On June 7, 1735 the leaders of the Creek Indian Confederacy traveled to the new colonial town of Savannah to meet with Governor James Edward Oglethorpe and leading citizens. The purpose was first to establish diplomatic and trade relations, but also to convince Oglethorpe that they were not primitive savages as they were viewed by most the British officials in older colonies to the north.
Their high king, +++Paracusa Chikili+++ presented Oglethorpe with a bison vellum, on which was written in the Apalache-Creek writing system, the early history of the Kaushete-Creek people. The Kaushete became the leading branch of the Upper Creeks. Newspaper accounts of the writing system described it as being composed of “peculiar red and black characters, not pictures.” The text of the vellum was read by Chikili and translated into English by Kusaponakesa (Mary Musgrove), a Creek noblewoman married to a British colonist. Georgia colonial secretary, Thomas Christie, wrote down the final translation.
Oglethorpe immediately realized that he had witnessed something extraordinary. He wrote a letter to King George II stating that the Creek Indians were distinctly different from any other tribe ever encountered by the British in North America. He stated, “I am convinced that the Creek Indians are descended from a great civilization. They are equal in intelligence or greater so, to any Englishman and deserving of being treated as our equals in all matters.”
Oglethorpe directed Christie to place the bison calf vellum, his translation and the interviews with Creek leaders on the next ship headed to London. The ship departed on July 6, 1735. The documents created quite a stir in London and were given extensive coverage in the American Gazetteer newspaper. The vellum hung on the wall of the Colonial Office at Westminster for many decades. The location of the translation that brought meaning to the vellum was soon lost.
Throughout the 1800s, several delegations of prominent scholars from major American universities sailed across the Atlantic in vain search for the lost Migration Legend of the Creek People. By the time that archaeology was becoming a true profession in the United States, the Migration Legends had become almost forgotten . . . but not by the Creek People.
https://apalacheresearch.com/2019/12/26/the-discovery-of-the-lost-c...
