Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/207

Rh until all were satisfied; and a similarly miraculous supply of food to the starving multitude is reported by the same people. In the genesis myth of the Tusayan, the culture-hero was enabled to pass dry shod through lakes and rivers by throwing a staff upon the waters, which were at once divided as by walls.

Among the Ojibwa traditions there is a variant of the conception that man could not look upon the form of a divine being and live. According to these traditions the divine beings were obliged to wear veils, and when one of them unintentionally let his eyes fall upon the form of a man the man fell dead as if struck by lightning.

The Midéwiwin rite was granted to the Ojibwa at a time of great trouble, through the intercession of Minabozho, their universal uncle, and at the same time rules of life were given to them, which are still represented in hieroglyphics on birch-bark. They have a resemblance in motive to the Biblical legends and laws. At the time of a great pestilence, which came "when the earth was new," the Ojibwa were saved by one of their number to whom a spirit, in the shape of a serpent, revealed a root which to this day they name the "snake-root," and songs and rites pertaining to the serpent are incorporated in the Midéwiwin.

Mr. W. W. Warren, in his "History of the Ojibwa Nation," tells that he sometimes translated parts of Bible history to the old Ojibwa men, and their expression invariably was, "The book must be true, for our ancestors have told us similar stories generation after generation since the earth was new." Only last year a well-informed representative in Washington of the Muskoki answered questions about the myths and legends of his people by the simple remark: "They are all in the Old Testament. Read them there, without the trouble of taking them down from our people."

—The golden age of the Israelites, as recorded in the Old Testament according to modified tradition, was the age ending with the Judges. The people lived in a state nearest to their ideal under a supposed theocracy, which really was not instituted until the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. The exploits of Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson are pictures of antiquity equal in grandeur and like in import to those of the Homeric heroes. If the Indians could have written about their own past, they would have portrayed a similar golden age, which, indeed, is mirrored in their traditions and myths.

But it must always be borne in mind that the Indians were not nomads, and were never in the true pastoral stage; hence their tales of the good old times were more archaic than those presented to us in the Israelite records.

Nomadic life requires the possession of either domesticated