EASTERN CHEROKEE FOLKTALES: 

 RECONSTRUCTED FROM THE FIELD NOTES OF 

 FRANS M. OLBRECHTS 



By Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick 



INTRODUCTION 



The Frans M. Olbrechts collection of North Carolina Cherokee 

 myths, legends, and miscellaneous stories and ethnographic data is not 

 a collection in the generally accepted sense of that term, but rather a 

 body of stenographic notes made at Big Cove on the Eastern Cherokee 

 Reservation during a series of seven sessions with informants Will 

 West Long and his half brother, Morgan Calhoun, on January 24 and 

 February 1-3, 7-9, 1927. These notes are contained in eight small, 

 lined notebooks plus five loose sheets. 



Olbrechts' sprawling calligraphy evidences the haste with which 

 he wrote. While almost every word of it is legible, unfortunately 

 much of what he jotted down cannot be assembled into cohesive 

 nari'atives. Groups of more or less complete sentences may be 

 interspersed with assemblages that consist only of key words or 

 phrases and mnemonic symbols across which one who has no famili- 

 arity with the tales cannot bridge the story lines. For this reason 

 several stories that apparently never before had been collected could 

 not be reconstructed. 



Olbrechts' notes are in English, with an occasional Flemish phrase 

 or paragraph or a Cherokee word. The Cherokee terms embedded in 

 the stories and marginal linguistic notes are written in Olbrechts' 

 complex phonetic system that presents serious problems in decipher- 

 ment when handwritten in haste, and peculiar typographical diflB- 

 culties to the printer. We, therefore, retranslated all Cherokee terms 

 and set them down in Lounsbury-Kilpatrick, a typographically more 

 practical system. We collated each story with other collections of 

 Cherokee folktales and with the major collections of stories from the 

 Southeastern cultural area. 



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