Rev. Alfred Wright, missionary of the Cha'hta, knows of six gentes only, but states that there were two great families who could not intermarry. These were, as stated by Morgan, the reed gens and the chufan gens. Wright then continues: "Woman's brothers are considered natural guardians of the children, even during father's lifetime; counsel was taken for criminals from their phratry, the opposite phratry, or rather the principal men of this, acting as accusers. If they failed to adjust the case, the principal men of the next larger division took it up; if they also failed, the case then came before the itimoklushas and the shakch-uklas, whose decision was final. This practice is falling in disuse now." A business-like and truly judicial proceeding like this does much honor to the character and policy of the Cha'hta, and will be found in but a few other Indian communities. It must have acted powerfully against the prevailing practice of family revenge, and served to establish a state of safety for the lives of individuals.
More points on Cha'hta ethnography will be found in the Notes to B. F. French, Histor. Collect, of La., III, 128-139.
The legends of the Cha'hta speak of a giant race, peaceable and agricultural (nahúllo)[71], and also of a cannibal race, both of which they met east of the Mississippi river.
The Cha'hta trace their mythic origin from the "Stooping, Leaning or Winding Hill," Náni Wáya, a mound of fifty feet altitude, situated in Winston county, Mississippi, on the headwaters of Pearl river. The top of this "birthplace" of the nation is level, and has a surface of about one-fourth of an acre. One legend states, that the Cha'hta arrived there, after crossing the Mississippi and separating from the Chicasa, who went north during an epidemic. Nanna Waya creek runs through the southeastern parts of Winston county, Miss.
Another place, far-famed in Cha'hta folklore, was the "House of Warriors," Taska-tchúka, the oldest settlement in the nation, and standing on the verge of the Kúshtush[72]. It lay in Neshoba county, Mississippi. It was a sort of temple, and the Unkala, a priestly order, had the custody or care of it. The I′ksa A′numpule or "clan-speakers" prepared the bones of great warriors for burial, and the Unkala went at the head of the mourners to that temple, chanting hymns in an unknown tongue.[73]
The curious tale of the origin of the Cha'hta from Náni Wáya has been often referred to by authors. B. Romans states that they showed the "hole in the ground," from which they came, between their nation and the Chicasa, and told the colonists that their neighbors were surprised at seeing a people rise at once out of the earth (p. 71). The most circumstantial account of this preternatural occurrence is laid down in the following narrative.[74] "When the earth was a level plain in the condition of a quagmire, a superior being, in appearance a red man, came down from above, and alighting near the centre of the Choctaw nation, threw up a large mound or hill, called Nanne Wayah, stooping or sloping hill. Then he caused the red people to come out of it, and when he supposed that a sufficient number had come out, he stamped on the ground with his foot. When this signal of his power was given, some were partly formed, others were just raising their heads above the mud, emerging into light,[75] and struggling into life.... Thus seated on the area of their hill, they were told by their Creator they should live forever. But they did not seem to understand what he had told them; therefore he took away from them the grant of immortality, and made them subject to death. The earth then indurated, the hills were formed by the agitation of the waters and winds on the soft mud. The Creator then told the people that the earth would bring forth the chestnut, hickory nut and acorn; it is likely that maize was discovered, but long afterward, by a crow. Men began to cover themselves by the long moss (abundant in southern climates), which they tied around their waists; then were invented bow and arrows, and the skins of the game used for clothing."
Here the creation of the Cha'hta is made coeval with the creation of the earth, and some features of the story give evidence of modern and rationalistic tendencies of the relator. Other Cha'hta traditions state that the people came from the west, and stopped at Nani Waya, only to obtain their laws and phratries from the Creator—a story made to resemble the legislation on Mount Sinai. Other legends conveyed the belief that the emerging from the sacred hill took place only four or five generations before.[76]
The emerging of the human beings from the top of a hill is an event not unheard of in American mythology, and should not be associated with a simultaneous creation of man. It refers to the coming up of primeval man from a lower world into a preëxistent upper world, through some orifice. A graphic representation of this idea will be found in the Návajo creation myth, published in Amer. Antiquarian V, 207-224, from which extracts are given in this volume below. Five different worlds are there supposed to have existed, superposed to each other, and some of the orifices through which the "old people" crawled up are visible at the present time.
The published maps of the Cha'hta country, drawn in colonial times, are too imperfect to give us a clear idea of the situation of their towns. From more recent sources it appears that these settlements consisted of smaller groups of cabins clustered together in tribes, perhaps also after gentes, as we see it done among the Mississippi tribes and in a few instances among the Creeks.
The "old Choctaw Boundary Line," as marked upon the U. S. Land Office map of 1878, runs from Prentiss, a point on the Mississippi river in Bolivar county (33° 37´ Lat.), Miss., in a southeastern direction to a point on Yazoo river, in Holmes county. The "Chicasaw Boundary Line" runs from the Tunica Old Fields, in Tunica county, opposite Helena, on Mississippi river (34° 33´ Lat.), southeast through Coffeeville in Yallabusha county, to a point in Sumner county, eastern part. The "Choctaw Boundary Line" passes from east to west, following approximately the 31° 50´ of Lat., from the Eastern boundary of Mississippi State to the southwest corner of Copiah county. All these boundary lines were run after the conclusion of the treaty at Doak's Stand.