[Footnote 1:  In the Ojibway dialect of the Algonkins, the word for day, sky or heaven, is gijig.  This same word as a verb means to be an adult, to be ripe (of fruits), to be finished, complete.  Rev. Frederick Baraga, A Dictionary of the Olchipwe Language, Cincinnati, 1853.  This seems to correspond with the statement in the myth.]

[Footnote 2:  H.E.  Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, vol. i, pp. 135, et seq.]

It is scarcely possible to err in recognizing under this thin veil of imagery a description of the daily struggle between light and darkness, day and night.  The maiden is the dawn from whose virgin womb rises the sun in the fullness of his glory and might, but with his advent the dawn itself disappears and dies.  The battle lasts all day, beginning when the earliest rays gild the mountain tops, and continues until the West is driven to the edge of the world.  As the evening precedes the morning, so the West, by a figure of speech, may be said to fertilize the Dawn.

In another form of the story the West was typified as a flint stone, and the twin brother of Michabo.  The feud between them was bitter, and the contest long and dreadful.  The face of the land was seamed and torn by the wrestling of the mighty combatants, and the Indians pointed out the huge boulders on the prairies as the weapons hurled at each other by the enraged brothers.  At length Michabo mastered his fellow twin and broke him into pieces.  He scattered the fragments over the earth, and from them grew fruitful vines.

A myth which, like this, introduces the flint stone as in some way connected with the early creative forces of nature, recurs at other localities on the American continent very remote from the home of the Algonkins.  In the calendar of the Aztecs the day and god Tecpatl, the Flint-Stone, held a prominent position.  According to their myths such a stone fell from heaven at the beginning of things and broke into sixteen hundred pieces, each of which became a god.  The Hun-pic-tok, Eight Thousand Flints, of the Mayas, and the Toh of the Kiches, point to the same association.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Brasseur de Bourbourg, Dissertation sur les Mythes de l’Antiquite Americaine, Sec.vii.]

Probably the association of ideas was not with the flint as a fire-stone, though the fact that a piece of flint struck with a nodule of pyrites will emit a spark was not unknown.  But the flint was everywhere employed for arrow and lance heads.  The flashes of light, the lightning, anything that darted swiftly and struck violently, was compared to the hurtling arrow or the whizzing lance.  Especially did this apply to the phenomenon of the lightning.  The belief that a stone is shot from the sky with each thunderclap is shown in our word “thunderbolt,” and even yet the vulgar in many countries point out certain forms of stones as derived from this source.  As the refreshing rain which accompanies the thunder gust instills new life into vegetation, and covers the ground parched by summer droughts with leaves and grass, so the statement in the myth that the fragments of the flint-stone grew into fruitful vines is an obvious figure of speech which at first expressed the fertilizing effects of the summer showers.