Throughout Canada I have never failed to find an amazing knowledge of Napoleon Bonaparte amongst the very old and “uncivilized” Indians.  Perhaps they may be unfamiliar with every other historical character from Adam down, but they will all tell you they have heard of the “Great French Fighter,” as they call the wonderful little Corsican.

Whether this knowledge was obtained through the fact that our earliest settlers and pioneers were French, or whether Napoleon’s almost magical fighting career attracted the Indian mind to the exclusion of lesser warriors, I have never yet decided.  But the fact remains that the Indians of our generation are not as familiar with Bonaparte’s name as were their fathers and grandfathers, so either the predominance of English-speaking settlers or the thinning of their ancient war-loving blood by modern civilization and peaceful times must, one or the other, account for the younger Indian’s ignorance of the Emperor of the French.

In telling me the legend of “The Lost Talisman,” my good tillicum, the late Chief Capilano, began the story with the almost amazing question, Had I ever heard of Napoleon Bonaparte?  It was some moments before I just caught the name, for his English, always quaint and beautiful, was at times a little halting; but when he said, by way of explanation, “You know big fighter, Frenchman.  The English they beat him in big battle,” I grasped immediately of whom he spoke.

“What do you know of him?” I asked.

His voice lowered, almost as if he spoke a state secret.  “I know how it is that English they beat him.”

I have read many historians on this event, but to hear the Squamish version was a novel and absorbing thing.  “Yes?” I said—­my usual “leading” word to lure him into channels of tradition.

“Yes,” he affirmed.  Then, still in a half-whisper, he proceeded to tell me that it all happened through the agency of a single joint from the vertebra of a sea-serpent.

In telling me the story of Brockton Point and the valiant boy who killed the monster, he dwelt lightly on the fact that all people who approach the vicinity of the creature are palsied, both mentally and physically—­bewitched, in fact—­so that their bones become disjointed and their brains incapable; but to-day he elaborated upon this peculiarity until I harked back to the boy of Brockton Point and asked how it was that his body and brain escaped this affliction.

“He was all good, and had no greed,” he replied.  “He was proof against all bad things.”

I nodded understandingly, and he proceeded to tell me that all successful Indian fighters and warriors carried somewhere about their person a joint of a sea-serpent’s vertebra; that the medicine-men threw “the power” about them so that they were not personally affected by this little “charm,” but that immediately they approached an enemy the “charm” worked disaster, and victory was