THE SWIMMER MANUSCRIPT 



CHEROKEE SACRED FORMULAS AND MEDICINAL 

 PRESCRIPTIONS 



By James Mooney 



revised, completed, and edited by 



Frans M. Olbrechts 



INTRODUCTION 

 Material and Method 



Cherokee manuscripts and material on the Cherokee language have 

 a most uncanny propensity to get lost. 



The "dictionary" of Christian Priber has never been heard of since 

 it reached Frederica, Ga., probably in 1741.^ 



The bidky material of the Rev. S. A. Worcester, including a gram- 

 mar and a dictionary, went down on the Arkansas about 1830.^ 



The manuscript contributions to Cherokee Hnguistics by Col. W. H. 

 Thomas have "unfortunately (been) mislaid."^ 



The manuscript of John Pickering's grammar of the Cherokee lan- 

 guage, the printing of which was interfered with, or was thought to 

 have been interfered with, by the invention of the Sequoya syllabary.* 

 has never been found. 



To reach a cUmax: The manuscript which is edited in the following 

 paper has been true to the tradition, and has disappeared without 

 leaving a clue. The manuscript is described by Mooney, who dis- 

 covered it and brought it to Washington, as " a small daybook of about 

 240 pages, . . . about half filled with writing in the Cherokee char- 

 acters,"^ and elsewhere as "an unpaged blank book of 242 pages, S% 

 by 12 inches, only partially filled; 137 (formulas) in all."° 



Mooney started work on it in 1888; he transliterated and translated 

 the formulas with the assistance of native informants, a^jb'\'m% 

 the writer, himself taking a conspicuous part in the work. 



1 Stevens, Hist, of Georgia, vol. i, p. 165; Adair, Hist. Amer. Inds., p. 243. 



2 Pilling, Bibliography of the Iroquoian Languages, p. 174. 

 » Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, p. 162, note. 



* Ludewig, Literature of Amer. Aboriginal Languages, p. 38. 



5 Seventh Ann. Rept. Bur. Ethn., p. 312. 



« Thirty-seventh Ann. Rept. Bur. Amer. Ethn., p. 8. 



