Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney
1819. Still another may have existed at one time on Tuskegee creek,
1074 words | Chapter 133
on the south bank of Little Tennessee river, north of Robbinsville,
in Graham county, North Carolina, on land which was occupied until
the Removal in 1838. Taskigi town of the Creek country was on Coosa
river, near the junction with the Tallapoosa, some distance above the
present Montgomery, Alabama. We find Tasquiqui mentioned as a town
in the Creek country visited by the Spanish captain, Juan Pardo,
in 1567. The name is evidently the same, though we can not be sure
that the location was identical with that of the later town.
Who or what the Taskigi were is uncertain and can probably never
be known, but they were neither Cherokee nor Muscogee proper. It
would seem most probable that they were of Muskhogean affinity, but
they may have been an immigrant tribe from another section, or may
even have constituted a distinct linguistic stock, representing all
that was left of an ancient people whose occupation of the country
antedated the coming of the Cherokee and the Creeks. The name may
be derived from taska or tasha'ya, meaning "warrior" in several of
the Muskhogean dialects. It is not a Cherokee word, and Cherokee
informants state positively that the Taskigi were a foreign people,
with distinct language and customs. They were not Creeks, Natchez,
Uchee, or Shawano, with all of whom the Cherokee were well acquainted
under other names. In the townhouse of their settlement at the mouth
of Tellico they had an upright pole, from the top of which hung their
protecting "medicine," the image of a human figure cut from a cedar
log. For this reason the Cherokee in derision sometimes called the
place Atsina'-k`taûñ, "Hanging-cedar place." Before the sale of the
land in 1819 they were so nearly extinct that the Cherokee had moved
in and occupied the ground.
Adair, in 1775, mentions the Tae-keo-ge (sic--a double misprint) as
one of several broken tribes which the Creeks had "artfully decoyed"
to incorporate with them in order to strengthen themselves against
hostile attempts. Milfort, about 1780, states that the Taskigi on
Coosa river were a foreign people who had been driven by wars to
seek an asylum among the Creeks, being encouraged thereto by the
kind reception accorded to another fugitive tribe. Their request was
granted by the confederacy, and they were given lands upon which they
built their town. He puts this event shortly before the incorporation
of the Yuchi, which would make it early in the eighteenth century. In
1799, according to Hawkins, the town had but 35 warriors, "had lost
its ancient language," and spoke Creek. There is still a "white" or
peace town named Taskigi in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory. [496]
The nearest neighbors of the Cherokee on the west, after the
expulsion of the Shawano, were the Chickasaw, known to the Cherokee
as Ani'-Tsi'ksû, whose territory lay chiefly between the Mississippi
and the Tennessee, in what is now western Kentucky and Tennessee
and the extreme northern portion of Mississippi. By virtue, however,
of conquest from the Shawano or of ancient occupancy they claimed a
large additional territory to the east of this, including all upon
the waters of Duck river and Elk creek. This claim was disputed by
the Cherokee. According to Haywood, the two tribes had been friends
and allies in the expulsion of the Shawano, but afterward, shortly
before the year 1769, the Cherokee, apparently for no sufficient
reason, picked a quarrel with the Chickasaw and attacked them in
their town at the place afterward known as the Chickasaw Old Fields,
on the north side of Tennessee river, some twenty miles below the
present Guntersville, Alabama. The Chickasaw defended themselves so
well that the assailants were signally defeated and compelled to
retreat to their own country. [497] It appears, however, that the
Chickasaw, deeming this settlement too remote from their principal
towns, abandoned it after the battle. Although peace was afterward
made between the two tribes their rival claim continued to be a
subject of dispute throughout the treaty period.
The Choctaw, a loose confederacy of tribes formerly occupying southern
Mississippi and the adjacent coast region, are called Ani'-Tsa'`ta
by the Cherokee, who appear to have had but little communication
with them, probably because the intermediate territory was held by
the Creeks, who were generally at war with one or the other. In 1708
we find mention of a powerful expedition by the Cherokee, Creeks,
and Catawba against the Choctaw living about Mobile bay. [498]
Of the Indians west of the Mississippi those best known to the Cherokee
were the Ani'-Wasa'si, or Osage, a powerful predatory tribe formerly
holding most of the country between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers,
and extending from the Mississippi far out into the plains. The
Cherokee name is a derivative from Wasash', the name by which the
Osage call themselves. [499] The relations of the two tribes seem
to have been almost constantly hostile from the time when the Osage
refused to join in the general Indian peace concluded in 1768 (see
"The Iroquois Wars") up to 1822, when the Government interfered to
compel an end of the bloodshed. The bitterness was largely due to the
fact that ever since the first Cherokee treaty with the United States,
made at Hopewell, South Carolina, in 1785, small bodies of Cherokee,
resenting the constant encroachments of the whites, had been removing
beyond the Mississippi to form new settlements within the territory
claimed by the Osage, where in 1817 they already numbered between
two and three thousand persons. As showing how new is our growth
as a nation, it is interesting to note that Wafford, when a boy,
attended near the site of the present Clarkesville, Georgia, almost
on Savannah river, a Cherokee scalp dance, at which the women danced
over some Osage scalps sent by their relatives in the west as trophies
of a recent victory.
Other old Cherokee names for western tribes which can not be identified
are Tayûñ'ksi, the untranslatable name of a tribe described simply
as living in the West; Tsuniya'tiga, "Naked people," described as
living in the far West; Gûn'-tsuskwa'`li, "Short-arrows," who lived
in the far West, and were small, but great fighters; Yûñ'wini'giski,
"Man-eaters," a hostile tribe west or north, possibly the cannibal
Atakapa or Tonkawa, of Louisiana or Texas. Their relations with the
tribes with which they have become acquainted since the removal to
Indian Territory do not come within the scope of this paper.
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