paraphrased in the Cherokee language by
Suyeta in introducing his first rabbit story: " Tsi'stu wuliga 'ndtHtUn'
ii,,,',iuts,itiY tj, x.'i— the Rabbit was the leader of them all in mischief."
The expression struck the author so forcibly that the words wire
recorded as spoken.
In regard to the contact between the two races, by which such stories
could be borrowed from one by the other, it is not commonly known
that in all the southern colonies Indian slaves were bought and sold and
kept in servitude and worked in the fields side by side with negroes up
to the time of the Revolution. Not to go back to the Spanish period.
when such things were the order of the day, we find the Cherokee as
early as Kin:] complaining that their people were being kidnaped by
slave hunters. Hundreds ofcaptured Tuscarora and nearly the whole
tribe of the Appalachee were distributed as slaves among the Carolina
colonists in the early part of the eighteenth century, while the Natchez
and others shared a similar fate in Louisiana, and as late at least as
1776 Cherokee prisoners of war were still sold to the highest bidder
for the same purpose. Atone time it was charged against the gov-
ernor of South Carolina that he was provoking a general Indian war
by his encouragement of slave hunts. Furthermore, as the coast tribes
dwindled they were compelled to associate and intermarry with the
negroes until they finally lost their identity ami were classed with
that race, so that a considerable proportion of the blood of the south-
ern negroes is unquestionably Indian.
The negro, with his genius for imitation and his love for