the word “isi” (medicine) which is both used for plants that cure illnesses like manzanilla (chamomile) and for chemical poisons to kill animals (wi isi-a chemical to kill worms).  It is possible to distinguish poisons by calling them “isi warki” (bad medicine), which in Honduran Spanish is usually just  called “mal” (bad).   “Mal” can include poisons, or spells (brujeria) or curses (hechizos) and can include the use of objects which are left that cause the person to get sick of the “mal”.

The Lenca religious leader in the 1940’s was called the hechicero (the one who did curses) according to Doris Zemurray Stone, even though he also supervised ceremonies related to Catholic saints, planting, and harvesting, giving thanks for a good hunt, and curing ceremonies. The Maya Chorti called their religious leader who also healed “el inteligente” or “el sabio” (the intelligent one or the wise one, which is also the translation of the Siberian word shaman) although both Ladinos and Chortis use the word “chuquerero” and the Ladinos in Copan Ruinas  have a verb “chuquerear” (to consult a chuquerero for healing or to get rid of witchcraft). When ethnobotanist Paul House went to visit a Miskito sukya to ask about medicinal plants, the man greeted him, “Well, who do you want to kill?”, so among some Miskito sukya or shaman/healers, cures and poisons are also related. The best known story of the Rah is that they sacrificed and ate a mixted Rah/Miskito child, and when the Miskito mother found out she went to the Miskito king. He gave her a vine (called all the people in Miskito) to put in the source of drinking water of the Rah of the village on the Patuca river now known as Raititara (big cementary) and they all died, except her and her husband who later had two girls. Miskitos Orfa Jackson and Erasmo Ordoñes both say they are descended from these two mixed Rah-Miskito girls and know this story and the story was also collected by Scott Wood from his mother. The use of human sacrifice by the Indians in the Ciudad Blanca area has been reported by the Pech and were also collected among the Miskitos, the “Payas”, and the Tawahkas near the Ciudad Blanca by Theodore Morde in 1930’s who said the legends are quite explicit about it and also he identified a stone was that possibly used for that purpose in the City of the Monkey God (Ciudad de Mono Dios) that he visited in the Honduran Mosquitia.

Morde also collected versions of sisimite stories. The sisimite is a tall, hairy person (hombre peludo, a man with lots of hair, according to Morde’s version) like an ape-man who steals women to keep them as wives. In the Tawahka version he stole three women reported by Theodore Morde, according to the Pech version who call him Takaskro he stole two Pech wives (jicaro and cacao, but he also had his own sisimite wife Yekayeka) collected by anthropologist Lazaro Flores and Pech Indians Angel Martinez and Juana Carolina hernandez and me, and the Ladino version in Honduras collected by my students and according to the version in Central Mexico collected by James Taggart, he stole one woman. Sisimite stories are well known among the Maya Chorti who also say his feet are on backwards, reports Brent Metz. In a Guatemalan colonial document, known as “isogue”, the author spends like 20 pages on whether or not sisimites exist, calling them Anthropos. So they were well known and important there. I believe this sisimite story and the story of his half human son who becomes god of the center, chief of the 4 lightenging gods and thunder and rain gods, makes available corn to the people, and teaches them to make milpa,  is the origin of the many monkey carvings in the Rio Platano Biosphere, which gave rise to Morde’s name for the Ciudad Blanca, “Ciudad de Mono Dios” . There is also a statue of a monkey god in the Trujillo Rufino Galan Museum. I believe this sisimite story, the origin of many Miskito stories of “kisi”, a tall hairy ape-man in the forest, who does things like carry away bad children. The kisi name is probably an African Bantu translation Which means any nature spirit, for the main character in the story the Ladinos of Honduras call sisimite. Both the Pech of Culmi and the Ladinos of Gualaco report sisimites in the Sierra de Agalta.  The Tawahka spirit Ulak, which is tall, hairy, lives in the forest, and scares people who try to spend the night in the Ulak’s part of the forest, and is half spirit, may also be related to son of sisimite stories, who would be half sisimite. Theodore Morde stayed at a place called Ulak, and the Tawahka Indians refused to accompany him further. 

Theodore Morde also collected a story about a blonde (rubia) Choroteca princess called Oro in the region of the Ciudad Blanca which he included in his 1939 report to the Honduran government which is called “La Ciudad de Mono” and is the basis for the UNAH book of the same title. While this sounds unlikely, in fact the Miskito Indians of Wampusirpe, the Miskito town you go through before you enter the Wampu River to get to many of the Ruins in the Ciudad Blanca area like Las Crucitas or the Cuesta la Llorona, still today do a Christmas dance called “Oro” which is surprising in a language with no “o”. The song of the dance is not about gold, the Spanish translation of oro.

