THE MYTH OF HIAWATHA,
AND
OTHER ORAL LEGENDS, MYTHOLOGIC AND ALLEGORIC, OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.
By
HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT, LL.D.
PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
LONDON: TRÜBNER & CO.
1856.
Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by
HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
TO PROF. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
SIR:—
Permit me to dedicate to you, this volume of Indian myths and legends, derived from the story-telling circle of the native wigwams. That they indicate the possession, by the Vesperic tribes, of mental resources of a very characteristic kind—furnishing, in fact, a new point from which to judge the race, and to excite intellectual sympathies, you have most felicitously shown in your poem of Hiawatha. Not only so, but you have demonstrated, by this pleasing series of pictures of Indian life, sentiment, and invention, that the theme of the native lore reveals one of the true sources of our literary independence. Greece and Rome, England and Italy, have so long furnished, if they have not exhausted, the field of poetic culture, that it is, at least, refreshing to find both in theme and metre, something new.
Very truly yours,
HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.
PREFACE.
There is but one consideration of much moment necessary to be premised respecting these legends and myths. It is this: they are versions of oral relations from the lips of the Indians, and are transcripts of the thought and invention of the aboriginal mind. As such, they furnish illustrations of Indian character and opinions on subjects which the ever-cautious and suspicious minds of this people have, heretofore, concealed. They place the man altogether in a new phasis. They reflect him as he is. They show us what he believes, hopes, fears, wishes, expects, worships, lives for, dies for. They are always true to the Indian manners and customs, opinions and theories. They never rise above them; they never sink below them. Placing him in almost every possible position, as a hunter, a warrior, a magician, a pow-wow, a medicine man, a meda, a husband, a father, a friend, a foe, a stranger, a wild singer of songs to monedos or fetishes, a trembler in terror of demons and wood genii, and of ghosts, witches, and sorcerers—now in the enjoyment of plenty in feasts—now pale and weak with abstinence in fasts; now transforming beasts and birds, or plants and trees into men, or men into beasts by necromancy; it is impossible not to perceive what he perpetually thinks, believes, and feels. The very language of the man is employed, and his vocabulary is not enlarged by words and phrases foreign to it. Other sources of information depict his exterior habits and outer garb and deportment; but in these legends and myths, we perceive the interior man, and are made cognizant of the secret workings of his mind, and heart, and soul.
To make these collections, of which the portions now submitted are but a part, the leisure hours of many seasons, passed in an official capacity in the solitude of the wilderness far away from society, have been employed, with the study of the languages, and with the very best interpreters. They have been carefully translated, written, and rewritten, to obtain their true spirit and meaning, expunging passages, where it was necessary to avoid tediousness of narration, triviality of circumstance, tautologies, gross incongruities, and vulgarities; but adding no incident and drawing no conclusion, which the verbal narration did not imperatively require or sanction. It was impossible to mistake the import of terms and phrases where the means of their analysis were ample. If the style is sometimes found to be bald, and of jejune simplicity, the original is characteristically so. Few adjectives are employed, because there are few in the original.[1] The Indian effects his purposes, almost entirely, by changes of the verb and demonstrative pronoun, or by adjective inflections of the substantive. Good and bad, high and low, black and white, are in all cases employed in a transitive sense, and with strict relation to the objects characterized. The Indian compound terms are so descriptive, so graphic, so local, so characterizing, yet so flexible and transpositive, that the legends derive no little of their characteristic features as well as melody of utterance from these traits. Sometimes these terms cannot be literally translated, and they cannot, in these cases, be left out without damaging the stories.
With regard to the thought-work of the legends, those who have deemed the Indians exclusively a cruel and blood-thirsty race, always seeking revenge, always invoking evil powers, will not be disappointed that giants, enchanters, demons, and dark supernatural agencies, should form so large a part of the dramatis personæ. Surprise has been expressed,[2] that the kindlier affections come in for notice at all, and particularly at the occurrence of such refined and terse allegories as the origin of Indian Corn, Winter and Spring, and the poetic conception of the Celestial Sisters, &c. I can only add, that my own surprise was as great when these traits were first revealed. And the trait may be quoted to show how deeply the tribes have wandered away from the type of the human race in which love and affection absorb the heart;[3] and how little, indeed, we know of their mental character.
These legends have been out of print several years. They are now reproduced, with additional legendary lore of this description from the portfolios of the author, in a revised, and, it is believed, a more terse, condensed, and acceptable form, both in a literary and business garb.[4]
HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.
