while some built schoolhouses upon
their own grounds and brought in private teachers from the outside.
With the beginning of the present century we find influential mixed
bloods in almost every town, and the civilized idea dominated even the
national councils. The Middle towns, shut in from the outside world
by high mountains, remained a stronghold of Cherokee conservatism.
With the exception of Priber, there seems to be no authentic record
of any missionary worker among the Cherokee before 1800. There is,
indeed, an incidental notice of a Presbyterian minister of North Caro-
lina being on his way to the tribe in 1758, but nothing seems to have
come of it, and we find him soon after in South Carolina and separated
from his original jurisdiction. 2 The first permanent mission was estab-
lished by the Moravians, those peaceful Germanimmigrants whose
teachings were so well exemplified in the lives of Zeisberger and
Heckewelder. As early as 1734, while temporarily settled in Georgia,
they had striven to bring some knowledge of the Christian religion to
the Indians immediately about Savannah, including perhaps some
stray Cherokee. Later on they established missions among the Dela-
wares in Ohio, where their first Cherokee convert was received in
1773, being one who had been captured by the Delawares when a
boy and had grown up and married in the tribe. In 1752 they had
formed a settlement on the upper Yadkin, near the present Salem,
1 Hawkins, Treaty Commission, 1801, manuscript No. 5, m library of Georgia Historical Society.
-Foote (?), in North Carolina Colonial Records, v. p. 1'2'J6, 1887.
M MYTHS OF THE CHEROKEE lbth.akh.1S
North Carolina, where 1 1 n - \ made