Cherokee Had Orthodox Jewish Beards Until about 1750

Here is the first half of the final chapter of the forthcoming book Cherokee DNA Studies Volume 2: More Real People Who Proved the Geneticists Wrong

Chapter 8: The Invention of the Cherokee People

Nice contradiction between fact and fact

Will make the whole read human and exact.

—Robert Graves, “The Devil’s Advice to Story-tellers”

Cherokees used to wear beards. “Anciently, all the Cherokees wore a long beard on the chin,” the grandmother of George Hicks told missionary and antiquarian Daniel S. Butrick about 1830.[i] She wasn’t alone in reporting this unusual fact from early Cherokee history. “The Raven says that the old men used to tell them that the ancient Cherokees had always been in the habit of wearing a long beard,” but they began plucking out their whiskers “probably 80 or 100 years ago.” The Raven, who was considerably more than a hundred years old in 1830 “and now blind,” stated:

…[A]nciently the Cherokee men uniformly wore a long beard, as their fathers had done, & considered it peculiarly ornamental. It seldom grew over six inches long. It was considered almost an unpardonable offence to seize a man by his beard… [when I was a lad, I] feared [my] beard would not be so thick and long as was desirable; and being told what to do to promote its growth, [I] commenced doctoring it… The medicine, however, proved ineffectual, and [I] never had as heavy a beard as [I] had desired (243).

Two other sources in Butrick’s “Cherokee Antiquities” confirm the tribe’s ancient custom of having long beards. Cherokee men tried to sometimes promote whiskers, sometimes pull them out (242). One of the sources was Thomas Smith, or Shield Eater (died 1828), a convert at Spring Place and regular informant to Butrick on Cherokee culture. Another was Zachariah, or Zacharias, formerly a silversmith, later a headman of Taloney, or Talona, a town on Talking Rock Creek in Gilmer County, Georgia. Of the two men, both were halfbloods. Zacharias had a Hebrew name and may have come from Jewish forebears. Raven was of the ruling Moytoy family, heavily admixed with Jewish or crypto-Jewish lines since the early 16^th century. The “grandmother of George Hicks,” his mother Lydia Halfbreed’s mother was a halfblood herself, known as Qua-la-yu-ga Gu-u-li-si Crittenden (d. 1849). Here is the descent of this matriline, ending in George Agustus Hicks, traced back to the Wild Potato Clan wife of Moytoy, the “Cherokee Emperor,” as the British called him in 1730:

1. Wild Potato Clan Woman (1686-1730) m. Moytoy of Tellico (1687-1741, perhaps son of Moytoy of Chota, though doubtful)
2. Ah-nee-wa-kee (Deerhead, b. 1710) m. Cornelius Dougherty (b. 1700, d. 1770 in Keowee Territory)
3. Jennie Doughterty (abt. 1745-after 1826) m. Crittenden (Non-Cherokee)
4. Qua-la-yu-ga Gu-u-li-si Crittenden (b. abt. 1760, d. 1849) m. George X Chisholm (bef. 1822)
5. Lydia Halfbreed (abt 1774-1849) William Abraham Hicks, Principal Chief 1826-1828
6. George Agustus Hicks (b. 1793, d. aft. 1858)[ii]

The earliest fullblood in this descent was born in the late seventeenth century, although even she could have had a white father, and died in 1730. If we compute the admixture entering Cherokee genes with European husbands we arrive at a generous estimate of 11/64 blood quantum or about 17% Cherokee ancestry for the sixth generation, which contained George Agustus Hicks.[iii] The next generation of leadership after the Hickses centered on Chief John Ross, who was only one-eighth Cherokee. Throughout the more than hundred years he lived, Raven, the informant who spoke of beards, born 1730, had apparently witnessed the gradual transformation of the Cherokee from Judaism, to judge by beards and sidelocks and names like Jacob, Zacharias, Abraham, Aaron and Moses, to Christianity. He himself was living proof of the rapid dilution of their pre-1700 indigenous ethnic stock to levels around one-eighth. As for Raven’s own parentage, we will come to that shortly when we look at the famous depictions of Cherokee men in London in 1730.

