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Show 2 0 MYTHS OF THE CHEROKEE [ ETH. ANN. 19 supplement and corroborate those of the northern tribes, thus bringing the story down to their final settlement upon the headwaters of the Tennessee in the rich valleys of the southern Alleghenies. Owing to the Cherokee predilection for new gods, contrasting strongly with the conservatism of the Iroquois, their ritual forms and national epics had fallen into decay even before the Revolution, as we learn from Adair. Some vestiges of their migration legend still existed in Haywood's time, but it is now completely forgotten both in the East. and in the West. According to Haywood, who wrote in 1823 on information obtained directly from leading members of the tribe long before the Removal, the Cherokee formerly had a long migration legend, which was already lost, but which, within the memory of the mother of one informant- say about 1750- was still recited by chosen orators on the occasion of the annual green- corn dance. This migration legend appears to have resembled that of the Delawares and the Creeks in beginning with genesis and the period of animal monsters, and thence following the shifting fortune of the chosen band to the historic period. The tradition recited that they had originated in a land toward the rising sun, where they had been placed by the command of " the four councils sent from above." In this pristine home were great snakes and water monsters, for which reason it was supposed to have been near the sea-coast, although the assumption is not a necessary corollary, as these are a feature of the mythology of all the eastern tribes. After this genesis period there began a slow migration, during which " towns of people in many nights' encampment removed," but no details are given. From Heckewelder it appears that the expression, " a night's encampment," which occurs also in the Delaware migration legend, is an Indian figure of speech for a halt of one year at a place. l In another place Haywood says, although apparently confusing the chronologic order of events: " One tradition which they have amongst them says they came from the west and exterminated the former inhabitants; and then says they came from the upper parts of the Ohio, where they erected the mounds on Grave creek, and that they removed thither from the country where Monti cello ( near Charlottesville, Virginia) is situated." 8 The first reference is to the celebrated mounds on the Ohio near Moundsville, below Wheeling, West Virginia; the other is doubtless to a noted burial mound described by Jefferson in 1781 as then existing near his home, on the low grounds of Rivanna river opposite the site of an ancient Indian town. He himself had opened it and found it to contain perhaps a thousand disjointed skeletons of both adults and children, the bones piled in successive layers, those near the top being least decayed. They showed no signs ' Heckeweldcr, Indian Nations, p. 47, ml. 1876. 2 Haywood, John, Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, pp. 225- 226; Nashville, 1823. |
