[255]. Rivers, also, takes Adair’s distinction: “But, on the other hand, some were gentlemen who doubtless would have achieved renown in the most arduous duties of a public career.”
[256]. Not only the Indians but the whites, particularly the French hunters out of New Orleans, were responsible for the extirpation of the buffalo from the region east of the Mississippi. The tale is told in Williams, Beginnings of West Tennessee, 10 et seq., 245. In early times the American bison ranged in great herds through the Southeast and Old Southwest. Some writers have questioned whether it ever existed in the Southeast below North Carolina; but in the first settlement of Georgia they were as abundant as they were in Tennessee and Kentucky. “Col. Wm. McIntosh, the brother of Gen. Lachland McIntosh, my grandfather, has often told me that he had seen ten thousand buffaloes in a herd.... My father, whose Indian establishements (as Bartram’s book shows) extended to St. Mark’s, was constantly supplied with buffalo tongues, until as late as 1774, as my mother has often stated to me.” Thos. Spalding in Ga. Hist. Coll., I, 268. For the buffalo in North Carolina, see Byrd’s Dividing Line. In East Tennessee, Williams, Memoirs of Timberlake, 47, 71, 120. In Middle Tennessee, Haywood’s History of Tennessee, 90. They are said to have been of late arrival, comparatively, in the region east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio. None of the De Soto narrators mentions the animal. The flesh and butter were food; the wool was used in making rough cloth; the skins for bedding. The hide was a symbol of protection to the early Cherokees; hence it was often given as a pledge. Worn by ardent lovers of the tribe, it was the mute offering of protection to the maid, chosen to preside over the warrior’s household.
[257]. Byrd, in Dividing Line, mentions a queer belief of the North Carolina Indians that the eating of bear’s flesh by women promotes vitality and makes child-bearing easy.
[258]. The flesh from the hump and rump was considered the choicest, next to the tongue.
[259]. Jones, op. cit., 311, citing Du Pratz, II, 225, and Loskiel’s History, etc., 67. Even the whites, in their first year on the frontier, of necessity used the mortar, and as late as 1820 in the Old Southwest. Williams, Beginnings of West Tennessee.
[260]. Some of the Chickasaw women are described as being of surpassing beauty. In 1762 Maj. Robert Rogers described them as “far exceeding in beauty any other nation to the Southward.” Cushman: “Seldom have I looked upon specimens of female grace and loveliness as I have seen among the Chickasaws three quarters of a century ago in their former homes east of the Mississippi River.... Their eyes were dark and full and their countenances like their native clime.... They were truly beautiful and, best of all, unconsciously so. Oft was I at a loss which most to admire—the graceful and seemingly perfect forms, finely chiseled features, lustrous eyes and flowing hair, or that soft, winning artlessness which was preëminently theirs.” History, etc., 488; also, Du Pratz, History, 366, 376. The men are described as handsome, beyond other tribes in the South. For mode of courtship, Cushman, op. cit., 498; and chastity, 232, 267.
[261]. The town or council house is best described in Bartram’s Observations (Creeks and Cherokees) pp. 52-57 and in Gatschet, Migration Legend, II, 186. See also, Thomas, Cherokees in Pre-Columbian Times, 63, 64, and Myer, Prehistoric Villages in Middle Tennessee, 510 et seq.
[262]. Perhaps John Wright of the Georgia Colony.
[263]. Compare Bartram, Travels, 499-502.
[264]. Best account, with illustrations, Jones, op. cit., 383-412; also, Timberlake Memoirs, 64, 78; Catlin, Illustrations of Manners, etc., of American Indians, I, 235.