Owing to the absence of the Author on official duties in the IndianTerritory, the Map which should accompany this volume has not been prepared.It will therefore be issued with the second volume.
BRINTON'S LIBRARY OF
ABORIGINAL AMERICAN LITERATURE.
NUMBER IV.
WITH A LINGUISTIC, HISTORIC AND ETHNOGRAPHIC INTRODUCTION,
BY
ALBERT S. GATSCHET,
OF THE U. S. BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY, WASHINGTON, D. C.
VOLUME I.
Νᾱφε καὶ μέμνας' ὰπιστεῑν
ᾰρθρα ταῦυτα τῶν φρενῶν.
Epicharmus.
PHILADELPHIA:
D. G. BRINTON.
1884.
In the present work, Mr. Gatschet has carried out a much neededinvestigation. The tribes who inhabited the watershed of the north shoreof the Mexican Gulf must always occupy a prominent place in the studyof American Ethnology, as possibly connecting the races of North andSouth America, and those of the Valley of the Mississippi with those ofAnahuac and Mayapan.
Years ago the general editor of this series stated, in various publications,the problems that region offers, and on finding the remarkable legend ofChekilli, translated it and published it, as pointing to a solution of some ofthe questions involved. This legend has, at his request, been taken by Mr.Gatschet as a centre around which to group the ethnography of that wholeterritory, as well as a careful analysis of the legend and its language.
The first volume contains the general discussion of the subject, andcloses with the Creek version of the Legend and its translation. Thesecond will contain the Hitchiti Version, the Notes, and Vocabulary.
One statement of the author, overlooked in the proof reading, seems ofsufficient importance to be corrected here. The Choctaw Grammar ofthe late Rev. Cyrus Byington was published complete, and from his lastrevision (1866-68), not as an extract from his first draft, as stated on page117. The full particulars are given in the Introduction to the Grammar.
THE EDITOR.
The present publication proposes to bring before the public, in popularform, some scientific results obtained while studying the language andethnology of the Creek tribe and its ethnic congeners. The method offurthering ethnographic study by all the means which the study of languagecan afford, has been too little appreciated up to the present time,but has been constantly kept in view in this publication. Language is notonly the most general and important help to ethnology, but outside ofrace, it is also the most ancient of all; ethnologists are well aware of thisfact, but do not generally apply it to their studies, because they find it tootedious to acquire the language of unlettered tribes by staying long enoughamong them.
The help afforded to linguistic studies by the books published in andupon the Indian languages is valuable only for a few among the greatnumber of the dialects. The majority of them are laid down in phoneticallydefective missionary alphabets, about which we are prompted torepeat what the citizens of the young colony of Mexico wrote to thegovernment of Spain, in Cortez's time: "Send to us pious and Christianmen, as preachers, bishops and missionaries, but do not send us scholars,who, with their pettifogging distinctions and love of contention, createnothing but disorder and strife."...