Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Bat Who Joined the Birds: Cherokee Ballgame Folklore and the Smallest Champion
On a smooth grassy bottom near the river, the animals gathered for a ballgame. The birds waited in the trees above them. In the old Cherokee story recorded by James Mooney in Myths of the Cherokee, the animals had challenged the birds, and the birds had accepted. It was not a small contest. It was the kind of game where strength, speed, pride, and medicine all met in one place.
The animals looked powerful. Bear was their captain, heavy and strong enough to pull down anything in his path. Terrapin was not the small terrapin known today, but the great original Terrapin, hard-shelled and boastful, certain no blow could hurt him. Deer could outrun every other animal. The animal side seemed built to win.
The birds had their own champions. Eagle was their captain. Hawk stood with him, along with the great Tlă′nuwă and other swift fliers. Still, Mooney wrote that the birds were uneasy. The animals had size. They had weight. They had confidence. Then, just before the game began, two little creatures climbed up the tree where Eagle sat.
They were hardly larger than field mice.
The Ones Too Small to Be Chosen
The two small animals asked to join the birds. Eagle looked at them and saw that they had four feet. He asked why they had not joined the animals. They answered that they had already tried. The animals had laughed at them and driven them away because they were too small.
That moment gives the story its heart. The tale is not only about a ballgame. It is about the ones overlooked by the strong. It is about smallness mistaken for weakness. The animals had judged by size. The birds, after some thought, judged by possibility.
There was one problem. The little animals had no wings. If they were going to play with the birds, they had to be made able to move like birds. The birds remembered the drum used in the dance. Its head was made of groundhog skin. They cut pieces from it, shaped them into wings, stretched them with cane splints, and fastened them to the forelegs of one of the small animals.
That was how Tla′mehă, the Bat, came to be.
When the birds threw the ball to him, Bat did not play like the heavy animals. He dodged. He circled. He kept the ball in the air and would not let it fall. The birds saw at once that he would be one of their best players.
The other small animal became Tewa, the Flying Squirrel. Since the birds had used up the drum leather, they stretched his skin between his forelegs and hind legs. When the captain tossed the ball, Flying Squirrel leaped after it, caught it in his teeth, and sailed away through the air.
The rejected ones had become the difference between victory and defeat.
The Smallest Champion
When the game began, Flying Squirrel caught the ball early and carried it up a tree. The birds kept it moving through the air. Then it dropped. Bear rushed for it, but Martin reached it first and threw it to Bat. Bat flew low. He twisted away from the animals. He dodged even Deer, the fastest among them. Then Bat threw the ball between the posts and won the game for the birds.
Bear and Terrapin, who had bragged on the way to the ground, never even touched the ball.
That is why the story has lasted. It is not hard to remember the image of Bat, small and strange, flying low with the game in his hands. In a contest full of large bodies and loud boasting, he wins by movement, timing, and nerve. He does not need to be Bear. He does not need to be Eagle. He wins because he has been remade, accepted, and trusted.
Mooney noted that this was one of the best-known Cherokee animal stories. He heard it in different forms from Cherokee informants in the East and in Indian Territory, including John Ax, Swimmer, Suyeta, Aʻwani′ta, and Wafford. Like many written records of Cherokee oral tradition, Mooney’s version came through an outside recorder. The story itself belongs to Cherokee tradition, older than its printed form.
More Than a Children’s Tale
The bat story matters because it connects directly to Cherokee ballplay. Mooney did not treat the tale as a loose animal fable. In his notes, he explained that because Bat and Flying Squirrel helped win the mythic game, Cherokee ballplayers invoked their aid. A player might tie a small piece of bat wing to his ballstick or fasten it to the frame over which the sticks were hung during the night dance before the game.
That detail shows how story and practice belonged together. The tale gave meaning to the movements of the game. Bat was not merely a comic little animal with wings. He represented quickness, evasion, low flight, and the ability to keep the ball alive when others could not reach it. Flying Squirrel represented another kind of motion, a sudden glide across distance. These were not the gifts of brute strength. They were the gifts of agility.
The Cherokee ballgame, known in forms such as anetso, was one of the great athletic traditions of the Cherokee and other Southeastern Native peoples. It was played with sticks and a small ball on a level field, often near water. Goals stood at opposite ends. In older descriptions, the side that reached the required score first won the game and the stakes.
The game could be rough. It could be dangerous. It required speed, toughness, courage, and discipline. Yet it also belonged to a ceremonial world. There were dances, songs, preparation, ritual specialists, going to water, scratching, and prayers. Mooney’s ballplay writings show that the game was physical, social, spiritual, and political all at once.
