Note 39 — Observations, and arguments, in proof of the American Indians being descended from the Jews. (continued 3)

Adair here describes the thanksgiving ceremonial, the Green Corn Dance, called the busk by the Creeks (puskita or boosketau). Yet fuller accounts by John Howard Payne, the poet, who was among the Cherokees, (1835) may be found. He made observations and wrote voluminously of their festivals. Payne MSS. Ayers Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. Payne contributed an article to Continental Monthly (New York, 1862) on the Green Corn Dance, in which it is set forth that it is the second of the six great festivals of the year, held when the young corn first becomes fit to eat; and that “at every green corn festival the sacred square is strewn with soil yet untrodden.” Squier, in his Serpent Symbol, 67, drawing on the Payne MSS., quotes the poet as entertaining the view that the festival was a survival of the ancient solar worship of the Cherokees. The other account referred to is by Benjamin Hawkins in his Sketch of the Creek Country, 75, reproduced in Bartram’s Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians, 67, and in Hodge’s Handbook, I, 176. See Bartram’s own lively account in Travels, 448, 507, and Timberlake’s in Memoirs, 64 (Williams edition) 88. A good description based on Hawkins and Swan (Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, V, 267) appears in Gatschet, Migration Legend of the Creeks, 177 et seq. Gatschet concludes with the observation: “Many analogies can be traced with well-known customs among the Aztecs and Maya Indians.” For the Green Corn Dance of the Iroquois, kinsmen of the Cherokees, see Morgan, League of the Iroquois, I, 176, 190. Generally, Jones, Antiquities of Southern Indians, 99 et seq.