People of the Thunder (North America's Forgotten Past) (62 page)

Read People of the Thunder (North America's Forgotten Past) Online

Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

BOOK: People of the Thunder (North America's Forgotten Past)
6.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

He and Old White had paddled a canoe out to the middle of the river—one last shared journey. Old White had dressed in his best: a white, beaded shirt, belted at the waist; his pouch of herbs, his pipe, and some tobacco at his side. He’d pulled what remained of his stringy white hair tightly behind his head and pinned it with a copper turkey-tail pin. A wealth of shell bead necklaces had hung around his spindly neck. The old fabric pack slung over his shoulder was once again weighted with the stone war ax.

The old man had been failing, frail, little more than a walking skeleton. Food either wouldn’t stay down or passed straight through. He could barely hold the paddle.

“Do not do this thing!” Green Snake had pleaded.

“I am the Seeker,” Old White had said with a knowing but toothless smile.

Trader had watched, tears in his eyes, as Old White had laid his paddle to the side. Then he had risen, clutched the sack of copper, and emptied it into the river. Copper gleamed as it floated down into the sunlit depths. “Fair Trade for passage to the Underworld.”

The old man had struggled to lift the large round stone he had chosen for the purpose. He had glanced back, meeting Trader’s eyes—that one long look more expressive than any words. Then Old White had said, “Power keep you, Trader.”

With that he had grinned happily . . . and stepped over the side.

In that instant, Trader would have sworn he heard a musical Song, the melody rising and falling as the waters closed over Old White’s body. The canoe seemed to rise, water sloughing around a huge sinuous body. Was it a trick of the sun, or had the river suffused with rainbow colors?

And then the musical Song faded, and there was only silence, and Trader’s empty canoe bobbing on the water.

Authors’ Note

Readers who are interested in the actual archaeological sites mentioned in
People of the Weeping Eye
and
People of the Thunder
should know that Split Sky City is, of course, the Moundville Archaeological Park outside Moundville, Alabama. It can be reached by traveling fifteen miles south from Tuscaloosa on Highway 69. The Red Wing mounds lie just south of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cahokia—the crown jewel of North American prehistory—rises just east of St. Louis, in Illinois. Signs on I-70/55 west of Collinsville will direct the traveler. We chose the Shiloh Mounds, located in the Shiloh National Battlefield, Tennessee, for the Yuchi’s Rainbow City. White Arrow Town is based on the Lubbub archaeological site near Aliceville, Alabama. The site lies on private property, and is accessible only through John Blitz’s excellent monograph,
Ancient Chiefdoms of the Tombigbee.
All of the towns referred to along the Black Warrior River are real, and are on private land. You must read the archaeological literature to learn more about them. Feathered Serpent Town represents the Kellog and Yarborough sites northwest of Columbus, Mississippi. These sites, too, are on private property. The Forest Witch lived atop the great Mound A at the Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana. Readers of our
People of the Owl
should be more than passingly familiar with
the place. The Mississippian component we refer to just south of Poverty Point did exist, but was bulldozed by the landowner.

Bibliography

Adair, James
2005
The History of the American Indians
. Reprint of the 1775 edition published by Edward and Charles Dilly. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Anderson, David G.
1997 The Role of Cahokia in the Evolution of Southeastern Mississippian Society. In
Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World,
edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 248–
268. Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.
1994
The Savannah River Chiefdoms.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Atkinson, James R.
2004
Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Beck, Robin A., Jr.
2003 Consolidation and Hierarchy: Chiefdom Variability in the Mississippian Southeast.
American Antiquity
68:641– 664.

Bense, Judith A.
1994
Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: PaleoIndian to World War I.
Academic Press, San Diego, California, New York, and London.

Blitz, John H.
1993
Ancient Chiefdoms of the Tombigbee.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Blitz, John H., and Patrick Livingood
2004 Sociopolitical Implications of Mississippian Mound Volume.
American Antiquity
69:291– 303.

Brain, Jeffrey P., and Philip Phillips
1996
Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast.
Peabody Museum Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Brown, Calvin S.
1992
Archaeology of Mississippi
. Reprint of the 1926 edition. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi.

Brown, Ian W. (editor)
2003
Bottle Creek: A Pensacola Culture Site in South Alabama.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Brown, James A.
1996
The Spiro Ceremonial Center
. Memoirs of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology No. 29, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Carstens, Kenneth C., and Patty Jo Watson (editors)
1996
Of Caves and Shell Mounds.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Cobb, Charles R.
2000
From Quarry to Cornfield: The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe Production.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Culin, Stewart
1975
Games of the North American Indians.
Reprint of the
Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902

1903.
Dover Publications, New York.

Davison, Gerald, John M. Neale, and Ann M. Kring
2004
Abnormal Psychology.
John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey.