Government and university officials claim the Cherokee people are tens of thousands of years old. They deny the Cherokee include any original pre-Columbian strains but Asiatic and Amerindian. They assert that the tribal name Tsalagi (pronounced Tchah-lah-kee) is as old as their language, that it is descended from a Proto-Iroquoian language that preceded Mohawk by thousands of years. Their minds are closed to thinking that the tribe ever spoke any other language or lived in any other place in recent times but the Appalachian region, from which they were forcibly removed on a Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, leaving behind a remnant in North Carolina. They vehemently reject any Jewish or African roots. Finally, they do not believe they are strongly related to other North American or South American groups such as the Lenape, Creek, Mexican or Peruvian Indians. They regard their “citizens” as a nation within a nation and the true heirs of roughly eight million square miles of territory in the Middle Atlantic and Southern states, from Kentucky to Florida, taken away from them by the British and U.S. governments between 1720 and 1836. All these claims depend on believing in Cherokee, or Tsalagi-speaking Amerindians miraculously persisting and proudly surviving under a unique continuity of leadership and traditional culture from thousands of years ago down to the present day.

We used to call this version of Cherokee history a polite fiction. Richard Thornton, a Creek architect and archeologist, has assembled a convincing case against it, and we won’t repeat his take-downs here. But the official Cherokee version of things has gone beyond make-believe and patronizing. It seems to have reached the realm of the dangerously delusional and actively injurious— the reason why so many Cherokee descendants today are disappointed by DNA results and puzzled by the so-called facts. Public history and the truth have been poisoned by agendas. Let’s look at one flagrant example.

Was Sequoyah Even Cherokee?

In a major article in a leading American anthropological journal,[iv] one reads recently that Sequoyah was a “Cherokee scholar, artist, and inventor…born in the heart of the Cherokee heartland in East Tennessee in the eighteenth century…[who] sometime in the first quarter of the nineteenth century…developed an entirely new writing system for the Cherokee language.” The startling invention was “intelligible only to Cherokee speakers…literacy became widespread… [and] facing forced removal from their ancestral homelands by the United States government, the Cherokee Syllabary was immediately a source of pride and cohesiveness…. For Cherokees, Sequoyah became a symbol of their unity and perseverance as they faced the Trail of Tears and the suffering and indignities that followed…From that time until the present day, Sequoyah has been revered as a giant of Cherokee innovation, intellectual achievement, and cultural identity.”

The blue-ribbon team for this cartoon version of Cherokee history includes “an Anglo-American archaeologist (Simek), a Cherokee scholar of tribal history (Reed) and a Cherokee language specialist (Belt)… [who] worked extensively with United States Forest Service archeaeologists.” They all revisited a 2011 article published in “the prestigious archaeological journal Antiquity” … by Rex Weeks and Ken Tankersley entitled “Talking Leaves and Rocks That Teach: The Archaeological Discovery of Sequoyah’s Oldest Written Record.” Its “historical importance…was obvious,” they said, “and the announcement of these findings generated worldwide interest and commentary.” Yet Weeks and Tankersley were not correct about the Red Bird River Shelter site (15CY52) showing evidence of a “Sequoyan” syllabary. They got the cultural context wrong. After the New York Times trumpeted the news that an early draft of Sequoyah’s ground-breaking syllabary had been spotted outside a cave in Kentucky, it appeared everyone was wet. Woops!

The University of Tennessee/Western Carolina University/Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians/National Forest team reanalyzes the Red Bird cave inscriptions and asserts they cannot be those made by Sequoyah and are not in the Cherokee language or writing system anyway. They are “Euro-American signatures overlying an important but very damaged set of much older pre-contact Native American line-and-grove petroglyphs”( p. 303). The evidence “has never been completely described in print,” they say, but “we do not believe [it] supports the notion that Sequoyah had white relatives in Kentucky whom he visited there at the time required for him to have authored those petroglyphs.” More fundamental misinterpretation of evidence. Woops again.

As Richard Thornton has pointed out, the Cherokees had very little, if any, presence in Kentucky after the American Revolution. They only occupied some small villages in the extreme southeastern corner prior to then. A 1715 map by John and Richard Beresford is the first map to even mention the Cherokees and the last one to show them living in present-day Kentucky and Virginia. The land that they ceded first to the Transylvania Company and later to the United States was never theirs to give away. It belonged to the Chickasaw and Shawnee. Until 1785 what is now northeast Alabama and the portion of northwest Georgia north of the Coosa and Coosawattee Rivers was Chickasaw Territory and in the state of Georgia. The first official map of the State of Georgia in 1785 proves this. Principal Chief Pathkiller established what he thought would be the Cherokee capital at Turkeytown (now Alabama) in the mid-1790s. The village was founded in 1788 by Chief Little Turkey as a refuge for non-hostile Cherokees during the Chickamauga-Cherokee War. Until then there were very few Cherokees living in either northeast Alabama or Kentucky. Pathkiller was told about an agreement between George Washington and Georgia in which Georgia was promised that the Cherokees would be out of the present boundaries of Georgia by 1805.

