Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/711

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the setting of the sun. The night came slowly toward them. The Great Being raised his voice again, saying : " Let us make man in our own image." He dropped his hands, and cast his eyes upon the land, and turned half way round toward his right hand, facing the setting of the sun; then he swept his right hand from the north to the south. Again the lightning followed the movement. Next, he passed his hand from the setting of the sun to the point of its rising; but when the lightning came upon the night, which was approaching, it disappeared; and the darkness hid from them what was beyond the night. Immediately the dust of the land began to shake and to heave in the form of a cross, where the Great Being had made a motion. And behold! there was the image of a man lying on the ground, — his head toward the north, and his feet toward the south; his right hand pointing toward the setting of the sun, while his face was toward the blue skies. His face was pale, to whiteness, because life was not yet in him. The Great Being then said to Klose-kerbeh, " Turn thy face to the setting of the sun." He obeyed. Again the Great Being spoke and said : " I will not suffer thee to see this man arise to his feet, like thyself; therefore go thy way toward thy right hand, and seek thy companions. I will be thy teacher, and thou wilt be their teacher." And Klose-ker-beh departed. In a later period, says Nicolas, the name Klosc-kcr-bch came to signify a man of false hood, or more rudely expressed, a liar. At the opening of the second chapter of this Tarratine book, it is said that Kloseker-beh, with the aid of May-May (the woodpecker), destroyed the serpent, which represented the beasts. Klose-ker-beh told the red men that the Great Being had established his number both with the red men and the white men; the number of the first being seven, and of

the latter, three; " and because his numbers are few he shall live fast and pass away quickly." "The first mother," Klose-ker-beh told the people, " when she had many children, and yet seemed lovely to her husband, and fair to all, appeared more and more unhappy. She besought her husband to kill her, which, she said, would result in his and the people's loving her always." Her husband, in his distress, went and consulted Klose-ker-beh about the matter, and was told to do as the woman requested. So the man killed her, then dragged her body so far for burial that the flesh was worn from the bones. Weeks later, the people found, growing in the trail, the green blades of a plant. After seven moons had passed, the hus band went along the trail, and found ripened corn; and where her bones lay he found tobacco growing. Both plants were pre viously unknown to this young race. "So woman was loved forever," says the book of Nicolas. " She had, when she first came, claimed her origin from a beautiful green blade. Corn will give strength to the body; tobacco, to the mind." Such, says the book, is the instruction which Kloseker-beh gave the people. What the religion of these Indians was previous to the settlement of the French missionaries among them, is not quite clear. It is, however, apparent that ideas imbibed from their earliest Christian instructors have become interwoven with the original Indian lore, in the formation of these traditions of the Tarratines, but of this the author does not seem to be in the least conscious. In the statements concerning the origin of man, the traditions appear to outdo Dar win, who only goes back to the beasts for a predecessor, while Klose-ker-beh derives man from the dust, as in the Mosaic account, but represents woman as springing from a living but still inanimate object.