None of all the allophylic tribes referred to in this First Part stood in closer connection with the Creeks or Maskoki proper than the Yuchi or Uchee Indians. They constituted a portion of their confederacy from the middle of the eighteenth century, and this gives us the opportunity to discuss their peculiarities more in detail than those of the other "outsiders." They have preserved their own language and customs; no mention is made of them in the migration legend, and the Creeks have always considered them as a peculiar people.
General Pleasant Porter has kindly favored me with a few ethnologic points, gained by himself from Yuchi Indians, who inhabit the largest town in the Creek Nation, Indian Terr., with a population of about 500. "In bodily size they are smaller than the Creeks, but lithe and of wiry musculature, the muscles often protruding from the body. Their descent is in the male line, and they were once polygamous. It is a disputed fact whether they ever observed the custom of flattening their children's heads, like some of their neighbors. They call themselves children of the Sun, and sun worship seems to have been more pronounced here than with other tribes of the Gulf States. The monthly efflux of the Sun, whom they considered as of the female sex, fell to the earth, as they say, and from this the Yuchi people took its origin. They increase in number at the present time, and a part of them are still pagans. Popularly expressed, their language sounds 'like the warble of the prairie-chickens.' It is stated that their conjurers' songs give a clue to all their antiquities and symbolic customs. They exclude the use of salt from all drugs which serve them as medicine. While engaged in making medicine they sing the above songs for a time; then comes the oral portion of their ritual, which is followed by other songs."
Not much is known of their language, but it might be easily obtained from the natives familiar with English. From what we know of it, it shows no radical affinity with any known American tongue, and its phonetics have often been noticed for their strangeness. They are said to speak with an abundance of arrested sounds or voice-checks, from which they start again with a jerk of the voice. The accent often rests on the ultima (Powell's mscr. vocabulary), and Ware ascribes to them, though wrongly, the Hottentot cluck.
The numerals follow the decimal, not the quinary system as they do in the Maskoki languages. The lack of a dual form in the intransitive verb also distinguishes Yuchi from the latter.
The earliest habitat of the Yuchi, as far as traceable, was on both sides of the Savannah river, and Yuchi towns existed there down to the middle of the eighteenth century.
When Commander H. de Soto reached these parts with his army, the "queen" (señora, caçica) of the country met him at the town Cofetaçque on a barge, a circumstance which testifies to the existence of a considerable water-course there. Cofetaçque, written also Cofitachiqui (Biedma), Cofachiqui (Garcilaso de la Vega), Cutifachiqui (consonants inverted, Elvas) was seven days' march from Chalaque (Cheroki) "province," and distant from the sea about thirty leagues, as stated by the natives of the place. There were many ruined towns in the vicinity, we are told by the Fidalgo de Elvas. One league from there, in the direction up stream, was Talomeco town, the "temple" of which is described as a wonderful and curious structure by Garcilaso. Many modern historians have located these towns on the middle course of Savannah river, and Charles C. Jones (Hernando de Soto, 1880; pp. 27. 29) believes, with other investigators, that Cofetaçque stood at Silver Bluff, on the left bank of the Savannah river, about twenty-five miles by water below Augusta. The domains of that "queen," or, as we would express it, the towns and lands of that confederacy, extended from there up to the Cheroki mountains.
The name Cofita-chiqui seems to prove by itself that these towns were inhabited by Yuchi Indians; for it contains kowita, the Yuchi term for Indian, and apparently "Indian of our own tribe." This term appears in all the vocabularies: kawíta, man, male; kohwita, ko-ita, plural kohino'h, man; kota, man, contracted from kow'ta, kowita; also in compounds: kowĕt-ten-chōō, chief; kohítta makinnung, chief of a people. The terms for the parts of the human body all begin with ko-. The second part of the name, -chiqui, is a term foreign to Yuchi, but found in all the dialects of Maskoki in the function of house, dwelling, (tchúku, tchóko, and in the eastern or Apalachian dialects, tchíki) and has to be rendered here in the collective sense of houses, town. Local names to be compared with Cofitachiqui are: Cofachi, further south, and Acapachiqui, a tract of land near Apalache.
The signification of the name Yutchi, plural Yutchihá, by which this people calls itself, is unknown. All the surrounding Indian tribes call them Yuchi, with the exception of the Lenápi or Delawares, who style them Tahogaléwi.
But there are two sides to this question. We find the local name Kawíta, evidently the above term, twice on middle Chatahuchi river, and also in Cofetalaya, settlements of the Cha'hta Indians in Tala and Green counties, Mississippi. Did any Yuchi ever live in these localities in earlier epochs? Garcilaso de Vega, Florida III, c. 10, states that Juan Ortiz, who had been in the Floridian peninsula before, acted as interpreter at Cofitachiqui. This raises the query, did the natives of this "capital" speak Creek or Yuchi? Who will attempt to give an irrefutable answer to this query?
The existence of a "queen" or caçica, that is, of a chief's widow invested with the authority of a chief, seems to show that Cofetaçque town or confederacy did not belong to the Maskoki connection, for we find no similar instance in Creek towns. Among the Yuchi, succession is in the male line, but the Hitchiti possess a legendary tradition, according to which the first chief that ever stood at the head of their community was a woman.