humans. A bear actually sacrificed himself so his guts might be made into
bowstrings. Animals also inflicted rheumatism and other ills upon waste-
ful and/or disrespectful hunters. Humans allied themselves, in turn, with
plants that became medicines for their ills. Ultimately humans acknowl-
edged wrongdoing and the great truth that nature might strike back at
those responsible for creating imbalance and disharmony. Peace was re-
stored, and Indians undertook disciplined observation of rituals to ensure
future peace. Thus hunters meditated or prayed before winter hunts, then
asked forgiveness of slain deer. Little Deer, spiritual chief of deer and pre-
vious warmaker upon humans, policed hunts, inflicting rheumatism on
hunters who failed to apologize.
Readers of this well-documented Cherokee ethnography might indeed
conclude that these people—and probably Creeks and others, also known
to sing and pray before and after hunts—would never waste, never kill
‘‘too many’’ deer or other animals. Yet nothing in the myth explicitly en-
joins hunters from taking only part of a deer carcass or, exactly, from
participating in market exchanges, whether with other native peoples or
white strangers from across the ocean. Cherokee ethnography is derived
first from Sequoyah’s famous syllabary, from early in the nineteenth cen-
tury, then from translations into English of ‘‘medicine books’’ composed in
Cherokee after . By this late date the whitetail population of the East
had been diminished close to extinction by two long centuries of a deerskin
trade initiated and conducted by Europeans (most successfully the British).
Cattle diseases in Europe had crashed leather supplies. Then native Ameri-
cans, in recorded instances even before the beginning of the seventeenth
century, presented gifts of cured and uncured skins to European mariners,
who seem immediately to have recognized a market potentially lucrative
beyond imagination. No natives resisted, but Timucuan, then Tuscawaran,
Powhatan, Chowan, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw—and Cherokee—rushed
to accommodate, unrestrained by Little Deer and assisted, perhaps, by song
and prayer. The Spanish in Florida, the French in Mobile and New Orleans,
and the British from their great trading base in Charleston, sent agents
hundreds of miles into the continental interior, bearing guns, powder and
shot, iron pots and axes, beads and trinkets, woolen blankets (‘‘duffel’’),
and later, an ocean of rum. Natives traded and consumed voraciously, be-
coming in short order, in the memorable words of the historian James Mer-
rill, ‘‘discriminating shoppers.’’^23
Mississippian culture was destroyed while native men became full-time
hunters of whitetail as well as of native slaves, who were valuable as porters