CACALOTE INDIANS. Cacalote ("crow" or "raven") is a name that was applied by the Spanish to several Indian groups in North America. Two Cacalote groups of northern Mexico can be connected with the Texas area. One of these lived south of the Rio Grande in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and may at times have crossed into Texas. This was probably a Coahuiltecan group. The other Cacalote group lived south of the Rio Grande near the site of present Presidio, Texas, in the early eighteenth century but is said to have ranged north of the Rio Grande in the late seventeenth century. These western Cacalotes have been identified as Concho Indians, but this identification is debatable. Both Cacalote groups disappeared in the late eighteenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Charles W. Hackett, ed., Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773 (3 vols., Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1923-37). J. Charles Kelley, "Factors Involved in the Abandonment of Certain Peripheral Southwestern Settlements," American Anthropologist 54 (July-September 1952). J. Charles Kelley, "The Historic Indian Pueblos of La Junta de Los Rios," New Mexico Historical Review 27, 28 (October 1952, January 1953). Carl Sauer, The Distribution of Aboriginal Tribes and Languages in Northwestern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934).

Thomas N. Campbell