Myth 105f

There are still several persons claiming Natchez descent among the East Cherokee, but the last one said to have been of full Natchez blood, an old woman named Alkĭnĭ′, died about 1895. She was noted for her peculiarities, especially for a drawling tone, said to have been characteristic of her people, as old men remembered them years ago. Haywood, the historian of Tennessee, says that a remnant of the Natchez lived within the present limits of the State as late as 1750, and were even then numerous. He refers to those with the Cherokee, and tells a curious story, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of other writers. According to his statement, a portion of the Natchez, who had been parceled out as slaves among the French in the vicinity of their old homes after the downfall of their tribe, took advantage of the withdrawal of the troops to the north, in 1758, to rise and massacre their masters and make their escape to the neighboring tribes. On the return of the troops after the fall of Fort Du Quesne they found the settlement at Natchez destroyed and their Indian slaves fled. Some time afterward a French deserter seeking an asylum among the Cherokee, having made his way to the Great Island town, on the Tennessee, just below the mouth of Tellico river, was surprised to find there some of the same Natchez whom he had formerly driven as slaves. He lost no time in getting away from the place to find safer quarters among the mountain towns. Notchy creek, a lower affluent of Tellico, in Monroe county, Tennessee, probably takes its name from these refugees. Haywood states also that, although incorporated with the Cherokee, they continued for a long time a separate people, not marrying or mixing with other tribes, and having their own chiefs and holding their own councils; but in 1823 hardly anything was left of them but the name. 26 Another refugee tribe incorporated partly with the Cherokee and partly with the Creeks was that of the Taskigi, who at an early period had a large town of the same name on the south side of the Little Tennessee, just above the mouth of Tellico, in Monroe county, Tennessee. Sequoya, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, lived here in his boyhood, about the time of the Revolution. The land was sold in 1819. There was another settlement of the name, and perhaps once occupied by the same people, on the north bank of Tennessee river, in a bend just below Chattanooga, Tennessee, on land sold also in 1819. Still another may have existed at one time on Tuskegee creek, on the south bank of Little Tennessee river, north of Robbinsville, in Graham county, North Carolina, on land which was occupied until the Removal in 1838. Taskigi town of the Creek country was on Coosa river, near the junction with the Tallapoosa, some distance above the present Montgomery, Alabama. We find Tasquiqui mentioned as a town in the Creek country visited by the Spanish captain, Juan Pardo, in 1567. The name is evidently the same, though we can not be sure that the location was identical with that of the later town. Who or what the Taskigi were is uncertain and can probably never be known, but they were neither Cherokee nor Muscogee proper. It would seem most probable that they were of Muskhogean affinity, but they may have been an immigrant tribe from another section, or may even have constituted a distinct linguistic stock, representing all that was left of an ancient people whose occupation of the country antedated the coming of the Cherokee and the Creeks. The name may be derived from taska or tasha′ya , meaning “warrior” in several of the Muskhogean dialects.