Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

THE SWIMMER MANUSCRIPT
CHEROKEE SACRED FORMULAS AND MEDICINAL
PRESCRIPTIONS
By James Mooney
revised, completed, and edited by
Frans M. Olbrechts
INTRODUCTION
Material and Method
Cherokee manuscripts and material on the Cherokee language have
a most uncanny propensity to get lost.
The "dictionary" of Christian Priber has never been heard of since
it reached Frederica, Ga., probably in 1741.^
The bidky material of the Rev. S. A. Worcester, including a grammar
and a dictionary, went down on the Arkansas about 1830.^
The manuscript contributions to Cherokee Hnguistics by Col. W. H.
Thomas have "unfortunately (been) mislaid."^
The manuscript of John Pickering's grammar of the Cherokee lan-
guage, the printing of which was interfered with, or was thought to
have been interfered with, by the invention of the Sequoya syllabary.*
has never been found.
To reach a cUmax: The manuscript which is edited in the following
paper has been true to the tradition, and has disappeared without
leaving a clue. The manuscript is described by Mooney, who discovered
it and brought it to Washington, as " a small daybook of about
240 pages, . . . about half filled with writing in the Cherokee characters,"^
and elsewhere as "an unpaged blank book of 242 pages, S%
by 12 inches, only partially filled; 137 (formulas) in all."°
Mooney started work on it in 1888; he transliterated and translated
the formulas with the assistance of native informants, a^jb'\'m%
the writer, himself taking a conspicuous part in the work.
1 Stevens, Hist, of Georgia, vol. i, p. 165; Adair, Hist. Amer. Inds., p. 243.
2 Pilling, Bibliography of the Iroquoian Languages, p. 174.
» Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, p. 162, note.
* Ludewig, Literature of Amer. Aboriginal Languages, p. 38.
5 Seventh Ann. Rept. Bur. Ethn., p. 312.
« Thirty-seventh Ann. Rept. Bur. Amer. Ethn., p. 8.