Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/354

344 like Schoolcraft's. Among the Mandans, Catlin found a legend which brings in the same notion of the World-tortoise, but shows by the difference of the accessory circumstances that it was not in America a mere part of a particular story, but a mythological conception which might be worked into an unlimited variety of myths. The tale that the Mandan doctor told Catlin, was that the earth was a large tortoise, that it carried dirt upon its back, and that a tribe of people who are now dead, and whose faces were white, used to dig down very deep in this ground to catch badgers. One day they stuck a knife through the shell of the tortoise, and it sank and sank till the water ran over its back, and they were all drowned but one man. The North American idea that it is the movement of the earth-tortoise which causes earthquakes, adds the last touch to the realism of the whole conception.

The Myth of the World-Tortoise is one of those which have this great value in the comparison of Asiatic and American Mythology, that it leaves not the least opening for the supposition of its having been carried by modern Europeans from the Old to the New World. But it is to be seen, even from the tales which have just been quoted, that it is mixed up in America with incidents and ideas more familiar to the European mind; and the stories told only with reference to the World- Tortoise may serve to give a glimpse into the vast ethnological field which lies in the Red Indian traditions, ready to be worked. The Deluge, Cain and Abel, Ahriman and Ormuzd, Romulus and Remus, all have their analogies among the legends of these wild hunters. In the story which Charlevoix tells just before that which I have quoted, there is Noah's raven and Pandora's casket.

To proceed now to the story of the Man swallowed by the Fish. It is related in the Chippewa tale of the Little Monedo, that there was once a little boy, of tiny stature, and growing no bigger with years, but of monstrous strength. He had done before various wondrous feats, and one day he waded into the lake, and called "You of the red fins, come and swallow me."