388 MYTHS OK THK CHEROKEK [eth.ann.I9 



persons cliiiiiiiiiy Natclu'/, (Icsccnt aiiiurii;' the East Cherokee, tmt the 

 last one said to have been of full Natchez blood, an old woman named 

 Alkinl', died about 1 895. She was noted for her peeuliarities, espe- 

 ciall}' for a drawling tone, said to have been characteristic of her 

 people, as okl men remembered them years ago. 



Haj'wood, the historian of Tennessee, says that a remnant of the 

 Natchez lived within the present limits of the State as late as 1750, 

 and were even then numerous. Ho refers to those with the Cherokee, 

 and tells a curious story, which seems somehow to have escaped the 

 notice of other writers. According- to his statement, a portion of the 

 Natchez, who had been parceled out as slaves among the French in 

 the vicinity of their old homes after the downfall of their tribe, took 

 advantage of the withdrawal of the troops to the north, in 1758, to 

 rise and massacre their masters and make their escape to the neighbor- 

 ing tribes. On the return of the troops after the fall of Fort Du 

 Quesne they found the settlement at Natchez destro3'ed and their 

 Indian slaves H(>d. Some time afterward a French deserter seeking an 

 asylum among the Cherokee, having made his way to the Great Island 

 town, on the Tennessee, justbelow the mouth of Tellico river, was sur- 

 prised to find there some of the same Natchez whom he had formerly 

 driven as slaves. He lost no time in getting away from the place to 

 find safer cj^uarters among the mountain towns. Notchy creek, a lower 

 afiluent of Tellico, in Monroe county, Tennessee, i^robably takes its 

 name from these refugees. Haywood states also that, although incor- 

 porated with the Cherokee, they continued for a long time a separate 

 people, not marrj'ing or mixing with other tribes, and having their 

 own chiefs and. holding their own councils; but in 1823 hardly any- 

 thing was left of them but the name.' 



Another refugee tribe incorporated partly with the Cherokee and 

 pai'tly with the Creeks was that of the Taskigi, who at an early period 

 had a large town of the same name on the south side of the Little Ten- 

 nessee, just above the mouth of Tellico, in Monroe county, Tennessee. 

 Sequo3'a, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, lived here in his boy- 

 hood, about the time of the Revolution. Tlie land was sold in 1819. 

 There was another settlement of the name, and perhaps once occupied 

 by the same people, on the north bank of Tennessee river, in a bend 

 just below Chattanooga, Tennessee, on land sold also in 1810. Still 

 another may have existed at one time on Tuskegee creek, on the south 

 bank of Little Tennessee river, north of Robbinsvillc, in Graham county, 

 North Carolina, on land which was occupied until the Removal in 1838. 

 Taskigi town of the Creek country was on Coosa river, near the junction 

 with the Tallapoosa, some distance above the present Montgomerj', 



^Haywood, Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, pp. 10.5-107, 1823. For a sketcli of the 

 Natchez war and tlie subsequent history of the scattered fragments of the tribe, see the author's 

 paper, The End of the Natchez, in the American Anthropologist for July, 1899. 



