market in the white settlements (manuscript journal, 1796). Bees, if
not native, as the Indians claim, were introduced at so early a period that the
Indians have forgotten their foreign origin. The De Soto narrative mentions the
finding of a pot of honey in an Indian village in Georgia in 1540. The peach was
cultivated in orchards a century before the Revolution, and one variety, known as
early as I7i«i as the Indian peach, the Indians claimed as their own. asserting that
they had had it before the whites came to America ( Lawson, Carolina, p. 182, ed. 1860).
Potatoes were introduced early and were so much esteemed that, according to one
old informant, the Indians in ( leorgia, before the Removal, "lived on them." Coffee
came later, and the same informant remembered when the full-bloods stillconsid-
ered it poison, in spite of the efforts of the chief, Charles Hicks, to introduce it
among them.
Spinning wheels and looms were introduced shortly before the Revolution.
According to the Wahnenauhi manuscript the first among the Cherokee were brought
over from England by an Englishman named Edward Graves, who taught his
Cherokee wife to spin and weave. The anonymous writer may have confounded
this early civilizer with a young Englishman who was employed by Agent Hawkins
in I si ) 1 to makewheels and looms for the ( 'reeks i Hawkins. 1801, in American State
Papers: Indian Affairs, i. p. 647). Waff ord, in his boyh 1, say about 1815, knewan
old man named Tsi'nawi on Young-cane creek of Nottely river, in upper Georgia,
who was known as a wheelwright and was reputed to have made the