Several people on the Internet mention the relation between supposed white people such as this blonde and the  builders of  the Ciudad Blanca. In the colonial period, there was a ethnic group in the Mosquitia near the mouth of the Rio Coco called Guabas by the Misionaries who were supposedly the mix of Indians and White people, although there are almost no Europeans in the Mosquitia at that time. The Guabas told the missionaries not to go with the other Indians of the interior who they called albatoineys (meat of slaves), but the missionaries went with the albatoineys who were probably Sumu speakers such as the Tawahkas, then killed the Catholic missionaries. A lot of different groups are reported at different times at the mouth of the Rio Coco—the followers of Miskut, the Tawira or the Indians of long straight hair, the Guabas, a Sumu speaking group the Bawinkas, the Rah were to the interior in the Valley of Auka, there were Panamaka Sumus on the Honduran side of the border until the 20^th century,  somehow eventually all these groups came to be known as Miskitos, but it was not a calm process. Particularly Gotz von Houwald’s book on the Mayagna, the  modern name for Sumu speaking peoples who were caught as neighbors of  the expansionist Miskitos, Rah, the Nicarao, the Chorotegas, Aztec traders, the Spanish, escaping or enslaved Blacks, the English, international companies like Wrigley’s,, gold mining companies, banana companies like Standard Fruit, logging companies, shows that they had a very difficult time fleeing from pillar to post.  When a Pech teacher met the Nahua Indians of Olancho of the Catacamas region, one of the things he noticed was that they were very pale skinned.

The fact that Cortes with light skin, brown hair  and a beard was mistaken for Quetzalcoatl  the Toltec king returning from Central America  and associated with the god Quetzalcoatl as he promised when he left, and that Cortes  was with four other men with brown hair (perhaps mistaken for the four gods of the wind and rain Tlaloc or Quia), some historians think influenced the fact that the Mexican Indians did not kill him and his entourage on sight. When he returned from Honduras, the Aztec  Indians in Mexico were shocked “as if he had returned from the dead”, and that is perhaps what they thought.  When US anthropologist  Brent Metz asked Mayan Indians what ghosts look like, they said “like you” (pale skin, pale hair, etc.).  Morde also talks a lot about “hombres peludos” (hairy men) and since Aztec and Honduran Indians do not grow beards, the fact that the Europeans were very hairy, also startled the Indians and made them think Cortes was a sisimite. Brent Metz reports one Chorti woman refusing to speak to him, until she saw that his feet were not backwards, because she considered him a “sisimite”. I have seen children pet Americans on their legs or their arms, amazed that they could have hair there. So the combination of light colored hair (some Mexican sources say Cortes had white hair, but paintings show him with brown hair, it was the perception of the Indians that it was so light it was white), light colored skin like a ghost, and particularly the ghost of Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl, tall and hairy like a sisimite, and returning from the Ciudad Blanca area Huehuetlapalan east of Trujillo where Ce Acalt supposedly died or just went into the sky like Quetzalcoatl, the Aztecs were truely amazed and concerned.

Magic  and medicine as it was practiced by the Nahuas or “witches” who spoke Nahua, is practiced in the Mosquitia, and maybe partial heritage from the Mesoamericans who the Miskitos intermarried with. The Miskitos consider the Garifunas great witches “grandes brujos” and the Garifunas consider the Miskitos “grandes brujos” (great witches) and part of it is for this use of poison (mal), and also for magic spells to harm people who harm them and to tie men to women or to separate them  or potions (mal or brujeria or “hoodoo” called  by some Garifunas).  I have heard of real stories of people who have died or been made ill or seen snakes in their path, or become lost in the mountains, or men who were tied to a woman (amarrado) by witchcraft done  by witches of Ladinos, Garifunas, Miskitos, and Black English speaker ethnic groups.

