mooxey] THE END OF THE NATCHEZ 5*7
to them from the Creek country. It is probable that the first refugees came from South Carolina, while others say that they came from Carolina, and were joined later by others from the Creeks and Chickasaw. Some of them, we are told by Bienville, went directly from the Chickasaw. They seem to have been regarded by the Cherokee as a race of wizards and conjurers, probably due in part to their peculiar religious rites and in part to the interest which belonged to them as the remnant of a broken tribe.
The venerable James Wafford, a prominent mixed-blood Che- rokee who was born in 1806 near the site of Clarkesville, Georgia, when it was all Indian country, and who afterward removed with his tribe to Indian Territory, informed the writer in 1890 that the " Notchees " had their town on the north bank of Hiwassee river, just above Peachtree creek, on the spot where a Baptist mission was established by the Rev. Evan Jones about 1820, and a few miles above the present Murphy, Cherokee county, North Carolina. On his mother's side he had himself a strain of Natchez blood. His grandmother had told him that when she was a young woman — say about 1755 — she had occasion to go to this town on some business, which she was obliged to transact through an interpreter, as the Natchez had then been there so short a time that only one or two spoke any Cherokee. They were all in the one town, which the Cherokee called Gwalgwd'hi y " Frog place," but he was unable to say whether or not it had a townhouse. In 1824, as one of the census enumerators for the Cherokee Nation, he went over the same section and found the Natchez then living jointly with Cherokee in a town called GulaniyI at the junction of Brasstown and Gumlog creeks, tribu- tary to Hiwassee river, some six miles southeast of their former location and close to the Georgia line. The removal may have been due to the recent establishment of the mission at the old place. It was a large settlement, about equally made up from the two tribes, but by this time the Natchez were indistinguishable in
�� �
