[11]. Red Shoes, a noted chief of the Choctaws, is frequently mentioned in later chapters. For sketch, p. 335M.
[12]. Mooney witnessed a confirmation among the Cherokees of the Eastern Band, in North Carolina: “A man standing one night upon a fish trap was scented by a wolf, which came so near that the man was compelled to shoot it. He at once went home and had the gun exorcised by a conjurer.” Myths of the Cherokees, 448.
[13]. Mooney gives Cherokee myths built upon Tlanuwa (the great hawk). On the north bank of Little Tennessee River, in Blount County, Tennessee, is a high overhanging cliff in which is a cave, the place where lived the mythic great hawk. Myths of the Cherokees, 315. A reciter of one of the myths insisted that the whites must also believe in it, as evidence pointing to a coin of the United States and to what he called the Tlanuwa, holding in its talons the arrows and in its beak the serpent of the myth. Ibid., 466.
[14]. Confirmed as of later date: Cushman, op. cit., 487.
[15]. Bartram, Travels, p. 495, says “These Indians are by no means idolaters, unless their puffing tobacco smoke towards the sun, and rejoicing at the appearance of the new moon may be so termed. So far from idolatry are they that they have no images amongst them, nor any religious rite or ceremony that I could perceive; but adore the Great Spirit, the giver and taker away of the breath of life, with the most profound and respectful homage.” Timberlake’s observations as to their belief in a Great Spirit and future rewards and punishment: Williams, Memoirs of Timberlake, 87; see also, Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country, 80. DeBrahm, who was at Fort Loudoun among the Cherokees, (1756) says that the “Indians have a scant knowledge of a Divine Being which extends no farther than that they believe he is good; the Cherokees call him Hianequo, the great man, whom the Catawbas call Rivet, the overseer; but they pay no adoration to him, nor anything existing.” Plowden, Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, 221. The same testimony as to their belief in a Supreme Being is borne by Wm. Byrd II in his History of the Dividing Line. Of the Chickasaws, Rev. John Wesley wrote from Georgia in 1736: “They have so firm a reliance on Providence and so settled a habit of looking up to a Superior Being in all occurrences of life, etc.” Ga. Col. Rec., XXI, 220. But see as to adoration of the sun by the Natchez: Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley, 381, 168 et seq., and his Early History of the Creeks, 381; Hodge, Handbook, II, 365. The theory has been held that the Southern Indians were advanced beyond some others because of the teaching of the Spanish missionaries among the Gulf and South Atlantic Indians at a very early period, such as Cabeca de Vaca (1528) who wrote: “We told them by signs, which they understood, there was One whom we called God, who created the heaven and the earth.”
[16]. See preceding note. A native halfbreed Cherokee, Elias Boudinot, a very intelligent man and at one time editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, says of his people: “They cannot be called idolaters, for they never worshipped images.” Foster, Cherokee Literature, 11. Of the Choctaws, Israel Folsom, a Choctaw, says: “They never worshipped idols, and believed in the existence of a Great Spirit.” Cushman, History of Choctaws, etc., 362. Whatever may have been the case with the Southern Indians of historic times, it cannot be denied that the mound-builders had idols. This, numerous excavations fully prove.
[17]. For the “black drink” see later note, p. [49M].
[18]. For the Cherokee’s use of eagles’ tails in the reception of Sir Alexander Cuming (1730) see: Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 126; and for Timberlake’s account of the eagle-tail dance: Memoirs, 107; also, Mooney, Myths, 281, 492-3, and Hodge, Handbook, I, 409.
[19]. Mooney, Myths, 475; Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley, 351.
[20]. The Okmulgees were a branch of the Lower Creeks. The Yamasee War was waged in 1715. Swanton’s Early History of the Creeks, 178. The site was described by Bartram (1775): “Where are yet conspicuous very wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients of this part of America, in the ruins of a capital town and settlement.” Travels, 379.