Deer shut up in hole--The Indian belief that the game animals were originally shut up in a cave, from which…
- 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 119
- 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
Deer shut up in hole--The Indian belief that the game animals were originally shut up in a cave, from which they were afterward released by accident or trickery, is very widespread
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 onlyDeer shut up in hole--The Indian belief that the game animals were originally shut up in a cave, from which they were afterward released by accident or trickery, is very widespread. In the Tuggle version of the Creek account of the creation of the earth we find the deer thus shut up and afterward set free. The Iroquois "believed that the game animals were not always free, but were enclosed in a cavern where they had been concealed by Tawiskara'; but that they might increase and fill the forest Yoskeha' gave them freedom." [522] The same idea occurs in the Omaha story of "Ictinike, the Brothers and Sister" (Dorsey, in Contributions to North American Ethnology, VI, 1890). The Kiowa tell how the buffalo were kept thus imprisoned by the Crow until released by Sinti when the people were all starving for want of meat.
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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