 In the Wikipedia in Spanish on Isatepeque, El Salvador, a Pipil community, the missionaries noted that Blacks and mulattos joined in the witchcrafts of the Indians of Isatepeque, too, up until the time of independence.  The book by Ramon Amaya Amador about “The Witches of Ilamatepeque”, set in the time of the wars of Francisco Morazan in the 19^th century after independence, is based on a true story and Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez has gone into the Santa Barbara mountains to see their graves which are still marked. Because they were witches, they were not allowed to be buried in town in the Catholic cementary (campo santo-sacred field).  The Spanish governor of Honduras at the end of the colonial period, Ramon Anguiano, in his 1801 census said the Indians in the mountains do not practice the Christian religion, and  the fact that Spanish missionaries are still seeing non-Christian ceremonies in the mountains of Olancho in 1807 or in the caves by Lake Yojoa in Santa Barbara in the 1860’s or there are people hechiceros (people who do curses) who help run Lenca villages in the 1940’s, seems to indicate that this was in fact true, even in the part of Honduran controlled by the Spanish. In Yoro when the Franciscan missionaries left at the beginning of the independence  period in the 1820’s, the Indians let the mission church at Luquique fall apart, and except for the finely carved saints which were in Tegucigalpa in the National Museum at Villa Roy before it closed, the more than 100 years of the Franciscans work showed little fruit until the end of the 19^th century.

Governor Anguiano of Honduras in 1801 at the end of the colonial period, also drew a map, showing also that the Mosquitia, most of Colon and much of Olancho and El Paraiso, all of Atlantida and  most of Yoro were totally outside of Spanish control.

The other Indian  town in Yoro under Spanish control during the colonial period  besides Agalteca was Sulaco in Western Yoro. While this area seems to have been Lenca in the Classic Period (300-900 AD), the ethnic group which controlled the province of Sulaco, Yoro at the time of Conquest is still controversial, but almost certainly Mesoamerican, because it was the head of a province with several subject towns.  While Alberto Membreño suggests the translation of “dove” or pigeon (paloma) for Sula, so that Sulaco would be the place of doves, in fact pigeons are not that common in Honduras.

Scott Wood suggests the Miskito word “Sula” for deer may be related to the word Sula in northwestern Honduras which also refers to Sula, Santa Barbara as well as Sulaco.  The use of the word Sula with San Pedro Sula came later, but may refer to its resettlement with mulattos who had intermarried with the Sula Indians. The Nahua word for deer “Mazat” is found in place names like “Mazatepe” (hill of deer) in Olancho, and in people’s names  like the leader “Mazatl” (deer) in the Trujillo area is known in the Nahua speaking parts of  Honduras.  However, it is possible that the word in Miskito Sula is related to the “sules” reported among the Indians in the Agalta Valley missions by the Franciscan missionaries and that some of the Sula Indians who were forced to pan for gold in the Rio Guayape in Olancho in eastern Honduras also escaped to the Mosquitia were they intermarried with the Miskito Indians. There had been 32,000 pans for gold on the Guayape River in the 1540’s of which 1,500 were black slaves and not much more than 100 Spanish, so there were a lot of Indians in the Olancho Valley at that time. They rose up and throw the Spanish out of the Olancho for two years. The Spanish came back after two years, but it became impossible to pan for gold because the Indians and Blacks ran away and Indian slavery was made illegal in 1545 after other rebellions in Lempira, in the San Pedro Sula area, Olancho, Comayagua, the Mosquitia, etc.  Without slave labor, or running the risk of losing a valuable investment in a black slave, it was not economically viable to take out gold that way. The runaway slaves who intermarried with local Indians became the base population of the Sula Valley, Olanchito which is only about 5 km from the Indian community of Agalteca, and the town of Yoro.

At the end of the colonial period there were 3 Spanish in Yoro, over 1,000 mulattos (this also refers to the mixture of Indians and blacks generally in Honduran documents), and over 15,000 free Indians, so obviously the impact of the Spanish was minimal. The Spanish of Yoro complained that they had no other protection than the mulattos who formed part of the militia and if the Indians attacked, the mulattos ran away. The mulattos of Yoro, which included those of Sonaguera to the west of Trujillo on the “margen izquierda road”, were famous for being in cahoots with the free Indians and with the English in the area of contraband or smuggling. The mulattos of Sonaguera were found with 40 donkey carts hidden in the Trujillo area to transport smuggled goods. Tela was also used as a port by free Indians in the colonial period for smuggling with the British. The mulattos of Yoro also intermarried with the free Indians, so if they shot at them, they might hit their business partner, their brother in law, etc.. So the Spanish ordered them to fight, but they ran away instead.  After Independence there was a lot of friction between the mulattos of Olanchito and the Indians of Agalteca, as the Indians of Agalteca wanted their own municio or county which they were the mayors of the mulattos of Olanchito kept arguing that Agalteca did not meet the requirements of being its own municipio. After forming its own municipio at least twice, Agalteca is now part of Olanchito. The Olanchito-Agalteca area was affected by both Standard Fruit and Truxillo Railroad expanding into the area.  The Jicaques and Tolupanes of Yoro and Atlantida and Cortes and maybe Balfate in Colon were severely impacted by the expansion of United Fruit and Standard Fruit, with whole villages disappearing.

