Indian Migration Legends, [214]. Migration Legends of the Creek Tribes, [222]. Tchikilli's Kasi'hta Legend, [235]. The Text, [237]. The Translation, [244].
A MIGRATION LEGEND
OF
THE CREEK INDIANS.
FIRST OR GENERAL PART.
THE SOUTHERN FAMILIES OF INDIANS.
The early explorers of the Gulf territories have left to posterity a large amount of information concerning the natives whom they met as friends or fought as enemies. They have described their picturesque attire, their curious, sometimes awkward, habits and customs, their dwellings and plantations, their government in times of peace and war, as exhaustively as they could do, or thought fit to do. They distinguished tribes from confederacies, and called the latter kingdoms and empires, governed by princes, kings and emperors. But the characteristics of race and language, which are the most important for ethnology, because they are the most ancient in their origin, are not often alluded to by them, and when the modern sciences of anthropology and ethnology had been established on solid principles many of these southern races had already disappeared or intermingled, and scientific inquiry came too late for their investigation.
A full elucidation of the history and antiquities of the subject of our inquiries, the Creeks, is possible only after having obtained an exhaustive knowledge of the tribes and nations living around them. The more populous among them have preserved their language and remember many of their ancestors' customs and habits, so that active exploration in the field can still be helpful to us in many respects in tracing and rediscovering their ancient condition. Three centuries ago the tribes of the Maskoki family must have predominated in power over all their neighbors, as they do even now in numbers, and had formed confederacies uniting distant tribes. Whether they ever crossed the Mississippi river or not, the Indians of this family are as thoroughly southern as their neighbors, and seem to have inhabited southern lands for times immemorial. The scientists who now claim that they descend from the mound builders, do so only on the belief that they must have dwelt for uncounted centuries in the fertile tracts where Hernando de Soto found them, and where they have remained up to a recent epoch. In the territory once occupied by their tribes no topographic name appears to point to an earlier and alien population; and as to their exterior, the peculiar olive admixture to their cinnamon complexion is a characteristic which they have in common with all other southern tribes.