ursuing, and
their hearts grew white with fear. They made an offering to the Great
Spirit, and he blew a wind into the water, so as to open a path on the
bed of the river, and they all went over in safety, and the waters,
closing up, left their enemies on the other side. This, probably, is
derived from a tradition of their forefathers, coming down to them from
the passing of the children of Israel through the Red Sea.

Elias Boudinot, many years ago, and a minister in Vermont also,
published books to show that the American Indians were a portion of the
lost tribes, from resemblances between their religious customs and
those of the Israelites. Later still, a converted Jew named Simon,
undertook to identify the ancient South American races, Mexicans,
Peruvians, etc., as descendants of ancient Israel, from similarity of
language and of civil and religious customs. These authors have taken
as their starting-point the resolution which, Esdras informs us (in the
Apocrypha), the ten tribes took after being first placed in the cities
of the Medes, viz., that they would leave the multitude of the heathen
and go into a land wherein never mankind dwelt, that they might there
keep their laws, which God gave them; and they suppose that, in
pursuance of this resolution, the tribes continued in a northeasterly
direction until they came to Behring Straits, which they crossed, and
set foot on this continent, spreading over it from north to south,
until, at the discovery of it by Columbus, they had peopled every part.
It must be admitted that this theory is very plausible, and that if our
Indians are not the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, they show
by their traditions and customs a knowledge of the ancient religion,
such as calling the Great Spirit Yo-he-wah, the Jehovah of the
Scriptures, and in many festivals corresponding to the Mosaic law.[1]
The country to which the ten tribes, in a journey of a year and a half,
would arrive, from the river Euphrates, east, would be somewhere
adjoining Tartary, and intercourse between the two races would easily
lead to the adoption of the religious ideas and customs of the one by
the other.

[1] Labagh.

The gypsy tribes came from Tartary, and in my intercourse with these
wandering people, I found they had a custom somewhat like our Indians'
practice, in removing from place to place. For instance, the gypsies,
when they leave a part of their company to follow them, fix leaves in