MooNEY] THE S()UTIiP:i{N TKIUKS 389 



Aliilmina. We tiiul Tasquiqui moiitioiiod as ii town in the Creek coun- 

 try visited by the Spanish captain, Juan Pardo, in 15G7. The name 

 is evidently the same, though we can not bo sure that the location was 

 identical with that of the later town. 



Who or what the Taskigi were is uncert^iin and can probably n(^vor 

 be known, but they were neither Cherokee nor Muscogee proper. It 

 would seem most probable that they were of Muskhogean affinity, but 

 they may have been an immigrant tribe from another section, or may 

 even have constituted a distinct linguistic stock, representing all that 

 was left of an ancient people whose occupation of the country ante- 

 dated the coming of the Cherokee and the Creeks. The nam(^ may be 

 derived from tasl-a or iaska'ya, meaning "warrior" in several of the 

 Muskhogean dialects. It is not aCherokee word, and Cherokee inform- 

 ants state positively that the Taskigi were a foreign people, witli 

 distinct language and customs. They were not Creeks, Natchez, 

 Uchee, or Shawano, with all of whom the Cherokee w(>i-e well 

 acquainted under other names. In the townhouse 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 some- 

 times called the place Atsina'-k'taufi, "Hanging-cedar place." Before 

 the sale of the land in ISIO they were so nearly extinct that tht; C'her- 

 okee had moved in and occupied the ground. 



Adair, in 1775, mentions the Tae-keo-ge {sic — a double misprint) as 

 one of several broken tribes which the Creeks had " artfully decoj-ed " to 

 incorporate with them in order to strengthen themselves against hos- 

 tile attempts. Milfort, about 1780, states that the Taskigi on Coosa 

 river were a foreign people who had been driven by wars to seek an 

 asylum among the Creeks, Ijeing encouraged thereto by the kind recep- 

 tion accorded to another fugitive tribe. Their request was granted by 

 the confederacj', and they were given lands upon which they l)uilt 

 their town. He puts this event shortly before the incorporation of 

 the Yuchi, which would make it early in the eighteenth century. In 

 17!'!*, according to Hawkins, the town had but 35 warriors, "had lost 

 its ancient language," and spoke Creek. There is still a "white" or 

 peace town named Taskigi in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory.' 



The nearest neighbors of the Cherokee on the west, after the expul- 

 sion of the Shawano, were the Chickasaw, known to the Cherokee as 

 Ani'-Tsi'ksu, whose territory lay chiefly between the Mississippi and 

 the Tennessee, in what is now western Kentucky an<l Tennessee and 

 the extreme northern portion of ^Mississippi. By virtue, however, of 

 conquest from the Shawano or of ancient occupancy they claimed a 



' Adair, History of American Indians, p. 257, 177n. The other statements concenilng the Tii-sklgi 

 among the Creeks are taken from Gatschet's valuable study, A Migration Legend of the Creek 

 Indians, i, pp. 122, 145, 228, 1S84. 