Sequoyah portrait from War Department in Washington. 

Before American Antiquity’s story of the Cherokee syllabary becomes “wikified,” and before Sequoyah becomes canonized as a “scholar, artist, inventor and intellectual,” let us all take a deep breath. Tell Them They Lie, by Traveller Bird (Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1971) poked holes in the Sequoyah myth many years ago. The author, a descendant of Sequoyah, presented an alternative history of the syllabary, one which was favorably reviewed in the American Indian Quarterly.[v]  Harvard professor Barry Fell thought the Cherokee syllabary a Bronze Age, East Mediterranean writing system and went so far as to term it Linear C,[vi] and the epigrapher Gloria Farley recognized and reported an early instance of it in the Possum Creek Stone, now in the permanent collection of the Kerr Museum in Poteau, Oklahoma.

The four-character inscription on the Possum Creek stone is apparently the legend on a large pedestal. It was read as ancient Greek, transliterated and translated by me (Donald Yates) in consultation with Brian Wilkes, a Cherokee language instructor. It says, HO-NI-KA-SA, “This is the one who has taken the prize of victory.”[vii] The winners in Greek athletic contests were crowned on such pedestals, and the ceremonial approach-ways leading to shrines and sports arenas were lined with statues of former champions standing atop such bases.[viii] The stone was dressed and scored with metal tools and otherwise prepared for epigraphy. Erosion and spalling of the monumental piece indicate extreme age. The method of inscribing the symbols by pecking would seem to point to production by indigenous inhabitants in the immediate locale, although the writing system and language is non-native by conventional thinking. Such a 300 pound artifact could not have traveled very far. It would have taken a team of men to lift or put it into place. These were not casual visitors to pre-historic Oklahoma.

There are also old, if not ancient, inscriptions in the Cherokee syllabary in North Carolina,[ix] and a new sample of Cherokee, clearly historical-era, came to light recently in north Alabama.[x]

The Red Bird Cave “petroglyph” is actually neither an example of the Cherokee writing system nor an instance of “Euro-American” nineteenth-century graffiti. The upper half is an inscription in ancient Greek letters and language (reading from left to right) and the lower line, much more deeply incised and ostensibly older, is in the Hebrew language and alphabet (reading from right to left). About the former, Klaus Hallof, a German epigrapher, who heads a world-heritage project at the Berlin Academy of Sciences to publish all the inscriptions of ancient Greece (Inscriptiones Graecae, IG, since 1827), recognized the upper part as Greek and read it. “We think we can discern the word TOPOS,” he wrote to us in 2007. “That suits the context extremely well in that it means, ‘This is the place of…’ It would be expected that there would also be a name above TOPOS in the genitive case. TOPOS inscriptions are a widespread occurrence in Greek epigraphy. According to the letter forms (sigma has the form [ ), the inscription belongs in high or late Augustan times, i.e. 2^nd-3^rd century after Christ (Yates, p. 130).” Possibly, the  upper Greek portion is a calque of the lower inscription in Hebrew. If this is the case, it was made by Greek-speaking, Greek-educated people who also knew Hebrew—a perfect description of Jews from Hellenistic times to Late Antiquity, and contemporary with the Bat Creek Stone, an inscription found beneath the head of a skeleton in an Adena mound dated to pre-Columbian times.[xi] The Red Bird rock-group includes other Greek inscriptions as well as Old Arabic, American Ogam (i.e. without vowels) and South Semitic. The surrounding region is notable for the heavily trafficked trail running through it called the Great Warrior Path. The locale is marked by a rich sampling of many different cultures and time periods.

According to Bird, the Cherokee writing system was used by the Cherokee (whom he calls Talagi) since 1483 and before. The Sequoyah family apparently preserved a cache of documents. “The ‘source’ of what I have written comes from more than six hundred documents written by George Guess [a variant spelling of Gist and Guest] himself on thick ruled ledger books, small leather-bound note books, scraps of paper, edges of early eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers, white buckskin, corn shuck paper, and mulberry and cedar bark. It comes from the mass of writings by his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren . . . .” (Traveller Bird, 143). These samples were evidently in the cursive, or miniscule, version of the syllabary. There was also a majuscule form used for epigraphy and printing. The story goes that Sequoyah, also known as George Gist, attacked the problem by trying first to develop a sign to represent a whole sentence, then a whole word, and finally parts of words. When he demonstrated how his young daughter could recognize the syllabic signs to George Lowrey one day, Lowrey exclaimed, “Yoh! It sounds like the Creek language.”