The Ball Dance and the Old Cherokee Towns
Long before Mooney wrote down the bat story, William Bartram watched Cherokee ballplay preparation in the eighteenth century. During his travels, Bartram visited Cherokee country and described a ballplay dance held in a town challenged to play another town the next day. He saw people gathered in the rotunda, musicians seated near the center, girls moving in response to the songs, and young men entering with rackets or hurls in their hands.
Bartram’s account gives an early outside view of the social world around the game. The ballplay was not a private pastime hidden away from community life. It drew towns, spectators, dancers, singers, players, and older men who remembered victories from their youth. Bartram wrote of town-against-town play, athletic skill, goals, rackets, and stakes. His language reflects the limits and assumptions of an eighteenth-century observer, but his account still helps place the game in the older Cherokee world.
In that world, a ballgame could carry the weight of town pride. It could settle tension, display courage, and draw the community together. Later writers often called stickball “the little brother of war,” a phrase that points to its place between conflict and ceremony. The game could channel aggression without becoming battle, though it still carried the danger and seriousness of combat.
Sacred Formulas and Red Bat
Mooney’s Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees gives another window into the ceremonial side of ballplay. He collected formulas on the Eastern Cherokee reservation in North Carolina in 1887 and 1888, including material written in Cherokee syllabary by Cherokee religious specialists. These formulas covered many parts of life, including medicine, hunting, love, war, and the ballplay.
The ballplay formulas must be handled carefully. They are not simply colorful folklore. They belong to religious and ceremonial knowledge that Mooney recorded from Cherokee sources. Still, they show that the game was surrounded by ritual language. In one ballplay formula, the “Red Bat” appears as an invoked helper for the player’s side. The player’s team is lifted toward success, while the opposing side is described through images of heaviness, slowness, and failure.
This is the same symbolic world found in the animal story. Bat stands with the side that moves well and wins. Turtle, mole, bear, and terrapin appear as figures of slowness or defeat. The story of the animals and birds was not separate from the ceremonial imagination of the game. It helped explain why certain beings were powerful helpers and why a small night-flying animal could matter on a bright ball field.
A Cherokee Record in Manitou Cave
One of the most remarkable modern discoveries connected to Cherokee stickball comes from Manitou Cave in Alabama. In 2019, scholars including Cherokee researchers interpreted Cherokee syllabary inscriptions inside the cave. One inscription referred to the leaders of a stickball team and gave the date April 30, 1828.
That date matters. It places Cherokee-language writing about stickball in a specific time and place before the forced removal crisis of the 1830s. The cave inscriptions are not a later outsider’s memory. They are Cherokee writing in Cherokee syllabary, made by people close to the event itself. The researchers connected the inscriptions to ceremonial preparation, seclusion, prayer, cleansing, and the physical danger of the game.
The Manitou Cave evidence also reminds us that Cherokee stickball cannot be understood only as sport. The public game was only part of the whole. Some parts were visible to spectators. Other parts belonged to the team and its ceremonial leaders. The cave writing suggests a world where ballplayers prepared themselves in ways tied to place, language, and spiritual power.
From Old Stories to Living Fields
Cherokee stickball did not remain only in old books and archival notes. It is still played and taught. Among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, modern public explanations describe stickball as a living cultural tradition. Games are still played in Cherokee, including by community teams, and rules can vary from game to game.
Modern Cherokee stickball is played with goal posts, sticks, a leather ball, drivers who help govern play, and teams that match strength and skill with endurance. Players may carry one or two sticks, depending on the rules agreed upon before the game. Tackling is part of play. There is no heavy padding. The game remains intense, physical, and deeply meaningful.
Public-facing Cherokee sources today emphasize that stickball is more than a game. It carries memory, identity, discipline, and respect. It links young players to older generations. It also reminds outsiders that what they see on the field is only part of a longer tradition.
The Penn Museum’s Cherokee Stickball project retells the origin story of Bat and Flying Squirrel while also drawing on photographs, museum objects, and interviews connected to Cherokee historians and former players. That kind of community-connected work matters because it helps move the story away from being treated as a detached folk tale and back toward the living tradition it came from.
What the Bat Still Teaches
The Bat who joined the birds is one of the most memorable small champions in Cherokee folklore. He begins as an outsider to both sides. The animals reject him because he is too small. The birds hesitate because he has no wings. Yet once he is given a place, he changes the game.
That is the quiet power of the story. Bat does not win by becoming large. He wins by using the gift that belongs to him. His flight is low, quick, and hard to predict. He cannot overpower Bear or outrun Deer on the ground, so he does neither. He moves in a way they cannot answer.
In Appalachian history, Cherokee stories like this one should not be treated as decorative legends added to the edge of the record. They are part of the deeper history of the mountains and the Native nations whose homelands shaped this region long before county lines, state borders, tourist roads, or printed histories. Western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, north Georgia, and surrounding Appalachian lands all carry Cherokee memory in their rivers, town names, trails, and sacred places.
