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Show 184 MYTHS OF THE CHEROKEE [ ETH. ANN. 19 Powhatan territory, and still preserved in Rockahock, the name ot an estate on lower Pamunkey river. We have too little material of the Powhatan language to hazard an interpretation, but it may possibly contain the root of the word for sand, which appears as lekawa, nikawa, negaw, rigawa, rekwa, etc, in various eastern Algonquian dialects, whence Rockaway ( sand), and Recgawawank ( sandy place). The Powhatan form, as given by Strachey, is racawh ( sand). He gives also rocoy hook ( otter), reihcahahcoik, hidden under a cloud, overcast, rickahone or reihcoan ( a comb), and rickewh ( to divide in halves). Talligevn^ AB Brinton well says: " No name in the Lenape' legends has given rise to more extensive discussion than this." On Colden's map in his " History of the Five Nations,'' 1727, we find the '' Alleghens'' indicated upon Allegheny river. Heckewelder, who recorded the Delaware tradition in 1819, says: " Those people, as I was told, called themselves Talligeu or Talligewi. Colonel John Gi bson, however, a gentleman who has a thorough knowledge of the Indians, and speaks several of their languages, is of the opinion that they were not called Talligewi, but Alligewi; and it would seem that he is right from the traces of their name which still remain in the country, the Allegheny river and mountains having indubitably been named after them. The Delawares still call the former Alligewi Sipu ( the river of the Alligewi),,- Indian Nations, p. 48, ed. 1876. Loskiel, writing on the authority of Zeisberger, says that the Delawares knew the whole country drained by the Ohio under the name of Alligewinengk, meaning " the land in which they arrived from distant places,' 1 basing his interpretation upon an etymology compounded from talli or alii, there, idfcu, to that place, and ewak, they go, with a locative final. Ettwein, another Moravian writer, says the Delawares called " the western country*' Ailigewenork, meaning a warpath, and called the river Alligewi Sipo. This definition would make the word come from pattiton or attiton, to fight, to make war, ewak, they go, and a locative, i. e., " they go there to fight.' 1 Trumbull, an authority on Algonquian languages, derives the river name from wulik, good, best, harme, rapid stream, and sipu, river, of which rendering its Iroquois name, Ohio, is nearly an equivalent. Rafinesque renders Talligewi as " there found," from talli, there, and some other root, not given ( Brinton, Walam Olum, pp. 229- 230,1885). It must be noted that the names Ohio and Alligewi ( or Allegheny) were not applied by the Indians, as with us, to different parts of the same river, but to the whole stream, or at least the greater portion of it from its head downward. Although Brinton sees no necessary connection between the river name and the traditional tribal name, the statement of Hecke welder, generally a competent authority on Delaware matters, makes them identical. In the traditional tribal name, Talligewi or Alligewi, wi is an assertive verbal suffix, so that the form properly means " he is a Tallige," or " they are Tallige.,, This comes very near to Tsa'l& gl', the name by which the Cherokee call themselves, and it may have been an early corruption of that name. In Zeisberger* s Delaware dictionary, however, we find waloh or walok, signifying a cave or hole, while in the " Walam Olum" we have oligonunk rendered " at the place of caves," the region being further described as a buffalo land on a pleasant plain, where the Lenape', advancing seaward from a* less abundant northern region, at last found food ( Walam Olum, pp. 194- 195). Unfortunately, like other aboriginal productions of its kind among the northern tribes, the Lenape chronicle is suggestive rather than complete and connected. With more light it may be that seeming discrepancies would disappear and we should find at last that the Cherokee, in ancient times as in the historic period, were always the southern vanguard of the Iroquoian race, always primarily a mountain people, but with their flank resting upon the Ohio and its great tributaries, following the trend of the Blue ridge and the Cumberland as they slowly gave way before the pressure from the north until they were finally cut off from the parent stock by the wedge of Algonquian invasion, but always, whether in the north |