The one time when Sequoyah’s name appeared in a national mainstream magazine in Cherokee characters it was misspelled. The reason, according to Cherokee language teacher and United Keetoowah Band chief George Wickliffe, is that the famous figure’s name is pronounced with an initial –es or –is sound.[xii] A more accurate transcription than Si-quo-ya is Essiquoya. Such a spelling casts doubt on the often-cited etymology from siqua ‘pig’. Analogous is Issaqueena, the name of a chief’s daughter who befriends the first English settlers near Keowee-Town in South Carolina. An “Essiquoya-signed syllabary” is included in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.[xiii]

Essiquoya and Issaqueena point to origins in areas where Apalache, Catawba,  Spanish and other languages were spoken. Sequoyah’s name could have been Ladino Spanish Cebolla, or Seboya, a pet-name and surname meaning “onion, little nut.” (The Cherokee language has no sound for b but substitutes qu.) The intertribal sign talk gesture for “onion, smells,” along with a phonetic resemblance (and possibly an allusion to Marranos, a slur for Jews), might have led to a spurious connection in Cherokee with “pig,” explaining the legends describing Sequoyah as a messy or dirty husband. Alternatively, it could have been an anti-Semitic epiithet like marrano. Issaqueena evidently represented the Cherokees’ pronunciation of the Jewish name Sabina.

In all likelihood, Sequoyah was half-Jewish, one-quarter Creek or other Indian, and one-quarter black. Only through a blunder of history is he celebrated as a Cherokee hero. His mother was a half-breed trading post operator from outside Cherokee territory, and his father was Nathaniel Gist, a Jewish trader.[xiv] The Gists family appears in Malcolm Stern’s definitive roister Americans of Jewish Descent.[xv]  A cousin of Sequoyah’s father was the Virginian Samuel Gist, partner of George Washington. Samuel Gist became one of the first admiralty insurance brokers in London, lived for nearly a hundred years, helped start Lloyd’s Bank of London and owned the first stud racehorse to come to America, an “Arabian Turk.” In The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company, Gist is explicitly called “an old Jew” by his son-in-law, John Anderson.[xvi] As for Sequoyah’s mother, Wootah or Wutah, that is a West African word for a witch, Gully or Geechee, according to Richard Thornton. It was quite common for Indian traders like Nathaniel Gist to use Mustee slaves to manage their factor houses in the uplands of the Southeast. Mustee is a term in the Lower Southeast for a person of mixed African-Native American ancestry. The Creeks derived the term from the Spanish word mestizo.

Was Nancy Ward a Cherokee Genetically?

Sketch from life of Nancy Ward attributed to George Catlin.

 If Sequoyah is disqualified as Cherokee because of his admixture, Nancy Ward and her descendants probably fail the most vital DNA test, the haplotype requirement discussed in the first chapters of this book. Significantly, her portrait exhibits anomalies like gray-streaked hair, Caucasian nose and other features that fit better with a Spanish ideal of beauty. Her peculiar haplotype C1 is extremely common among Mexicans. Twenty percent of Mexicans carry haplogroup C. Did Nancy descend from the Mexican wife of a Spanish colonial from a time when Spaniards (often Sephardic Jewish in ancestry) mined the mountains and built villages and missions as far north as Virginia?  Or was the line Cherokee all the way back? In other words, was the precise haplotype brought from Mexico in the 17^th or 18^th century or had it traveled previously south of the border and after leaving a minor trace in the Appalachians expanded widely there. The former scenario seems more likely on balance, and by that criterion Nancy Ward was Spanish rather than American Indian. She was only a Cherokee because her male forebears like Sir Francis Ward asserted their prerogative to be so and have their progeny so recognized. If the Cherokee Nation was following strict protocol, her female line descendants should not be enrolled.