According  to Orfa Jackson, a descendant of the Rah, the Rah had cinnamon colored skin, they had a lot of long straight hair, and they were tall. Everyone, the descendants of the Rah, the Miskitos, and Pech, remember these people as very tall, even giants. Scott Wood said the bones of the Rah at Raititaira have been dug up and measured and they were taller than the average Miskito, and because the Miskitos are mixed with escaped African slaves, the Miskitos are taller than the Pech or the Tawahkas.  The Rah spoke their own language and Scott Wood collected a few words of it from a mixed Rah-Miskito man at the end of his life who said his father was Rah and taught him these words as a young boy, before he went away to school in central Honduras in the time of Carias and then spent his whole life working in ships outside of Honduras. Most Rah were reportedly bilingual with Miskito as well as speaking Rah, but that they spoke slowly, which would be likely in the case of being bilingual. In addition to the Honduran Miskitos who were called Mam by the Rah or the Tawira (unmixed Miskitos, people of abundant hair in Miskito)  and the Rah who also lived near Auka, Miskito Scott Woods reports that in Nicaraguan Miskitia there were Tawira or Miskitos who did not mix with Blacks until recently. Charles Napier Bell’s book Taweera: Life among Gentle Savages also notes the presence of these Tawira in the Mosquitia in Nicaragua.

The fact that the Rah or the Tawira   called the Honduran Miskitos “Mam” is interesting. When the Mexican Indians who arrived to influence the Maya Quiche reached the department of Huehuetenango, they called the local Mayan Indians “Mam” which meant “people who were mute”, because they could not understand their language, according to the author of the Los Pipil-Tolteca de Guatemala.   They said they wanted to learn the local language. Eventually the Toltecs entered into alliance with the Quiche, giving them symbols of power that include quartz crystals known as “diamantes”  (diamonds) in Central American Spanish and the claws of jaguar, a jaguar bone flute, a sacred bundle with something wrapped up in it which is too sacred to unwrap, an animal spirit that was their symbol like jaguar or panther, or eagles, etc.  among other things.

Jaguars are not native to Central Mexico and needed to be hunted in Central America to obtain the bone for the flutes, the skins for special ceremonial wear, claws for symbols of power. Sometimes the Aztecs buried whole jaguars in ceremonial offerings in Mexico and the intact skeletons have been found by archaeologists, meaning that sometimes they brought the live jaguars from  Central America to Central Mexico, by canoe. Moctezuma II had a zoo when Cortes arrived. Besides live jaguar, codices also show Aztec merchants (Pochtecas)  carrying live green parrots (loras) on their backs in cages on foot.

The jaguar and the green parrots and quetzals are all native to the northeastern Honduras rainforest. Thus the fact that the Aztecs in Central Mexico had jaguar flutes, that the Toltecs gave jaguar flutes to the Mayas, that arqueologists find jaguar bones flutes in the ruins around Trujillo, and that the Pech in the twentieth century have a story of the origin of the jaguar bone flute that is the same as the Aztec story collected in a codex at the time of conquest, could be because the Pech learned the story from the Nahuas or even that the Nahuas learned the story from the Pech who sold them or made for them by force the flutes. This story involved the morning star (kapani) hunting the jaguar at the request of the great grandfather/the thunder and his twin the evening star getting the wax to make the flute, and after they make the flute they go to the sky and become stars, so it is an origin of the morning star story, too, which would be related to Queztalcoatl as the morning star.  The Pech still made these flutes in the 1920’s when Eduard Conzemius was working with them, but do not make them now, partly due to the lack of jaguars, but also the ceremony where they would have been used has not been done since the 1950’s.

Among the Pech the morning star is associated with the hunt, as it is among Nahuas. Fo example, the Pech have a rule that you should not hunt animals when only the morning star is up, but not the sun, a time known as “kapani” because the animals are under the protection of the morning star (kapani). The Pech do not give much importance to the sun, but rather the morning star is more important. For example to say “hello”, you say “morning star time good-kapani eña”. When you say every day, you say from one morning star to the next-kapa kapa, if you say early in the morning I got up, the word for early in the morning is kapani (morning star).  The afternoon (ani) is the same word for the evening star and can be used in a similar (ani eña-good afternoon, good evening, anite anite, every day in the afternoon).

