106. THE GIANTS FROM THE WEST

James Wafford, of the western Cherokee, who was born in Georgia in

1806, says that his grandmother, who must have been born about the

middle of the last century, told him that she had heard from the old

people that long before her time a party of giants had come once to

visit the Cherokee. They were nearly twice as tall as common men,

and had their eyes set slanting in their heads, so that the Cherokee

called them Tsunil' kalû', "The Slant-eyed people," because they

looked like the giant hunter Tsul`kalû' (see the story). They said

that these giants lived very far away in the direction in which the

sun goes down. The Cherokee received them as friends, and they stayed

some time, and then returned to their home in the west. The story

may be a distorted historical tradition.

Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology · 第 162 / 197 题