The ballgame story also warns against a simple reading of strength. Bear is strong, but strength alone does not win. Terrapin is protected, but protection alone does not win. Deer is fast, but speed alone does not win. Bat wins because he is small, overlooked, adaptable, and brave enough to move through the narrow spaces left open by the proud.
That is why the story endures. On the old ball ground beside the river, the smallest player became the champion. The animals had laughed him away. The birds gave him wings. Then Bat took the ball, dodged the strongest, escaped the fastest, and won the game.
Sources & Further Reading
Mooney, James. “The Ball Game of the Birds and Animals.” In Myths of the Cherokee. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–1898. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45634/45634-h/45634-h.htm
Mooney, James. “The Cherokee Ball Play.” American Anthropologist 3, no. 2, old series (April 1890): 105–132. https://digirepo.nlm.nih.gov/ext/dw/101732095/PDF/101732095.pdf
Mooney, James. The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1885–1886. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24788/24788-h/24788-h.htm
Mooney, James, and Frans M. Olbrechts. The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicinal Prescriptions. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 99. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/15491
Bartram, William. Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bartram/bartram.html
Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775. https://archive.org/details/GR_10
Timberlake, Henry. The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake. London: Printed for the Author, 1765. https://archive.org/details/memoirsoflieuthe00intimb
Payne, John Howard, and Daniel S. Butrick. The Payne-Butrick Papers. Edited by William L. Anderson, Jane L. Brown, and Anne F. Rogers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803236974/
Carroll, Beau Duke, Jan F. Simek, Julie Reed, Alan Cressler, Tom Belt, Joseph F. C. Douglas, and others. “Talking Stones: Cherokee Syllabary in Manitou Cave, Alabama.” Antiquity 93, no. 368 (2019): 519–533. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/talking-stones-cherokee-syllabary-in-manitou-cave-alabama/860758497F5CC21BE060D5A1E73F2205
Culin, Stewart. Games of the North American Indians. Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902–1903. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907. https://repository.si.edu/items/77d27f0b-a54b-4562-9635-4a88c62393bd
Speck, Frank G., Leonard Broom, and Will West Long. Cherokee Dance and Drama. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. https://www.oupress.com/9780806125800/cherokee-dance-and-drama/
American Philosophical Society. Frank G. Speck Papers, 1903–1950. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. https://as.amphilsoc.org/repositories/2/resources/2970
Denver Art Museum. “Ball Game Sticks.” Cherokee artist, ca. 1900. Denver Art Museum, accession no. 1939.175.1–2. https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/object/1939.175.1-2
North Carolina Digital Collections. “Cherokee Ball Game.” Photograph, 1946. State Archives of North Carolina. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/cherokee-ball-game./346936
North Carolina Digital Collections. “Contact Sheet with Images of Cherokee Ball Game.” Photograph contact sheet, 1946. State Archives of North Carolina. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/contact-sheet-with-images-of-cherokee-ball-game./346414
Zogry, Michael J. Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. https://academic.oup.com/north-carolina-scholarship-online/book/20651
Fogelson, Raymond D. “The Cherokee Ballgame Cycle: An Ethnographer’s View.” Ethnomusicology 15, no. 3 (September 1971): 327–338. https://www.jstor.org/stable/850633
Herndon, Marcia. “The Cherokee Ballgame Cycle: An Ethnomusicologist’s View.” Ethnomusicology 15, no. 3 (September 1971): 339–352. https://www.jstor.org/stable/850634
Freeman-Witthoft, Bonita. “Formal Games in the Cherokee Ritual Cycle.” Expedition Magazine 30, no. 2 (1988): 53–60. https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/formal-games-in-the-cherokee-ritual-cycle/
Penn Museum. “Cherokee Stickball: An Enduring Tradition.” University of Pennsylvania. https://web.sas.upenn.edu/stickball/
Penn Museum. “Ethnographers.” Cherokee Stickball: An Enduring Tradition. University of Pennsylvania. https://web.sas.upenn.edu/stickball/ethnographers/
OsiyoTV. “The Little Brother of War, Cherokee Stickball.” Cherokee Nation. https://osiyo.tv/little-brother-war-cherokee-stickball/
Visit Cherokee NC. “Stickball.” Cherokee, North Carolina. https://visitcherokeenc.com/culture/stickball/
Swanton, John R. The Indian Tribes of North America. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 145. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/15440
Smithsonian Institution. Cherokee Subject Guide. National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives, 2022. https://www.si.edu/media/NMNH/NMNH-NAASubjectGuide_Cherokee_2022.pdf
Author Note: Cherokee ballgame stories should be read with care because the earliest written versions were recorded by outsiders from Cherokee oral tradition. This article treats the story as living cultural memory, not as a simple fable separated from Cherokee people, ceremony, and place.