Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/98

 looked upon it as a marvelous thing. We gathered many interesting stories and traditions from these neighbors of ours. The Indian's theory of the origin of the red man is interesting. I first heard this tradition from the lips of a venerable Chemomochot priest or doctor, sixty or more years ago, and I have never found an Indian who was able to add a word to it. All the priests or "medicine men," and I believe, all the people knew this much of their origin. This is the tradition: "In the beginning was a mountain, and on the mountain top was a table of stone. On this table was a deposit of some kind of matter jelly-like in consistence—we would call it protoplasm—and out of this protoplastic mass grew a living being in the form of, and was, a woman. She held in her arms a male child, and when she was fully grown she descended, carrying the child on her bosom, to the base of the mountain, where the two were joined by a wolf. The woman placed the boy astride on the wolf's hack and passed a strap around the child and over the wolf's head above his eyes." This ends the story of the beginning of the red man. It ends abruptly with the group of three persons: Snowats, Iswukaw and Quartux (woman, boy and wolf). Some of ahe Indians believed that when a man died he became the same as a clod of earth or kahte (a stone). Others seemed to believe in the transmigration of souls. I recall a number of times when an Indian, pointing to a wolf which was often seen near the village, suggested that the Quartux was some person, naming some one who had recently died. They regarded the wolf as a sacred animal.

Indians from the village were frequent visitors at our home. One day when a number were there I was reading in a small book which was illustrated. I read from the book and showed some of the pictures to the Indians, expecting them to be greatly surprised, hut they were not, and it appeared from what they said to me and to one another that they had seen "paper that talked," as they expressed it, or had some information in regard to books. This discovery aroused my curiosity and led to the following tradition which I gathered after much labor and many interviews with the Indians. Squiyowhiynoof was a man, a foreigner, of what nationality I could not learn, who came to the tribe from they knew not where. He was a