Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series on the life and work of James Mooney.

For 36 years, from the time he launched his career with the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1885 until his death in 1921, James Mooney devoted his life to detailing various aspects of the history, material culture, oral tradition, language, arts, and religion of the Eastern Cherokee, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa and other tribes, adding a new dimension to the writing of Indian history by combining various methods of research and utilizing sources from the Indians themselves.

Some of his most inspired work took place in the mountains of Western North Carolina where he lived among the remnant Eastern Band of Cherokees for parts of four years from 1887 through 1890 and for interim periods thereafter through 1916. He was the first serious student of that then neglected tribe.
According to University of Georgia anthropologist Charles Hudson, perhaps today’s the leading authority on the Indian tribes of the southeast, Mooney “possessed just the right combination of persistence and tact to do superb fieldwork,” allowing him to publish works on the Cherokee without which readers “would know next to nothing about the world view of the southeastern Indians.”

The major works dealing with the Eastern Cherokee that Mooney saw through the press during his lifetime were Myths of the Cherokees (1900) and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee (1891). Both appeared as Bureau of American Ethnology publications. The 1900 publication presented the author’s 214-page “Historical Sketch of the Cherokee” as a prelude for the 320-page section in which “The Myths” are enumerated, along with information on their sources, parallels in other cultures, geographical settings, and more. Taken together with “Sacred Formulas,” the two sections of the “Myths of the Cherokees” volume provide a Cherokee trilogy that unites the central themes of tribal history, lore, and ritual Mooney always sought to explore and correlate.

But no full understanding of these classic documents can be had without recourse to the influences of the author’s early life or the innovative methods he evolved to solicit and record information once he traveled into the Cherokee country.

Mooney was born in 1861 in Richmond, Ind., a village situated on a tributary of the Ohio River. His mother, Ellen Devlin Mooney, already had relatives in Richmond when she and her husband, James Mooney Sr., arrived there in the mid-1850s. Both parents were natives of rural County Meath, Ireland.
The influence of Mooney’s Irish heritage — as inculcated by his mother and their Irish-American relatives — can’t be overemphasized in view of his later tendency to utilize endangered Indian cultures as lenses that enabled one to look through the chaotic present into a legendary past so as to focus upon, retrieve, and preserve their essential history, lore, and rituals.

The purpose of such a process was in part documentary, of course, but it was also shamanistic in the sense that it always held forth the promise of possible revitalization. It seems clear enough that Mooney saw the Indians’ struggles to preserve their various cultures and identities as not dissimilar from the Irish struggle toward the same ends. They were struggles in which he readily participated.
After graduating from high school, Mooney took a job with a newspaper in his hometown, but his free time was given over to reading about Indian cultures and studying the publicatons of early American anthropologists and explorers like John Wesley Powell. In 1882, the 22-year-old “anthropological Irishman” (as Mooney was labeled by one supporter) wrote Powell, who was director of the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., asking for employment.

He cited his “study of local names, tribal relations and boundaries, linguistic affinities and general history of the Indians of North and South America.” Apparently influenced by Indiana’s Quaker community, which had established a school among the Eastern Band of Cherokees, Mooney also noted that he would “probably visit the mountain region of Tennessee & Carolina soon, and if commissioned to investigate the local names, ancient boundaries, town sites ... of the East Cherokee, I can promise satisfaction.”

The bureau ethnologist to whom Powell referred the letter was not impressed and responded negatively. He was rejected again the following year, and yet again in 1884, but as his subsequent career was to demonstrate time and again, Mooney was nothing if not persistent, even at times audacious.

He left Indiana in the spring of 1885 bound for Washington with the vague intention of proceeding on his own “to Brazil in order to investigate the aborigines of that country.” In the back of his mind, of course, Mooney maintained hope that Powell might be persuaded face-to-face into changing his mind, which is exactly what happened.

He called at the Bureau of American Ethnology, bringing samples of his work to show Powell, who “became so much impressed by him that he gave him a position under himself.” So Mooney began work, initiating a monumental career that is to this day not fully comprehended by most admirers of his writings about the Eastern Cherokees. In due time, working persistently with vision and passion, he became the leading authority on the Eastern Cherokees as well as on various tribes in the Plains Indian complex.

Mooney remained an active member of the Bureau of American Ethnology until his death in 1921, but what Charles Hudson has rightly depicted as “his cultural relativism and his moral courage” led to a ban in 1918 by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on his right to conduct fieldwork on “any Indian reservations.” This resulted from his support for chartering the Native American Church of Oklahoma, which practiced the ritual use of peyote.

Our interest, however, lies with those formative years of Mooney’s career in the mountains of WNC, during which he befriended, lived with, interviewed, observed, researched, sketched, photographed, and subsequently chronicled the remnant band of eastern Native American mountaineers, and in so doing contributed as much as any outsider has yet managed toward the understanding and preservation of Cherokee culture.

Every student of Cherokee history and lore knows James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokees and possibly even his Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, but very few know the story of the curious and driven man who compiled those monumental works.

Mooney became a worker at the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1885. That summer he met Nimrod Jarrett Smith, principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokees, who was often in Washington lobbying for official recognition of the band as a legal entity or for responsible use of tribal resources.

He warmed to Mooney and revealed much regarding his people, especially their language, including confirmation of the theory that Cherokees permanently situated at various localities in WNC spoke several dialects. On his first trip to WNC in the summer of 1887, Mooney was instructed by the BAE “to collect information for comparisons of religious practices, customs, and arts” in addition to considering linguistic matters.

The 26-year-old budding ethnologist who disembarked at the rail and telegraph station at present Whittier on the Tuckaseegee River about six miles south of Yellow Hill (as Cherokee was then known), was “a small, agile man with long dark-brown hair and large gray eyes,” about 5’ 4” in height. Since graduating from high school, he had been inclined to wear a mustache and sometimes wore his hair shoulder-length. Not physically imposing, Mooney’s greatest asset, as one of his co-workers noted much later, was an “intense emotional attitude,” which time and again manifested itself as a sincere concern for the subjects that interested him and an almost unequaled intensity in pursuing those interests.

In Cherokee, Smith invited him to observe what turned out to be the last Green Corn Dance enacted by the Eastern Band for over a century, with its attendant individual and tribal cleansing rituals, involving conjuring, singing, and prayer that lasted all day and into the night. That summer Mooney started learning the Cherokee language, collected native medicinal plants, blowguns, fish spears and other objects, and in the process became acquainted with individual tribal members and their mountainous homeland.

As Mooney himself indicates in his writings, there was initial distrust in some quarters, especially among conservative Cherokees who “had experienced white duplicity too many times to have much confidence in strangers, even someone who had their chief’s blessings.”

In the late 1880s, Mooney found that old Cherokee traditions were dying out in the face of an onslaught by white Christianity, culture and material goods. Periodic epidemics had also sapped their individual and collective will to resist so that many displayed “passive resignation” in the midst of what seemed to be “times of world decay.” Some Cherokees welcomed acculturation or were simply resigned to it.
But many truly preferred the old ways and consciously sought to maintain their identity through traditional lifestyles, ceremonies and beliefs.

Mooney — one of the first to recognize in Indian degradation the trauma of acculturation and adjustment to loss of power — urgently directed his energies toward preserving Cherokee history, lore and rituals before they faded from tribal consciousness and were forever lost. In retrospect, we can see quite clearly that he arrived in the nick of time since most of the Cherokee traditionalists then able to provide him with essential information and insights had died by the turn of the century.

(Next week we’ll take a closer look at Mooney’s life among the Cherokees.)

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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