Note 87 — Observations, and arguments, in proof of the American Indians being descended from the Jews. (continued 5)

Schoolcraft, Information Indian Tribes, I, 309 et seq., gives the story as told by old men of the Chickasaws: That tribe came from the West; a part of the tribe remaining in the West. The migrants carried a pole which they planted in the ground at night, and the next morning they would go in the direction it was found to be leaning. They continued eastward across the Mississippi until they arrived at Chickasaw Old Fields, where, the pole standing erect, they settled. Cushman (History of the Choctaw, etc., Indians, 62) gives the same tradition as being handed down by old men to missionaries in 1820, and that the Indians at the time named the “great water” Misha Sipokni (the Mississippi). Buttrick gives a migration legend of the Chickasaws coming from the West across a great river; and the tradition fixes the crossing place at the bluffs, later known as the Chickasaw Bluffs, on one of which stands the city of Memphis.