The Tawiras in the Mosquitia moved from the Honduran side to be all together on the Nicaraguan side when they became annoyed that the kingship of the Mosquitia had passed to mixed Blacks with Indians (Sambos-Miskitos) in the colonial period, according to a study published in the book Blackness in Central America. The Tawira or straight haired with abundant hair Indians were the ones who went to Costa Rica and Panama and stole Indians in raids to sell them as slaves on the Mosquitia Coast according to this study, and not the mixed Miskitos with blacks.  They were experts in long distant trade and raiding, also sometimes traveling to Belize and attacking the San Pedro Sula area.  Although the Miskitos now all speak Miskito, a language related to Sumu languages like Tawahka, Panamaka and Ulwa, they may not have originally spoken the same language, and there is likely to have been Mesoamerican influence among the Miskitos. It is surprising the Miskitos formed a large state eventually stretching from the Aguan River to Rio San Juan in Nicaragua with a king, and captains for every ten villages, and a headman in every village, as compared to the Pech who seem to have no structure above the village level. According to Scott Wood’s history, these kings also required tribute, something the Spanish never managed to impose on the Pech.

The fact that the first Miskito king who united all the Mosquitia is called “Morning Star” in Miskito, which reminds us of  the Toltec King’s  title of Quetzalcoatl who is personified as the morning star, also raises some interesting questions about the Tawira and the origins of Miskitos, before they all spoke Miskito. The reign of Morning Star and several other kings including Miskut, seemed to have happened before the kings who have English names like Oldman, the Prince, and Samuel.  There is a heavy influence of English in the Mosquito language not only due to the presence of English traders, but also intermarriage with English speaking blacks who came to the Mosquitia at different times either from English speaking African countries like Ghana or  more often after having spent time in English speaking Caribbean islands or countries like Belize and Jamaica.  Immigration of English speaking Blacks continued to the Mosquitia after the period of Independence of Honduras and into the twentieth century with the arrival of the Truxillo Railroad and other international companies on both sides of the border. This mixing of blacks running away from slavery and various tribes of Indians  like among the Miskitos, happens in other zones of refuge such as the Florida Everglades where most Seminoles (means renegades)  are Black Seminoles and at least two Indian languages still exist, among the Garifunas of Saint Vincent (there are both Carib and Arawak words exist in the Garifuna language).

This alliance between the Maya Quiche and the Toltecs, the teaching in the finer points of Toltec law, the symbols of power,  made them stronger than their neighbors such as the Tzutzujil Mayas, and the Cakquiquel Mayas (the three are known collectively as achin) in the area of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Eventually the  Cakchiquels also went to the Toltec king Naxcit to go and get the same or similar symbols of power and instruction. These quartz crystals known as “diamantes” were found by William Duncan Strong’s assistant on the Bay Island of Roatan, and the assistant was excited about them, although Strong did not seem impressed.

 The Payas (possibly the same Indians as the Rah) also attacked the Spanish, such as attacking Catacamas in the 1700’s. Catacamas, Olancho in the valley of Olancho was formed by Franciscan missionaries who built a mission there and took out of the mountains often by force, the local Indians. This might have led to a mixed ethnic group situation in Catacamas. One cofradia was definitely of Nahua Indians and this is why the Indians of towns like Siguate and Jamasquire near Catacamas are now part of the Nahua Indian Federation, but there are also Indians in the Catacamas muncipio or county who identified as lenca Indians on the 2001 Ethnic Census. Catacamas was a big Indian town, one of the biggest in Honduras, with 1,000 Indians at the end of the colonial period. It was also a very disobedient town, for example when asked to send Indians to work for the Spanish, or to go and guard the coast, Catacamas in Olancho and Toloa in Cortes refused, citing the need to protect the area from Miskito Indians. It was never an enconmienda town, but in fact had huge extensions of land and thousands of head of cattle. Tawahka Indians would visit it by canoe, arriving at a nearby “desembarcadero” (place to unload canoes) according to local residents like Sigiesfreido Infante, and that is why people remember the people saying “parastá”  (hello in Tawahka) in Catacamas, but that was not the main population. The Batuca Indians (probably Tawahkas from the Patuca River whose correct name in Tawahka is Batuka) who arrived in Catacamas fleeing the Miskito Indians who were taking their wives or selling them as slaves, the Spanish shipped them first to Santa Lucia near Tegucigalpa and finally to Sensenti, south of Copan Ruinas, where they ran away into the mountains, and probably intermarried with the local Chorti.)

