bwantoh] EARLY HISTORY OF THE CREEK INDIANS 209 
in Monroe County, Tennessee. Sequoya, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, 
lived here in his boyhood, about the time of the Revolution. The land was sold in 
1819. There was another settlement of the name, and perhaps once occupied by the 
same people, "ii the north bank of Tennessee River, in abend jnst below Chattanooga, 
Tennessee, on land sold also in 1819. Still another may have existed at one time on 
Tuskegee Creek, on the south bank of Little Tennessee River, north of Robbinsville, 
in Graham County, North Carolina, on land which was occupied until the removal 
in L838. It is not a Cherokee word, and ( iherokee informants state positively that the 
Taskigi were a foreign people, with distinct language and customs. They were not 
Creeks. Natchez. Uchee, or Shawano, with all of whom the Cherokee were well ac- 
quainted under other names. In the town house of their settlement at the mouth 
of Tellico they had an upright pole, from the top of which hung their protecting 
" medicine," the image of a human figure cut from a cedar log. For this reason the 
Cherokee in derision sometimes called the place Atsinak taufi ("Hanging-cedar 
place"). Before the sale of the land in 1819 they were so nearly extinct that the 
Cherokee had moved in and occupied the ground. 
While part of these people may have removed to the south to 
join their friends among the Creeks, the majority were probably 
absorbed in the surrounding Cherokee population. 
A few maps, such as one of the early Homann maps and the Seale 
map of the early part of the eighteenth century, place Tuskegee 
near the headwaters of the Coosa. This may be intended to rep- 
resent the Tennessee band of Tuskegee or it may show that the 
migration of the Alabama Tuskegee southward was a comparatively 
late movement, something which took place late in the seventeenth 
century or very early in the eighteenth. 
The Tuskegee are placed on the Coosa north of the Abihka Indians 
on the Couvens and Mortier map of the early part of the eighteenth 
century. Perhaps these were the southern band mentioned by 
Adair, in the badly misprinted form Tae-keo-ge, as one of those which 
the Muskogee had "artfully decoyed to incorporate with them." 1 
He is confirmed in substance by Milfort, who states that they were 
a tribe who had suffered severely from their enemies and had in con- 
sequence sought refuge with the Creeks. 2 The town appears in the 
census estimates of 1750. 3 In the enumeration of 1761 we find "Tus- 
kegee including Coosaw old Town" with 40 hunters.' The name 
dues not occur in Bar tram's list, but, as I have said elsewhere, it 
appears to be the town which he calls Alabama. 5 Hawkins (1799) 
has the following to say regarding it: 
Tus-kee-gee: This little town is in the fork of the two rivers, Coo-sau and Tal-la-poo- 
sa, where formerly stood the French fort Toulouse. The town is on a bluff on the Coo- 
sau, forty-six feet above low-water mark; the rivers here approach each other within a 
quarter of a mile, then curve out, making a flat of low land of three thousand acres, 
which has been rich canebrake; and one-third under cultivation in times past; the 
1 A. lair, Hist. Am. Inds., p. 257. * Ga. eol. Docs., vm, p. 524. 
1 Milfort, Menioire, p. 2ti7. » iiartram, Travels, p. 461; see also p. 197. 
•MS., Aver Col!. 
1 18061°— 22 14 
