Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part article on James Mooney.

Every student of Cherokee history and lore knows James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokees (1900) and possibly even his Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee (1891), but very few know the story of the curious and driven man who compiled those monumental works. Last week we took a look at Mooney’s early life up to the time of his arrival on Cherokee lands here in Western North Carolina. This week we’ll take a closer look at his relationship with the Eastern Band of Cherokees.

James 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.

When Mooney first visited Eastern Band lands in WNC in the summer of 1887, Smith served as his host, inviting him to observe what turned out to be the last Green Corn Dance enacted by the tribe for over a century. He also observed that old Cherokee traditions were dying out in the face of an onslaught by white Christianity, culture and material goods; accordingly, he directed his energies toward preserving Cherokee history, lore and rituals before they faded from tribal consciousness and were forever lost.

The methods Mooney employed and the range of information collected are astonishing: he interviewed numerous Indian informants, particularly the great Big Cove medicine man Swimmer; inquired about manuscripts; gathered plants the Cherokee shamans used and sent them back to Washington for identification; investigated the whereabouts and history of mounds; compiled vital statistics; studied dialects and personal names; constructed word glossaries; observed “the great tribal game of ball play” and other ritual ceremonies; took photographs of people and places; sketched pictographs; and collected artifacts or commissioned the making of ceremonial objects like the “feather wands” used in the Eagle Dance. He also sent hundreds of circulars “to postmasters, doctors, and prominent merchants within a seven-state area” and thereby located “more than one thousand Cherokee names and localities ... with the meanings of the names and whatever local legends are connected with them.”

A letter Mooney wrote back to the Bureau of American Ethnology office in Washington from the Qualla Boundary requesting his leave be extended for several months indicates the fever pitch at which he often conducted such research: “I am working here every hour of the daylight & half the night as I have brought my informants to live in the same room with me.”

Swimmer and, in time, the other shamans and populace of the Eastern Band, concluded that the courteous white man who came to visit and talk with them each year was “u-da-nu-ti;” that is he was “a man of soul” who had the correct “emotional attitude.”

Swimmer was Mooney’s most valuable informant by far. The author credits “nearly three-fourths” of the stories related in Myths of the Cherokees to the medicine man, who was over 50-years-old in the late 1880s. Swimmer lived in the isolated and traditional Big Cove community (which remains a bastion of Cherokee traditionalism to this day) but had heard of Mooney’s arrival on the Qualla Boundary before they met in the fall of 1887. Once the ethnologist gained Swimmer’s trust, they spent “day and night, talking and writing” about “the whole range of Indian life and thought.”

Shortly after the great medicine man’s death, Mooney penned an elegiac tribute to his friend: “He died in March, 1899, aged about sixty-five, and was buried like a true Cherokee on the slope of a forest-clad mountain. Peace be to his ashes and sorrow for his going, for with him go about half the traditions of his people.”

In 1891 the 30-year-old ethnologist’s most ambitious project to date, Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, was published. In compiling the 90-page manuscript, Mooney selected but “twenty-eight specimens” from the mass of nearly 600 formulas, prayers, and sacred songs collected from the written records of Swimmer and the other medicine men.

For most of the 1890s, Mooney roamed the Great Plains, studying in detail the Ghost Dance and heraldry systems, in addition to initiating his examination of the peyote religion. By the end of the decade, however, he was prepared to return his attention to the Eastern Cherokees, having maintained contact through correspondence with a number of friends on the Qualla Boundary. In the spring of 1898, he settled down in Washington to compose the compendium of Cherokee history and lore entitled “Myths of the Cherokees.”

Mooney’s lifelong insistence on “trying to get things right“ was evidenced yet again by the trip he made to the Qualla Boundary in late 1900 to update Cherokee history to the end of the nineteenth century, confirm several local legends, and check details on his map of the region. With printer’s proof in hand, he made his final revisions at Yellow Hill (as Cherokee was then known) in the midst of the people who were his subject matter. The volume, destined to become “a standard reference for anyone interested in the history and ethnology”of the Cherokees was issued in 1900 by the BAE to glowing reviews.

From 1911 through 1916, Mooney returned to WNC to work on a larger collection of the sacred formulas with his old friend and scribe Will West Long, one of the few medicine men still practicing the ancient arts among the Eastern Cherokees. In the afternoon, after working on the texts, they walked in the surrounding woodlands, gathering almost 700 plants mentioned in them as cures, which were packed for shipment to Washington.

After Long’s wife had given birth to a baby boy, he was invited to participate in the ancient “going to water” ceremony in which the entire family “arose before sunrise, prayed, and then walked two miles to a special mountain stream.” While Will West Long faced the rising sun, held forth colored beads, and invoked “The Long Man” (the designation for a stream in Cherokee mythology) for aid, everyone else waded into the sacred, cleansing water.

But Mooney’s health deteriorated, which diminished his ability to work with Long and other informants. That and a ban on his right to visit Indian reservations dispirited Mooney, keeping him from seeing his expanded volume on Cherokee sacred formulas into print before his death in 1921.

Mooney remained an active member of the Bureau of American Ethnology until his death, but what one observer has called “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. When the church came under attack by missionaries and Bureau of Indian Affairs administrators, Mooney defended the Indians right to utilize peyote as a sacraments and was one of the first non-Indians to participate in and perhaps the first anthropologist to describe the ceremonies involving this hallucinatory drug derived from the tubercules of mescal cactus.

During 1926 and 1927, anthropologist Frans M. Olbrechts visited Big Cove and consulted with Mooney’s former informants. By that time, Mooney’s original manuscript for the sacred formulas he intended to publish had been lost. Olbrechts published The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicinal Perscriptions in 1932 under both his own name and James Mooney’s. While obviously a valuable publication based, in part, on the pioneering ethnologist’s work, the extent to which it reflects Mooney’ intentions is arguable.

To retain with certainty his understanding of the history, lore, and rituals of the Cherokees, we must go to the major texts he saw through the press during his lifetime: The Sacred Formulas (1891) and Myths of the Cherokees (1900). And while Mooney himself viewed them as being fragmentary, preliminary “papers” for a Cherokee book of epic proportions that was never to be, it is possible for us to comprehend, in retrospect, that he came much closer to achieving his dream in these vivid and interrelated documents than he had supposed.

Mooney’s Cherokee materials are amazingly varied in regard to their diverse origins in both oral and printed sources, as well as in the range of narrative styles he employed to present them. But beyond matters of research methodology and literary style, Mooney’s greatest achievement was his recognition of the enduring significance of the stories, myths, and sacred formulas to the Cherokees themselves and his ability to place those materials at the very heart of his writing.

I have been studying James Mooney’s career in Western North Carolina and at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. for years. Only recently has it become apparent to me that he was the vessel chosen by the Cherokees in the late 19th century to record their history and lore. Chief Smith recognized something in the young ethnologist and invited him to visit. Swimmer checked him out and approved as well. No doubt they and the many other Cherokees who aided Mooney recognized his abilities as a historian. But they also recognized that he had that most import quality of being“u’da’nu’ti”; otherwise, they would have never opened the door and allowed him to enter their spirit world.

(George Ellison is 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. He can be reached at PO Box 1262, Bryson City, NC, 28713, or by email at ellisongeorge@cs.com)

 

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