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Tali Indians were a band of Yuchi
Source: Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors #121
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On the maps of the latter part of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth centuries this name [Tale/Tali] is persistent. The tribe is generally placed above the Tahogale, now known to have been a band of Yuchi, and below the Kaskinampo and Shawnee. The name of the Tennessee band of Koasati rarely appears. In another set of maps we find a different group of towns, one of which is called Taligui, and in still another, from the French, a set in which a town Talicouet is in evidence. There can be no doubt that Talicouet is the Cherokee town Tellico, since the maps show it in the proper position, and of the three other towns one, Aiouache, is evidently Hiwassee or Ayuhwa'si; while another, Amobi, is the Cherokee town Amoye which appears on some maps. The fourth, Tongeria, is the Tahogale of other cartographers. Taligui is evidently intended for the same town as Talicouet. These two forms combined with a well-known Algonquian suffix would produce a name almost identical with that of the Talligewi of Delaware tradition. Mr. Mooney believes that the Talligewi were the Cherokee,5 and this would tend to confirm the identification, since the whole tribe may have received its name from the Tellico towns. This is a matter which does not, however, concern us here. The important question is, Were the Tali, Taligui, and Talicouet identical? If so, then the Tali are at once established as Cherokee. That the Cherokee country extended in later times as far as the great bend of the Tennessee is well known, but this fact necessarily tends to cast doubt upon any earlier tradition of such an extension, since it assumes an intervening period of abandonment. Still it is interesting to know that there was such a tradition. In an article on "The Indians of Marshall County, Alabama," by Mr. O. D. Street, of Guntersville, Alabama, we read: "The late Gen. S. K. Rayburn, who came to this country many years before the removal of the Cherokees to the West and was intimately acquainted with many of them, told the writer that he had been informed by intelligent Cherokees that, many thousand moons before, their people had occupied all the country westward to Bear Creek and Duck River, but that on account of constant wars with the Chickasaws they had sought quiet by withdrawing into the eastern mountains, though they had never renounced their title to the country." Our investigation has now brought out the following facts. On early maps four or five small tribes appear on the middle course of Tennessee River. One of these, Tali, bears the same name as a tribe found by De Soto near the big bend of the same stream. Maps of a somewhat later date show the same number of towns, but they are not all identical. Three are, however, evidently Cherokee towns, and one, Taligui or Talicouet, is certainly the Cherokee town of Tellico (Talikwa). We also have traditional evidence that the Cherokee were in possession at an early date of that region where the Tali lived. If the Taligui and Talicouet of later maps are the same as the Tali of earlier ones the identification is complete; if there was merely a chance resemblance between the names they were, of course, distinct. The chances, in my opinion, are very much in favor of the identification. (Swanton)
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