Keechie and Granny Boo ~ How the Stories Began

(Photo and mock-up by Creek Historian, Richard Thornton)
This photo is of a mock-up of an ancient Hitchiti Creek ceremonial stone circle that was found on Ladd's Mountain in Bartow County, Ga.. These were placed on mountain tops all over the southeast - Pine Mountain included, and were used as astronomical observatories and communication (via smoke signals). Both my novels are set at the location of the one on Pine Mountain. The 'Rock' that I featured is at the actual site where the circle once stood, but destroyed by the WPA in the 1930s for the stone to use in their own construction projects.

While researching for Keechie and later, Granny Boo, I came across a Creek legend in a genealogy site that told of a Muskogee (Creek) migration that began in northwest Mexico and went overland all the way to Georgia. This was in the 1500s after Cortez had decimated the Aztec population in Mexico. At every river they encountered on the way they built a town (talofa), restocked their food supply and established trade with the local Indians. After a year or two, some of them continued their eastward migration until they finally arrived in Georgia.
I had learned that the Aztec, through selective hybridization, had taken a local grass (Teosinte) and genetically engineered it into what we now know as CORN!
This gave me the idea of combining the Creek legend and this bit of scientific fact into my own theory that it was these early Native Americans that changed the way people lived all across America - by bringing this new food product with them on their migration. No longer dependent on hunting/gathering, the people could now raise their crops and live a more sedentary lifestyle.
Further proof that these Muskogee Indians were from South and Central America and not from a Bering Strait migration is the new DNA evidence that they are related to the Maya and actually have common words between the Mayan and Muskogean languages!
And I thought I was making this stuff up!