Research source

At last the people went to a great medicine man, who promised to help them

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 70
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

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 only

At last the people went to a great medicine man, who promised to help them. Some were afraid that if he failed to kill the Tla'nuwas they would take revenge on the people, but the medicine man said he could fix that. He made a long rope of linn bark, just as the Cherokee still do, with loops in it for his feet, and had the people let him down from the top of the cliff at a time when he knew that the old birds were away. When he came opposite the mouth of the cave he still could not reach it, because the rock above hung over, so he swung himself backward and forward several times until the rope swung near enough for him to pull himself into the cave with a hooked stick that he carried, which he managed to fasten in some bushes growing at the entrance. In the nest he found four young ones, and on the floor of the cave were the bones of all sorts of animals that had been carried there by the hawks. He pulled the young ones out of the nest and threw them over the cliff into the deep water below, where a great Uktena serpent that lived there finished them.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

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Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

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