CULIN] HOOP AND POLE: CHEROKEE 475 
they are surprisingly expert, and will stop the progress of the hoop when going 
with great velocity, by driving the pointed arrow into its edge; this they will 
do at a considerable distance, and on horseback as well as on foot. 
Cueroker. Tennessee. 
Lieut. Henry Timberlake (1762)* describes the game under the 
name of nettecawaw : 
each player having a pole about 10 feet long, with several marks or 
divisions, one of them bowls the round stone, with one flat side, and the other 
convex, on which the players all dart their poles after it, and the nearest counts 
according to the vicinity of the bow] to the marks on his pole. 
North Carolina. 
Mr James Mooney ” describes the wheel-and-stick game played with 
a stone wheel, or circular disk, under the name of gatayusti. 
John Ax, the oldest man now living among the East Cherokee, is the only one 
remaining in the tribe who has ever played the game, having been instructed in 
it when a small boy by an old man who desired to keep up the memory of the 
ancient things. The sticks used have long since disappeared, but the stones 
remain, being frequently picked up in the plowed fields, especially in the neigh- 
borhood of the mounds. 
This was the game played by the great mythic gambler Untsaiyi, 
Brass.° 
It was he who invented the gatayfisti game that we play with a stone wheel 
and a stick. 
He lived at Untiguhi on the south side of the Tennessee river, and 
made his living by gambling. 
The large flat rock, with the lines and grooves where they used to roll the 
wheel is still there, with the wheels themselves, and the stick turned to stone. 
Mr Mooney relates the story of a boy, the son of Thunder, who 
played the wheel-and-stick game with Untsaiyi,and vanquished him 
by the aid of his father’s magic. The gambler at last staked his 
life, and was pursued to the edge of the great water, where he was 
‘aught by the boy and his brothers, whom he got to help him. 
They tied his hands and feet with a grapevine and drove a long stake through 
his breast, and planted it far out in the deep water. They set two crows on 
the end of the pole to guard it and called the place Kagin’yi, Crow place. But 
Brass never died, and can not die until the end of the world, but lies there 
always with his face up. Sometimes he struggles under water to get free, and 
sometimes the beavers, who are his friends, come and gnaw at the grapevine to 
release him. Then the pole shakes and the crows at the top ery Ka! Ka! Ka! 
and seare the beavers away.¢ 
“ Memoirs, p. 77, London, 1765. 
*Myths of the Cherokee. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology, p. 434, 1902. 
© Ibid., p. 311. 
4Ibid., p, 314. 
