chiefly from the Wahnenauhi manuscript. There is a persistent belief
among the Cherokee that a portion of their people once wandered
far to the west or southwest, where they were sometimes heard of
afterward, but were never again reunited with their tribe. It was
the hope of verifying this tradition and restoring his lost kinsmen
to their tribe that led Sequoya to undertake the journey on which he
lost his life. These traditional lost Cherokee are entirely distinct
from the historic emigrants who removed from the East shortly after
the Revolution.
Similar stories are common to nearly all the tribes. Thus the Kiowa
tell of a chief who, many years ago, quarreled over a division of game
and led his people far away across the Rocky mountains, where they
are still living somewhere about the British border and still keeping
their old Kiowa language. The Tonkawa tell of a band of their people
who in some way were cut off from the tribe by a sudden inroad of the
sea on the Texas coast, and, being unable to return, gradually worked
their way far down into Mexico. The Tuscarora tell how, in their early
wanderings, they came to the Mississippi and were crossing over to the
west side by means of a grapevine, when the vine broke, leaving those
on the farther side to wander off until in time they became enemies
to those on the eastern bank. See Mooney, Calendar History of the
Kiowa Indians, Seventeenth Annual Report Bureau of American Ethnology,