Thus ginseng, or "sang," as it is more often called by the white mountaineers, is known to the laity as…
- 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 113
- 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
Thus ginseng, or "sang," as it is more often called by the white mountaineers, is known to the laity as â'tali-gûli', "the mountain climber," but is addressed in the formulas as Yûñwi Usdi', "Little Man," while selu (corn) is invoked under the name of Agawe'la in myths, as, for instance, that of Prosartes lanuginosa, w…
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 onlyThus ginseng, or "sang," as it is more often called by the white mountaineers, is known to the laity as â'tali-gûli', "the mountain climber," but is addressed in the formulas as Yûñwi Usdi', "Little Man," while selu (corn) is invoked under the name of Agawe'la in myths, as, for instance, that of Prosartes lanuginosa, which bears the curious name of walâs'-unûl'sti, "frogs fight with it," from a story that in the long ago--hilahi'yu--two quarrelsome frogs once fought a duel, using its stalks as lances. In the locative form this was the name of a former Cherokee settlement in Georgia, called by the whites Fighting-town, from a misapprehension of the meaning of the word.
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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