Washington, D.C., April 28, 1856.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
Hitherto, Indian opinion, on abstract subjects, has been a sealed book. It has been impossible to extract the truth from his evasive replies. If asked his opinion of religion in the abstract, he knows not the true meaning of the term. His ideas of the existence of a Deity are vague, at best; and the lines of separation between it and necromancy, medical magic, and demonology are too faintly separated to allow him to speak with discrimination. The best reply, as to his religious views, his mythology, his cosmogony, and his general views as to the mode and manifestations of the government and providences of God, are to be found in his myths and legends. When he assembles his lodge-circle, to hear stories, in seasons of leisure and retirement in the depths of the forest, he recites precisely what he believes on these subjects. That restlessness, suspicion, and mistrust of motive, which has closed his mind to inquiry, is at rest here. If he mingles fiction with history, there is little of the latter, and it is very easy to see where history ends and fiction begins. While he amuses his hearers with tales of the adventures of giants and dwarfs, and the conflicts of Manito with Manito, fairies and enchanters, monsters and demons, he also throws in some few grains of instruction, in the form of allegory and fable, which enable us to perceive glimpses of the heart and its affections.
It is also by his myths that we are able to trace connections with the human family in other parts of the world. Yet, where the analogies are so general, there is a constant liability to mistakes. Of these foreign analogies of myth lore, the least tangible, it is believed, is that which has been suggested with the Scandinavian mythology. That mythology is of so marked and peculiar a character, that it has not been distinctly traced out of the great circle of tribes of the Indo-Germanic family. Odin, and his terrific pantheon of war-gods and social deities, could only exist in the dreary latitudes of storms and fire, which produce a Hecla and a Maelstrom. These latitudes have invariably produced nations, whose influence has been felt in an elevating power over the world; and whose tracks have everywhere been marked by the highest evidences of inductive intellect, centralizing energy, and practical wisdom and forecast. From such a source the Indian could have derived none of his vague symbolisms and mental idiosyncrasies, which have left him, as he is found to-day, without a government and without a God. Far more probable is it, in seeking for analogies to his mythology and cosmogony, to resort to the era of that primal reconstruction of the theory of a Deity, when the human philosophy in the oriental world ascribed the godship of the universe to the subtile, ineffable, and indestructible essences of fire and light, as revealed in the sun. Such were the errors of the search for divine truth, power, and a controllable Deity, which early developed themselves in the dogmas of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, and wandering hordes of Northern Asia.
Authors inform us that the worship of the sun lies at the foundation of all the ancient mythologies, deeply enveloped as they are, when followed over Asia Minor and Europe, in symbolic and linguistical subtleties and refinements. The symbolical fires erected on temples and altars to Baal, Chemosh, and Moloch, burned brightly in the valley of the Euphrates,[5] long before the pyramids of Egypt were erected, or its priestly-hoarded hieroglyphic wisdom resulted in a phonetic alphabet. In Persia, these altars were guarded and religiously fed by a consecrated body of magical priesthood, who recognized a Deity in the essence of an eternal fire and a world-pervading light.
The same dogma, derived eastwardly and not westwardly through Europe, was fully installed at Atacama and Cuzco, in Peru, at Cholulu, on the magnificent and volcano-lighted peaks of Mexico; and along the fertile deltas of the Mississippi valley. Altar-beds for a sacred fire, lit to the Great Spirit, under the name and symbolic form of Ceezis, or the sun, where the frankincense of the nicotiana was offered, with hymns and genuflections, have been discovered, in many instances, under the earth-heaps and artificial mounds and places of sepulture of the ancient inhabitants. Intelligent Indians yet living, among the North American tribes, point out the symbol of the sun, in their ancient muzzinabikons, or rock-inscriptions, and also amid the idiographic tracery and bark-scrolls of the hieratic and magical medicine songs.
With a cosmogony which ascribes the creation of the Geezha Monedo, who is symbolized by the sun, the myth of Hiawatha is almost a necessary consequence in carrying out his mundane intentions to the tribes, who believed themselves to be peculiar objects of his love and benevolence. This myth is noticed by the earliest explorers of this continent, who have bestowed attention on the subject, under the various names of Inigorio, Yoskika, Taren-Yawagon, Atahentsic, Manabozho, and Micabo. A mythology appears indispensable to a rude and ignorant race like the Indians. Their vocabulary is nearly limited to objects which can be seen and handled. Abstractions are only reached by the introduction of some term which restores the idea. The Deity is a mystery, of whose power they must chiefly judge by the phenomena before them. Everything is mysterious which is not understood; and, unluckily, they understand little or nothing. If any phenomenon, or existence not before them, is to be described, the language must be symbolic. The result is, that the Indian languages are peculiarly the languages of symbols, metaphors, and figures. Without this feature, everything not in the departments of eating, drinking, and living, and the ordinary transactions of the chase and forest, would not be capable of description.
