Gatschet, in commenting on the mention of cassine in the legend, says:
Black drink was prepared from the small and narrow leaves and the tender shoots of the shrub Ilex cassine, which grows spontaneously as far north as the thirty-seventh degree of latitude. The white people of the Carolinas prepared from it a sort of tea. The botanical name formerly given to the plant was Cassine yaupon, yaupon being a derivative from the Katawba term yáp or yop plant, tree, or shrub. The name cassine was first applied, as Prof. Lester F. Ward informs me, as a generic name to a South African plant by Linné, and as a species name for an Ilex by Thomas Walter. (Dahoon is the name of another Ilex; Walter spells it duhoon, others houx d’ahon.) The plant and decoction are called by the Sketimasha, nu’ut; by the Creeks, Assi luputski, small leaves, which is generally abbreviated to Assi leaves. The term black drink originated among the British traders. In Ch. C. Jones’s “Tomochichi,” p. 118, it is called “foskey.”
The Creeks made use of the Assi as we use fermented liquors, to promote conviviality; but it entered also into their ceremonies of religion and warfare. But the black drink potion was not always prepared in the same strength. The ancient Creeks had three modes of preparing it; the three potions resulting from them widely differed in strength according to the uses for which they were intended. Small quantities of the young leaf, parched in a pot until it assumed a brown color, produced a liquor acting as an exhilarant and gentle diuretic; it was drank by the people at the busk, and by the “elders” when assembled in council or when discussing every-day topics. After the potion had been poured from one pan or cooler into another, it begins to ferment and to produce a white froth, from which it is styled also white drink, the term “white” alluding simultaneously to its purifying qualities. To make the liquid stronger a larger infusion of the parched leaves is required; it then assumes a dark hue, nearly as black as molasses, and acts as a powerful intoxicating stimulant. A still larger addition of the cassine leaf produces a strong narcotic, which was, as mentioned previously, used by conjurors to evoke prophetic ecstacies accompanied by dreams. The black drink of the weaker sort acts as an emetic,[5] and was used as such at the annual busk and on other occasions extensively; this gave to the liquid its renown as a bodily and moral purificator, for primitive people are prone to regard agencies which act with mysterious force upon the bodily constitution as symbols for abstract spiritual or religious ideas. This drink being served at all games and festivals, councils, and conclusions of treaties, special ministrants, the Hinihalgi, were appointed for its manufacture by the miko of the town. On festive days they prepared it with peculiar ceremonies and served it to all who attended the celebration in the square. The singing of the yahola, or black-drink note, was, and is still, a peculiar rite connected with the drinking of this favorite liquid.
Narvaez writes (1536) of the Indians on the coast of Texas:
They have a sort of drink made of the leaves of a tree like the mulberry tree, which they boil very well and work it up into a froth, and so drink it as hot as ever they can suffer it to come into their mouths. All the while this is over the fire the vessel must be close shut; and if by chance it should be uncovered, and a woman should come by in the meantime, they would drink none of it, but fling it all away. Likewise, while they stand cooling it and pouring it out to drink, a woman must not stir or move, or they would throw it all to the ground, or spew it up again if they had drunk any; she herself would incur the bastinado. All this time they continue bawling out aloud, “Who will drink?” and when the women begin to hear these exclamations, then it is that they settle themselves in their postures, and were they sitting or standing, though it were a tiptoe, or one leg up and the other down, they must continue so till the men have cooled their liquor and made it fit to drink. The reason of this is every whit as foolish and unreasonable as the custom itself, for they say should not the women stand still when they hear their voice some bad thing would be conveyed into the liquor, which they say would make them die; and if such a generation of asses were all poisoned it were no great loss to the world.
In the narrative of René Laudonnière (1564) he says of his expedition from Fort Caroline, at the mouth of the river of May (St. Johns), Florida:
I departed with fifty of my best soldiers in two barks, and arrived in the dominion of Utina, distant from our fort about 40 or 50 leagues (125 miles); and going ashore we drew near his village, situated 6 leagues from the river, where we took him prisoner. They (his tribe) therefore brought me fish in their little boats, and their meal of mast (maize); they also made their drink which they call cassine, which they sent to Utina and me.
The map in Le Moine’s Narrative shows the residence of Utina to be west of the river St. Johns, and in such a position that it is possible that Laudonnière went up the St. Johns to the Ochlawaha River, then up that river to Orange Creek and to Orange Lake, which is of crescent shape, just as it is figured on Le Moine’s map. The cassine which Utina’s men sent to him must have been obtained from the east or west coast, unless it was the leaves of the Ilex dahoon, which grows in the interior of Florida.
Le Moine, in his “Narrative,” illustrated with drawings and written in 1504, has the following mention of cassine:
I sent a second expedition, with two shallops, having soldiers and sailors aboard, with a present to be given in my name to the widow of a deceased chief named Hionacara, who lived about 12 miles north of us. She received my men kindly, and loaded both of these shallops, for me, with maize and nuts; and she sent in addition some baskets of cassina leaves, of which they make a drink.