Myth 105h

29 Of the Indians west of the Mississippi those best known to the Cherokee were the Ani′-Wasa′sĭ, or Osage, a powerful predatory tribe formerly holding most of the country between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers, and extending from the Mississippi far out into the plains. The Cherokee name is a derivative from Wasash′, the name by which the Osage call themselves. 30 The relations of the two tribes seem to have been almost constantly hostile from the time when the Osage refused to join in the general Indian peace concluded in 1768 (see “The Iroquois Wars”) up to 1822, when the Government interfered to compel an end of the bloodshed. The bitterness was largely due to the fact that ever since the first Cherokee treaty with the United States, made at Hopewell, South Carolina, in 1785, small bodies of Cherokee, resenting the constant encroachments of the whites, had been removing beyond the Mississippi to form new settlements within the territory claimed by the Osage, where in 1817 they already numbered between two and three thousand persons. As showing how new is our growth as a nation, it is interesting to note that Wafford, when a boy, attended near the site of the present Clarkesville, Georgia, almost on Savannah river, a Cherokee scalp dance, at which the women danced over some Osage scalps sent by their relatives in the west as trophies of a recent victory. Other old Cherokee names for western tribes which can not be identified are Tayûñ′ksĭ, the untranslatable name of a tribe described simply as living in the West; Tsuniya′tigă, “Naked people,” described as living in the far West; Gûn′-tsuskwa′ʻlĭ, “Short-arrows,” who lived in the far West, and were small, but great fighters; Yûñ′wini′giskĭ, “Man-eaters,” a hostile tribe west or north, possibly the cannibal Atakapa or Tonkawa, of Louisiana or Texas. Their relations with the tribes with which they have become acquainted since the removal to Indian Territory do not come within the scope of this paper.