When the Sun found her daughter dead, she went into the house and grieved, and the people did not die any more,…
- Date of account
- Material collected chiefly 1887-1890; published 1900
- Source
- Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
- Reference
- Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology · selected passage 44
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English with Cherokee names and material translated from oral testimony
- Translation
- Collected and edited by James Mooney
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
When the Sun found her daughter dead, she went into the house and grieved, and the people did not die any more, but now the world was dark all the time, because the Sun would not come out
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyWhen the Sun found her daughter dead, she went into the house and grieved, and the people did not die any more, but now the world was dark all the time, because the Sun would not come out. They went again to the Little Men, and these told them that if they wanted the Sun to come out again they must bring back her daughter from Tsûsginâ'i, the Ghost country, in Usûñhi'yi, the Darkening land in the west. They chose seven men to go, and gave each a sourwood rod a hand-breadth long. The Little Men told them they must take a box with them, and when they got to Tsûsginâ'i they would find all the ghosts at a dance. They must stand outside the circle, and when the young woman passed in the dance they must strike her with the rods and she would fall to the ground.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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