264 BUREAU OP AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



are scarce in their towns, and they now usually return poor and hungry from 

 their hunts. They begin their hunt late in the fall, generally in October. 

 (Hawkins, 1916, pp. 385-386, 396.) 



My own informants recalled the time as the last of October or 

 November. 



From a later note by Hawkins, dated at Kasihta, November 19, 

 1797, it is evident that the hunt was often prolonged much beyond 

 February. He says, 



The hunters of this nation are all gone into the woods and not expected 

 to return till from the first orf March to the beginning of September. (Hawkins, 

 1916, p. 241.) 



During the summer, while they were in or near the town, the 

 Creeks took part in a series of monthly ceremonies which began in 

 April or May and culminated in July or August with the great 

 annual busk which marked the end of the one year and the beginning 

 of another.^* Food was most plentiful during the period immediately 

 following this, and then assemblies were most in evidence. There 

 was also a series of social feasts and dances which culminated in 

 the Skunk Dance, or the Dance of the Ancient People, which took 

 place in October or November (Swanton, 1928 a, pp. 546-614). 



The Choctaw had few canoes and ordinarily went overland to 

 their winter camps, but they devoted more attention to agriculture 

 than any other Southeastern tribe and sold some of the produce to the 

 less thrifty Chickasaw. Their hunting territories were proportion- 

 ately restricted and they did not wander far from their towns. Small 

 game, particularly squirrels, played a large part in their economy, 

 but these were hunted mostly in summer. As in the case of the 

 Creeks, their principal feasts and ceremonies were in the fall and 

 anciently they seem to have had some ceremony corresponding to the 

 busk, but next to nothing is known regarding it. An early authority 

 tells us that 



In years of scarcity when the corn crop has failed, all of the savages leave 

 the villages and go with' their families to camp in the woods at a distance of 

 30 or 40 leagues, in places where bison and deer are to be found, and they live 

 there by hunting and on [wild] potatoes. (Swanton, 1918, p. 49.) 



Thus even the best farmers in the Southeast were at times con- 

 verted en masse into hunters, for their conquest of the vegetable 

 world had not carried with it a similar conquest of the animal world. 

 They must still seek flesh food where nature had placed it, and 

 animal manure assisted wild nature alone instead of renewing the 

 Indian farms and enabling their cultivators to continue indefinitely 

 in one place. 



"* From Adair's statement It seems not unlikely that there were two New Year's Days 

 6 months apart. 



