from John Ax, with additional details by Swimmer and Wafford, has
parallels in many tribes. Swimmer did not know the burial incident,
but said--evidently a more recent interpolation--that when they came
near the sunrise they found there a race of black men at work. It is
somewhat remarkable that the story has nothing to say of the travelers
reaching the ocean, as the Cherokee were well aware of its proximity.
What the Sun is like--According to the Payne manuscript, already
quoted, the Cherokee anciently believed that the world, the first
man and woman, and the sun and moon were all created by a number of
beneficent beings who came down for the purpose from an upper world,
to which they afterward returned, leaving the sun and moon as their
deputies to finish and rule the world thus created. "Hence whenever the
believers in this system offer a prayer to their creator, they mean
by the creator rather the Sun and Moon. As to which of these two was
supreme, there seems to have been a wide difference of opinion. In
some of their ancient prayers, they speak of the Sun as male, and
consider, of course, the Moon as female. In others, however, they
invoke the Moon as male and the Sun as female; because, as they say,
the Moon is vigilant and travels by night. But both Sun and Moon,
as we have before said, are adored as the creator.... The expression,
'Sun, my creator,' occurs frequently in their ancient prayers. Indeed,
the Sun was generally considered the superior in their devotions"
(quoted in Squier, Serpent Symbol, p. 68). Haywood, in 1823, says:
"The sun they call the day moon or female, and the night moon the
male" (Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tenn., p. 266). According to Swimmer,
there is also a tradition that the Sun was of cannibal habit, and in
human form was once seen killing and devouring human beings. Sun and
Moon are sister and brother. See number 8, "The Moon and the Thunders."
The Indians of Thompson river, British Columbia, say of the sun that
formerly "He was a man and a cannibal, killing people on his travels
every day.... He hung up the people whom he had killed during his day's
travel when he reached home, taking down the bodies of those whom he
had hung up the night before and eating them." He was finally induced
to abandon his cannibal habit (Teit, Thompson River Traditions, p. 53).
In the same grave--This reminds us of the adventure in the voyage of
Sinbad the Sailor, as narrated in the Arabian Nights. The sacrifice
of the wife at her husband's funeral was an ancient custom in the
Orient and in portions of Africa, and still survives in the Hindu
suttee. It may once have had a counterpart in America, but so far
as known to the author the nearest approach to it was found in the
region of the lower Columbia and adjacent northwest coast, where a
slave was frequently buried alive with the corpse.
Vault of solid rock--The sky vault which is constantly rising and
falling at the horizon and crushes those who try to go beyond occurs in
the mythologies of the Iroquois of New York, the Omaha and the Sioux
of the plains, the Tillamook of Oregon, and other widely separated
tribes. The Iroquois concept is given by Hewitt, "Rising and Falling
of the Sky," in Iroquois Legends, in the American Anthropologist
for October, 1892. In the Omaha story of "The Chief's Son and
the Thunders" (Dorsey, Contributions to North American Ethnology,
VI, 1890), a party of travelers in search of adventures "came to
the end of the sky, and the end of the sky was going down into the
ground." They tried to jump across, and all succeeded excepting one,
who failed to clear the distance, and "the end of the sky carried
him away under the ground." The others go on behind the other world
and return the same way. In the Tillamook myth six men go traveling
and reach "the lightning door, which opened and closed with great
rapidity and force." They get through safely, but one is caught on
the return and has his back cut in half by the descending sky (Boas,
Traditions of the Tillamook Indians, in Journal of American Folk-Lore,
Jan., 1898). See also number 1, "How the World was Made" and number 3,
"Kana'ti and Selu."