DeJarnette, David L.
1975
Archaeological Salvage in the Walter F. George Basin of the Chattahoochee River in Alabama.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Diaz-Granados, Carol, and James R. Duncan
2004
The Rock Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Dickens, Roy S. Jr., and Trawick Ward (editors)
1985
Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Dye, David H., and Cheryl Anne Cox
1990
Towns and Temples along the Mississippi.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Emerson, Thomas E., Randall E. Hughes, Mary R. Hynes, and Sarah U. Wisseman
2003 The Sourcing and Interpretation of Cahokia-style Figurines in the Trans-Mississippi South and Southeast.
American Antiquity
68:287– 313.

Emerson, Thomas E., and R. Barry Lewis (editors)
1991
Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest.
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

Fairbanks, Charles H.
2003
Archaeology of the Funeral Mound.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Finger, Michael
2004 Shiloh: Emergency Archaeology.
American Archaeology
8(2):30– 38.

Fisher-Carroll, Rita
2001
Mortuary Behavior at Upper Nodena.
Arkansas Archaeological Survey Research Series 59, Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Fundabrook, Emma L., and Mary Douglass Foreman
1957
Sun Circles and Human Hands
. Southern Publications, Fairhope, Alabama.

Gibbons, Whit, Robert R. Haynes, and Joab L. Thomas
1990
Poisonous Plants and Venomous Animals of Alabama.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Gibson, Arrell M.
1971
The Chickasaws.
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma.

Gibson, Jon L., and Philip J. Carr
2004
Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Granberry, Julian
2005
The Americas That Might Have Been: Native American Social Systems through Time.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 1993
A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timuca Language,
3rd ed. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Grantham, Bill
2002
Creation Myths and Legends of the Creek Indians.
University Press of Florida, Tallahassee, Florida.

Green, Michael Foster
2001
Schizo phre nia Revealed.
W. W. Norton, New York.

Hawkins, Benjamin
2003
The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796

1810
. Edited by H. Thomas Foster II. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Howard, James H.
1968
The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex and Its Interpretation.
Memoir Missouri Archaeological Society No. 6. Springfield, Missouri.

Hudson, Charles M.
2003
Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa.
The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and London.
1979
Black Drink: A Native American Tea.
The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia. 1976
The Southeastern Indians.
The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Jackson, H. Edwin, and Susan L. Scott
2004 Patterns of Elite Faunal Utilization at Moundville, Alabama.
American Antiquity
68:552– 572.

Jackson, Jason Baird
2003
Yuchi Ceremonial Life.
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Jenkins, Ned J., and Richard A. Krause
1986
The Tombigbee Watershed in Southeastern Prehistory.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Jones, Charles C.
1998
Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly the Georgia Tribes.
Reprint of the 1873 edition. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Keesing, Roger M.
1975
Kin Groups and Social Structure.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.

Kidder, Tristram R.
2004 Plazas as Architecture: An Example from the Raffman Site, Northeastern Louisiana.
American Antiquity
69:514– 532.

King, Adam
2003
Etowah: The Political History of a Chiefdom Capital.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Knight, Vernon James Jr.
2005 Characterizing Elite Midden Deposits at Moundville.
American Antiquity
69:304– 321. 1997 Some Developmental Parallels between Cahokia and Moundville. In
Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World
, edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 229– 247. Bison
Books, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.
1990 Social Organization and the Evolution of Hierarchy in Southeastern Chiefdoms.
Journal of Anthropological Research
46(1):1–23.
1986 The Institutional Organization of Mississippian Religion.
American Antiquity
51:675– 687.

Knight, Vernon J., and Vincas Steponaitis
1998
Archaeology and the Moundville Chiefdom.
Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., and London.

Lacefield, Jim
2000
Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks: A Guide to the State’s Ancient Life and Landscapes.
The Alabama Geological Society, Birmingham, Alabama.

Lambert, Patricia M.
1999
Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture.
The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Lankford, George E.
2004 World on a String: Some Cosmological Components of the Southeast Ceremonial Complex. In
Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art in the Midwest and South,
edited by Richard F. Townsend and Robert V. Sharpe, The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
1987
Native American Legends. Southeastern Legends: Tales from the Natchez, Caddo Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other Nations.
August House, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Other books

Temptation in a Kilt by Victoria Roberts
Bermuda Schwartz by Bob Morris
Dirty Rotten Scoundrel by Liliana Hart
The New World: A Novel by Chris Adrian, Eli Horowitz
Hopes by Linda Chapman
Cover Girls by T. D. Jakes
(1987) The Celestial Bed by Irving Wallace