In spite of many attempts by the Franciscan monks to convert the Pech, the Payas, the Sules, the Comayagues, the Mexican Indians, Lencas, the Tawahka and other Sumu speaking Indians, and Pantasmas (Matagalpas), Miskitos and neighbors of the Honduran Miskitos the Rah, in northeastern Honduras, the Spanish still did not have control of the mountains, such as the Sierra de Agalta, on either side of the royal road between the Valley of Olancho and  Trujillo, and they did not control the area north and east of Catacamas, Olancho or east of Danli, El Paraiso. The 20 Spanish who lived in Danli in the 1820’s still called themselves, Conquistadores, because they lived on the edge of “civilization” beside free Indians. These free Indians ran contraband on the rivers between the Coast and Danli, spoke “la voz Azteca” (nahuatl), and the Spanish of Danli fully cooperated with them in the contraband trade. The Indians are the mouth of the Ulua river also reportedly “la voz Azteca” (Nahuatl) in the mid-1850’s according to William Wells. He was apparently informed this, by the Catacamas Indians, who may themselves still have been Nahuatl speakers. He reported them wearing long feather cloaks at the fair in Catacamas Olancho in the 1860’s. There is a drawing of such long feather cloaks in the Aztec court in Central Mexico in the 1500’s.

Although Aztec shields are round with feather work, the shields in the Honduran ruins, such as in the San Pedro Museum are square, although obviously a similar style decorated by feathers. This statue wears a high headdress of long feathers, and leather sandals  with ties of a type called “caites” all over Honduras, the Nahua word for leather sandals.  A stone statue in the Trujillo Museum, seen from the side, and having on a breechcloth (taparado), and a tall featherdress, also has a kidney shield. This is a device over the kidneys on the back, often decorated with feathers, similar to bustles of US Indian pow wow dances. According to Michael Coe, this style of kidney shield was started by the Toltecs. These statues do not wear the pati, a cloth worn over one shoulder and tied in a knot shown on the all people in Aztec Codexes.   Sabas Whittaker, a Garifuna who is native to Puerto Cortes, bought a pair of small stone finely carved statues with the person seen from the side and sitting in a featal position and wearing similar clothes,  similar to these ones in the Trujillo Museum, in a Puerto Cortes drugstore where they had sat for over 20 years.  Since the Indians at the mouth of the Ulua River who in addition to also being reported as speaking la voz Azteca, also had Naco Bichrome pottery showing the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, and Sula Fine Orange, do seem to have been related linguistically and culturally to the Indians of Northwestern Honduras and that is why similar statues appear in both places.   Place names like those that end in –gua, and in –oa, both related to water, and those related to the plant tule—Acalteca, tulito, tulian,  also seem to be related in the Agalta Valley and the Aguan Valley in northeastern Honduras and those in the Sula valley and along the coast in northwestern Honduras. 

Some sources call these Indians  whose place names end in –gua “Toquegua”, but whether Toquegua refers to a ruling  lineage, or an ethnic group, or a culturally and linguistically mixed group of which one elite part was Nahua and /or Chol Mayan speaking, is still not clear. Toqueguas have been reported in Belize, the area north of Qurigua to the Coast in Guatemala, Ocotepeque and Cortes in northwestern Honduras and in the Bay Islands.  There are archaeologists and ethnohistorians who consider that maybe all the Toqueguas areas from Belize to Guatemala, Honduras, and maybe El Salvador, parts of Guatemala, and the Mesoamerican parts of Nicaragua were unified in a big confederation and maybe the name “Hueyatlato” (ell mayor- the big one)   which the Nahua speakers formed with other groups in order to be able to get a monopoly on certain goods such as obsidian and gold. Payaqui (Among Nahuas) is identified as being the same as Hueyatlato by two different Spanish officials  in the 16^th century in Central America. Both the name of the area east of Trujillo Taguzgalpa and Honduras’s capital Tegucigalpa were translated as meaing the “place where gold is melted”.  Gold bearing river areas where there are a lot of nearby Nahua place names include the Sula-Quimistan area in Santa Barbara, the Sensenti and Cucuyagua valleys in Ocotepque, the Rio Platano in the Mosquitia, and the Sico river (Tayaco) and Paulaya river in Colon and Olancho. The Sico river forms the Agalta Valley.