ORIGIN LEGENDS 
Like other Muskhogean tribes, the Chickasaw had a well-defined 
legend of a former home somewhere in the west, beyond the Missis- 
sippi River. The earliest versions of this are given by Adair, who 
alludes to it several times. In one place he says, “they, and the 
Choktah, and also the Chokchooma, who in process of time were 
forced by war to settle between the two former nations, came to- 
gether from the west as one family ”*; and in another, “the Indians 
have on old tradition, that when they left their own native land, 
they brought with them a sanctified rod by order of an oracle, which 
they fixed every night in the ground; and were to remove from place 
to place on the continent towards the sun-rising, till it budded in 
one night’s time; that they obeyed the sacred mandate, and the mir- 
acle took place after they arrived to this side of the Missisippi, on 
the present land they possess.” It is added that Yaneka, “the most 
southern old town,” was the one which they first settled after reach- 
ing the country later occupied by them.? Again he remarks: “The 
old waste towns of the Chikkasah lie to the west and southwest, from 
where they have lived since the time we first opened a trade with 
them; on which course they formerly went to war over the Missi- 
sippi, because they knew it best, and had disputes with the natives 
of those parts, when they first came from thence.”* Some items re- 
garding this migration, such as the fact that they brought horses 
with them, and on the way despoiled a caravan laden with gold and 
silver, may be dismissed as late embellishments by the Indians or by 
Adair. 
As among the Choctaw, however, we find along with the above 
stories a tradition that the people had come out from under the earth, 
and Adair cites the case of “one of their politicians,” who per- 
suaded them that the cave from which they had ascended was “in 
the Nanne Hamgeh old town, inhabited by the Mississippi-Nachee 
Indians, which is one of the most western parts of their old-inhab- 
ited country.” This seer undertook to reopen communication with 
the brethren who had remained in their subterranean world, but 
was shut in by the Indians so that he might be purified.© It is a 
1 Adair, Hist. Am. Inds., p. 352. *Ibid., p. 196. 
*Tbid., p. 162, note. ®Ibid., pp. 195-196, 
*Ibid., p. 66. 
174 
