This iconoclastic and unæsthetical prairie-wolf represents a barbarian’s incapacity to see in the arrangement

{p. 200}

of the stars any such constellations, or, in fact, anything but an unmeaning jumble of cinders.

And then we learn how the tribes of men separated: 

“The old men” (the civilized race, the gods) “prepared two earthen tinages, or water-jars, and having decorated one with bright colors, filled it with trifles; while the other was left plain on the outside, but filled within with flocks and herds and riches of all kinds.  These jars being covered, and presented to the Navajos and Pueblos, the former chose the gaudy but paltry jar; while the Pueblos received the plain and rich vessel—­each nation showing, in its choice, traits which characterize it to this day.”

In the legends of the Lenni-Lenape,—­the Delaware Indians,—­mankind was once buried in the earth with a wolf; and they owed their release to the wolf, who scratched away the soil and dug out a means of escape for the men and for himself.  The Root-Diggers of California were released in the same way by a coyote."[1]

“The Tonkaways, a wild people of Texas, still celebrate this early entombment of the race in a most curious fashion.  They have a grand annual dance.  One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in the earth; the others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, snuff around him, howl in lupine style, and finally dig him up with their nails."[2]

Compare this American custom with the religious ceremony of an ancient Italian tribe: 

“Three thousand years ago the Hirpani, or Wolves, an ancient Sabine tribe of Italy, were wont to collect on Mount Soracte, and there go through certain rites, in memory of an oracle which predicted their extinction when they ceased to gain their living as wolves do, by violence and plunder.  Therefore they dressed in wolf-skins,

[1.  Brinton’s “Myths of the New World,” p. 247.

2.  Ibid.]

{p. 201}

ran with barks and howls over burning coals, and gnawed wolfishly whatever they could seize."[1]

All the tribes of the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times banded into one common confederacy, unanimously located their earliest ancestry near an artificial eminence in the valley of the Big Black River, in the Natchez country, whence they pretended to have emerged.  This hill is an elevation of earth about half a mile square and fifteen or twenty feet high.  From its northeast corner a wall of equal height extends for nearly half a mile to the high land.  This was the Nunne Chaha, properly Nanih waiya, sloping hill, famous in Choctaw story, and which Captain Gregg found they had not yet forgotten in their Western home.

“The legend was, that in its center was a cave, the house of the Master of Breath.  Here he made the first men from the clay around him, and, as at that time the waters covered the earth, he raised the wall to dry them on.  When the soft mud had hardened into elastic flesh and firm bone, he banished the waters to their channels and beds, and gave the dry land to his creatures."[2]