Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/271

 Water-Monsters of American Aborigines. 259

mouth of Toccoa Creek. Another of these fantastic beings was a great leech or tlaniisi, formerly in Valley River, just above the junc- tion of Hiawassee Creek, at Murphy, North Carolina ; this village was called on that account Tlanusiyi, or "leech-place." A third of these creatures was Uktena, a huge snake or water-serpent, once holding forth at different places along streams and to be kept dis- tinct from the "great horned uktena."

The Iroquois people of New York, rich in all kinds of mythic folk-lore, were not delinquent in forming stories about miraculous aquatic beings. The Onyare (in Mohawk, On-yar-he) is their lake serpent, which traversed their country and by coiling up in domi- nant positions near the pathways or trails interrupted communica- tion between the settlements of the Iroquois. Onyare's breath, diffused through the air, brought on sickness ; it was finally with its brood destroyed by thunderbolts, or compelled to retire into deep water. The life of Onyare is in the stories brought into connection with the Stone-Heads or Otneyarhe, and also with the Flying Heads or Konearaunene.

The ancient Creek Indians believed in a miraculous horned snake, which at times appeared at the surface of water-holes, and whose horns, used as a war-physic, were prized higher than any other fetish within their knowledge. When the snake was seen in a blue hole filled with deep water, the old men of the tribe sang their incanta- tions, which brought the snake to the surface. They sang again, and it emerged a little from the moving waves. When they sang for the third time, it came ashore and showed its horns, and they sawed one off ; again they sang, and it emerged for the fourth time, when they sawed off the other horn. Fragments of the horns were carried along in the warriors' shot-pouches on their expeditions, and the song lines of the horned-snake referred to all the manipula- tions connected with the capture of the snake's horns or tchito ydbi. The refrain was " kitizvaihi, kitiwdyi, dhayi."

The Kdyowe or Kiowa Indians, now settled in Oklahoma, know of Zemd Jigu-ani, a species of horned alligator of extraordinary size found in deep holes in streams, and have named certain places after it. By the Jicarilla Apaches, in the northern part of New Mexico, a great frog is remembered, who lived in a former lake at Taos pueblo, and has been described by J. Mooney in his article on "Jicarilla Genesis," " Amer. Anthropologist," July, 1898, pp. 201, 202.

Especially productive of this class of " miraculous hydrozoology " were the nations living on Columbia River and its numerous tribu- taries. Among the Kalapuya Indians of Willamette River, Oregon, the figure of Amhuluk, a monstrous and nondescript being which lives in a water-basin at the Forked Mountain {tcha Waldktchi ameffu)

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