Thus it clearly appears that the frame, so to speak, of the traditions preserved by Bristock actually did exist and may be proved from other writers. But we are still more strongly convinced that his account is at least founded on fact, when we compare the manners and customs, of the Apalachites, as he gives them, with those of the Cherokee, Choktah, Chickasah, and Muskohge, tribes plainly included by him under this name, and proved by the philological researches of Gallatin to have occupied the same location since De Soto’s expedition.[162] We need have no suspicion that he plagiarized from other authors, as the particulars he mentions are not found in earlier writers; and it was not till 1661 that the English settled Carolina, not till 1699 that Iberville built his little fort on the Bay of Biloxi, and many years elapsed between this latter and the general treaty of Oglethorpe. If then we find a close similarity in manners, customs, and religions, we must perforce concede his accounts, such as they have reached us, a certain degree of credit.
He begins by stating that Apalacha was divided into six provinces; Dumont,[163] writing from independent observation about three-fourths of a century afterwards, makes the same statement. Their towns were inclosed with stakes or live hedges, the houses built of stakes driven into the ground in an oval shape, were plastered with mud and sand, whitewashed without, and some of a reddish glistening color within from a peculiar kind of sand, thatched with grass, and only five or six feet high, the council-house being usually on an elevation.[164] If the reader will turn to the authorities quoted in the subjoined note, he will find this an exact description of the towns and single dwellings of the later Indians.[165] The women manufactured mats of down and feathers with the same skill that a century later astonished Adair,[166] and spun like these the wild hemp and the mulberry bark into various simple articles of clothing. The fantastic custom of shaving the hair on one-half the head, and permitting the other half to remain, on certain emergencies, is also mentioned by later travellers.[167] Their food was not so much game as peas, beans, maize, and other vegetables, produced by cultivation; and the use of salt obtained from vegetable ashes, so infrequent among the Indians, attracted the notice of Bristock as well as Adair.[168] Their agricultural character reminds us of the Choktahs, among whom the men helped their wives to labor in the field, and whom Bernard Romans[169] called “a nation of farmers.” In Apalache, says Dumont,[170] “we find a less rude, more refined nation, peopling its meads and fertile vales, cultivating the earth, and living on the abundance of excellent fruit it produces.”
Strange as a fairy tale is Bristock’s description of their chief temple and the rites of their religion—of the holy mountain Olaimi lifting its barren, round summit far above the capital city Melilot at its base—of the two sacred caverns within this mount, the innermost two hundred feet square and one hundred in height, wherein were the emblematic vase ever filled with crystal water that trickled from the rock, and the “grand altar” of one round stone, on which incense, spices, and aromatic shrubs were the only offerings—of the platform, sculptured from the solid rock, where the priests offered their morning orisons to the glorious orb of their divinity at his daily birth—of their four great annual feasts—all reminding us rather of the pompous rites of Persian or Peruvian heliolatry than the simple sun worship of the Vesperic tribes. Yet in essentials, in stated yearly feasts, in sun and fire worship, in daily prayers at rising and setting sun, in frequent ablution, we recognize through all this exaggeration and coloring, the religious habits that actually prevailed in those regions. Indeed, the speculative antiquarian may ask concerning Mount Olaimi itself, whether it may not be identical with the enormous mass of granite known as “The Stone Mountain” in De Kalb county, Georgia, whose summit presents an oval, flat, and naked surface two or three hundred yards in width, by about twice that in length, encircled by the remains of a mural construction of unknown antiquity, and whose sides are pierced by the mouths of vast caverns;[171] or with Lookout mountain between the Coosa and Tennessee rivers, where Mr. Ferguson found a stone wall “thirty-seven roods and eight feet in length,” skirting the brink of a precipice at whose base were five rooms artificially constructed in the solid rock.[172]
One of the most decisive proofs of the veracity of Bristock’s narrative is his assertion that they mummified the corpses of their chiefs previous to interment. Recent discoveries of such mummies leave us no room to doubt the prevalence of this custom among various Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. It is of so much interest to the antiquarian, that I shall add in an Appendix the details given on this point by later writers, as well as an examination of the origin of those mummies that have been occasionally disinterred in the caves of Tennessee and Kentucky.[173]
One other topic for examination in Bristock’s memoir yet remains—the scattered words of the language he mentions. The principal are the following;[174]
Mayrdock—the Viracocha of their traditions.
Naarim—the month of March.
Theomi—proper name of the Gulf of Mexico.
Jauas—priests.
Tlatuici—the mountain tribes.