Sequoyah adapted an ancient syllabary in currency around 1820. He did not invent one ex nihilo. Missionaries seized on the majuscule version and made it a font used to print religious tracts and gospel books in the Cherokee language after 1830. Later it appeared in newspapers and became fixed in form. Its long history can be illustrated from around 200 BCE (Possum Creek Stone), when it was used to reproduce the Greek language, to a Cherokee chief’s neck sash in a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds from 1769.

The Apalache and others had similar writing systems, and we have already seen how the Apalache language may have evolved from Ancient Greek. The Cusseta Indians of Georgia used a syllabary that also appears to be ancient and from the Old World. Richard Thornton found the lost original copies of the Creek Migration Legends painted on buffalo for Oglethorpe in 1735 at Lambeth Palace in March 2015. It was Dr. Grahame Davies, Assistant Private Secretary to HRH Prince Charles, who determined in 2014 that the Migration Legends were in a wooden box, somewhere in Lambeth Palace, but he told Thornton that he did not have the time to look for it. The assistance of Prince Charles and Dr. Davies eventually, however, resulted in the documents’ discovery, after being lost for 285 years.

Apalache Writing System used in the Creek Migration Legends . Courtesy People of One Fire.

Red Bird Cave entrance inscriptions. Courtesy Phyllis and Billy Starnes.

POSSUM CREEK STONE in Kerr Museum, Poteau, Oklahoma:  a) transcribed into modern Cherokee font characters, b) transliterated into phonetic values, c) as photographed by Gloria Farley (see above), d) translated into ancient Greek, e) translated from Greek into English. “It was first reported to me in January 1975,” wrote Farley, “by Elaine Flud and her friend Jeanna James, who had slipped and fallen over it near the creek bed. It lay at the edge of the old main channel of Possum Creek, a tributary to Brazeal Creek, the Poteau River and the Arkansas River, near the town of Calhoun. . . . The Possum Creek stone is pecked with four eroded symbols, 3½ to 6 inches tall. They are in a straight line and have mostly curved lines, which is not typical of most [New World pre-historic] inscriptions. The flat stone measures 5 feet long, 30 inches wide, about 5 inches thick, and weighs about 300 pounds.” Gloria Farley, In Plain Sight, vol. II (unpublished manuscript). Farley’s essay on the Possum Creek stone forms a chapter in her book In Plain Sight, vol. II, in process of being published by her executor Bart Torbert. Farley died March 18, 2006. There are no Greek or Cherokee inscriptions in her first volume (Golden: Gloria Farley Publications, 2007). The Greek word  nikao “conquer, win” appears in the name of the athletic shoe brand Nike and the Hellenistic statue of the Greek goddess of Victory called the Nike of Samothrace. If our interpretation is correct, it also survives in a host of modern Cherokee language derivations, including anetcha “contest, ballplay” (Yates 2012, p. 23), the phrase nikohilunh “he’s playing ball” and place-names like Nikasi (“ball-ground”). Compare Greek teatron “theater, assembly” with Cherokee tetchanun “ceremonial enclosure” and Greek kanon “scraper” to Cherokee kanuga “scraper.”[xvii]

Sequoyah probably never saw the “Sequoyan Syllabary” as we know it today. What Cherokees use now was created in 1827 by Elias Boudinot, editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, and the Rev. Samuel Worcester, a missionary from New England.  Sequoyah’s letters were quite different. The widely repeated claim that the Sequoyah Syllabary was used throughout the Cherokee Nation is not true. Even though the Cherokee Syllabary printed version in the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper was free for all Cherokee citizens, there was so little demand for it that Boudinot eventually began publishing the newspaper solely in English.

North Carolina Cherokees never accepted the syllabary. They attempted to execute Sequoyah and his wife on convictions of practicing witchcraft. Although seriously wounded from days of torture, their lives were saved by a troop of Georgia Cherokee Light Horse, commanded by Captain John Ridge.  When Richard Thornton was a land planning consultant to the Eastern Band of Cherokees in 1976,  only a handful of tribal members even knew of the syllabary. No one used it. However, that same year, the State Board of Tourism and Humanities Council paid for two teachers to come from Oklahoma to teach classes in this writing system. Soon, it was taught in the Cherokee High School along with a new version of their history, purporting that the Cherokees had lived in North Carolina for at least a thousand years.

