be discussed here.
It might seem at first thought that the Cherokee, with their civi-
lized code of laws, their national press, their schools and seminaries,
are so far advanced along the white man's road as to offer but little
inducement for ethnologic study. This is largely true of those in the
Indian Territory, with whom the enforced deportation, two generations
ago, from accustomed scenes and surroundings did more at a single
stroke to obliterate Indian ideas than could have been accomplished
11
12 MYTHS OF THE OHEBOKEE [bth.aiw.19
by fifty years of slow development. There remained behind, however,
in the bearl of the Carolina mountains, :i considerable body, outnum-
bering todaj such well-known western tribes as the Omaha, Pawnee,
Comanche, and Kiowa, and it is among these, the old conservative
Kitn'hwa < 'lenient, that t lie ancient things have been preserved.Moun-
taineers guard well the past, and in the secluded forests of Xantahala and
Oconaluftee, faraway from the main-traveled road of modern progress,
the Cherokee priest still treasures the Legends and repeats the mystic
rituals handed down from his ancestors. There is change indeed in
dress and outward seeming, but the heart of the Indian is still his own.
For this and other reasons much the greater portion of the material
herein contained has been procured among the East Cherokee living
upon the Qualla reservation in western North Carolina and in various
detached settlements between the reservation and the Tennessee line.
This has been supplemented with information obtained in the Cherokee
Nation in Indian Territory, chiefly from old men and women who
had emigrated from what is now Tennessee and Georgia, and who
consequently had a better local knowledge of these