While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Hitchiti (Creek: ahítchita, 'to look upstream'). A
Muskhogean tribe formerly residing chiefly in a town of the same name on
the east bank of Chattahoochee river, 4 miles below Chiaha, and possessing
a narrow strip of good land bordering on the river, in west Georgia. When
Hawkins visited them in 1799 they had spread out into two branch
settlements, one, the Hitchitudshi, or Little Hitchiti, on both sides of
Flint river below the junction of Kinchafoonee creek, which passes through
a country named after it; the other, Tutalosi, on a branch of Kinchafoonee
creek , 20 miles west of Hitchitudshi. The tribe is not often mentioned in
history, and appears for the first time in 1733, when two of its
delegates, with the Lower Creek chiefs, met Gov. Oglethorpe at Savannah.
The language appears to have extended beyond the limits of the tribe as
here defined, as it was spoken not only in the towns on the Chattahoochee,
as Chiaha, Chiahudshi, Hitchiti, Oconee, Sawokli, Sawokliudshi, and
Apalachicola, and in those on Flint river, but by the Mikasuki, and, as
traceable by the local names, over considerable portions of Georgia and
Florida. The Seminole are also said to have been a half Creek and half
Hitchiti speaking people, although their language is now almost identical
with Creek; and it is supposed that the Yamasi likewise spoke the Hitchiti
language. This language, like the Creek, has an archaic form called
"woman's talk," or female language. The Hitchiti were absorbed into and
became an integral part of the Creek Nation, though preserving to a large
extent their own language and peculiar customs.