A thousand years ago, the Cherokee were nowhere near present-day Tennessee, Georgia or Alabama. We’ve seen they were also not carving their script on the Red Bird cave entrance in Kentucky, though Greeks, Hebrews, Celts and others were leaving evidence of their presence there. According to William Eubanks, there was a time when the Cherokee did not exist, and their tribal name had not been invented or used of them. Moreover, Eubanks claimed that Cherokee identity, or their true name, “has never been found out, and perhaps never will be.” It was a designation given to those “initiated as a tribe into the eastern mysteries . . . by a wise branch of the tribe known as those who spoke the language of Seg.” He focused on the name “Esh-he-el-o-archie,” which we have derived from Greek Etheloikeoi “Volunteer Settlers, Colonists.”[xviii] If read this way, it is probably the same word as Shalaki, the name of the mystical tall white ghostly ancestors of Zuni ritual.[xix]

[i] The Payne-Butrick Papers, Volumes 1, 2, 3, ed. William L. Anderson et al (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010), p. 243.

[ii] This genealogy is based on the work of James R. Hicks, Cherokee Lineages, available online at: https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/h/i/c/James-R-Hicks-VA/index.html. We have consistently found Hicks to be the most reasonable and best documented of the sources for Cherokee genealogies.

[iii] Here is the math, generation by generation, each new generation halving the percentage of each parent: 1. Fullblood + ½ blood 2.¾ blood + white 3. 3/8 blood + white 4.                  3/16 blood + white 5. 3/32 + ¼ blood 6. 11/64 blood or about 17%.

[iv] Jan F. Simek, Beau Duke Carroll, Julie Reed, Alan Cressler, Tom Belt, Wayna Adams and Mary White, “The Red Bird River Shelter (15CY52) Revisited: The Archaeology of the Cherokee Syllabary and of Sequoyah in Kentucky,” American Antiquity 84(2), 2019, pp 302-316.

[v] Susan Kalter, “America’s Histories’ Revisited,” American Indian Quarterly, 25 (2001), pp. 329-62.

[vi] “The Minoan Language – Linear A Decipherment,” Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications 4 (1977), pp.  1–54.

[vii] Donald N. Yates, Old World Roots of the Cherokee (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), p. 131.

[viii] For similar wording on vases and stone, see Panos Valavanis, trans. Dr. David Hardy, foreword by Sir John Boardman, Games and Sanctuaries in Ancient Greece: Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, Nemea, Athens (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum: 2004), 110, 126, 146, 374.

[ix] R. B. Myers and photograph in “Tanith in N.C.,” Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications 18 (1989), p. 259.

[x] “Talking Stones: Cherokee Syllabary in Manitou Cave, Alabama,” Journal of Antiquity 93/368, April 2019.

[xi] McCulloch, J. Huston, The Bat Creek Stone, 2004 publication available online at  https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/mcculloch.2/arch/batcrk.html.

[xii] Interview with Mack Bettis and Donald N. Yates, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, July 30, 2010.

[xiii] See Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh, “The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary,” Ethnohistory 40.1 (Winter 1993), pp. 70-94.

[xiv] See Samuel Cole Williams, “Nathaniel Gist, Father of Sequoyah.” East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 4 (1932) 39-54. George Lowery [Lowrey], “Notable Persons in Cherokee History: Sequoyah or George Gist/ George Lowery and John Howard Payne,” Journal of Cherokee Studies 2.4 (1977) 385-93. The Payne-Butrick Papers, Volumes 1, 2, 3, pp. 132-43. Jean Muir Dorsey and Maxwell Jay, Christopher Gist of Maryland and Some of His Descendants 1679-1957 (Chicago: Swift, 1969).

[xv] See Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald N. Yates, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), pp. 137-39.

[xvi] Charles Royster,  The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company (New York:  Knopf, 1999).

[xvii] On Cherokee ballplay as an analog to the sports of classical antiquity, see David Sansone, Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 50-59, and Yates, pp. 83-4.

[xviii] William Eubanks, “Cherokee Legend of the Son of Man . . . The Red Race, It is Claimed by this Writer, Were the Originators of the Ancient Apollo Worship, Now Known as the Christian Religion,” in A Collection of Works by William Eubanks, ed. Doug Weatherly and Kristy Hales. American Native Press Archives and Sequoyah Research Center. Published online:  https://ualrexhibits.org/tribalwriters/artifacts/Eubanks_Collection-of-Works-by-William-Eubanks.html.

[xix] On Hopi and Zuni connections, see Donald N. Yates, Old Souls in a New World: The Secret History of the Cherokee Indians (Phoenix: Panther’s Lodge, 2014), ch. 1, “The Hopis’ Elder White Brother,” pp. 1-14.