[30] Wasash, French Ouasage, corrupted by the Americans into Osage. [↑]
[31] Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tenn., p. 266. [↑]
[32] MacGowan, Dr D. J., Indian Secret Societies, Historical Magazine, X, p. 139, 1866. Morrisania, N. Y. [↑]
[33] Haywood, Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tenn., p. 239. [↑]
[34] Letters from the Alleghany Mountains, pages 41–42. [↑]
[35] Gatschet, Some Mythic Stories of the Yuchi Indians, in American Anthropologist, VI, p. 281, July, 1893. [↑]
NOTES AND PARALLELS TO MYTHS
In the preparation of the following notes and parallels the purpose has been to incorporate every Cherokee variant or pseudomyth obtainable from any source, and to give some explanation of tribal customs and beliefs touched upon in the myths, particularly among the Southern tribes. A certain number of parallels have been incorporated, but it must be obvious that this field is too vast for treatment within the limits of a single volume. Moreover, in view of the small number of tribes that have yet been studied, in comparison with the great number still unstudied, it is very doubtful whether the time has arrived for any extended treatment of Indian mythology. The most complete index of parallels that has yet appeared is that accompanying the splendid collection by Dr Franz Boas, Indianische Sagen von der nordpacifischen Küste Amerikas.[1] In drawing the line it has been found necessary to restrict comparisons, excepting in a few special cases, to the territory of the United States or the immediate border country, although this compels the omission of several of the best collections, particularly from the northwest coast and the interior of British America. Enough has been given to show that our native tribes had myths of their own without borrowing from other races, and that these were so widely and constantly disseminated by trade and travel and interchange of ceremonial over wide areas as to make the Indian myth system as much a unit in this country as was the Aryan myth structure in Europe and Asia. Every additional tribal study may be expected to corroborate this result.
A more special study of Cherokee myths in their connection with the medical and religious ritual of the tribe is reserved for a future paper, of which preliminary presentation has been given in the author’s Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, in the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.