ey
belong to history or mythology, their nation's poetry or its prose. In
arriving at a conclusion we must remember that a fiction built on an
idea is infinitely more tenacious of life than a story founded on fact.
Further, that if a striking similarity in the legends of two such heroes
be discovered under circumstances which forbid the thought that one was
derived from the other, then both are probably mythical. If this is the
case in not two but in half a dozen instances, then the probability
amounts to a certainty, and the only task remaining is to explain such
narratives on consistent mythological principles. If after sifting out
all foreign and later traits, it appears that when first known to
Europeans, these heroes were assigned all the attributes of highest
divinity, were the imagined creators and rulers of the world, and
mightiest of spiritual powers, then their position must be set far
higher than that of deified men. They must be accepted as the supreme
gods of the red race, the analogues in the western continent of Jupiter,
Osiris, and Odin in the eastern, and whatever opinions contrary to this
may have been advanced by writers and travellers must be set down to the
account of that prevailing ignorance of American mythology which has
fathered so many other blunders. To solve these knotty points I shall
choose for analysis the culture myths of the Algonkins, the Iroquois,
the Toltecs of Mexico, and the Aymaras or Peruvians, guided in my choice
by the fact that these four families are the best known, and, in many
points of view, the most important on the continent.

From the remotest wilds of the northwest to the coast of the Atlantic,
from the southern boundaries of Carolina to the cheerless swamps of
Hudson's Bay, the Algonkins were never tired of gathering around the
winter fire and repeating the story of Manibozho or Michabo, the Great
Hare. With entire unanimity their various branches, the Powhatans of
Virginia, the Lenni Lenape of the Delaware, the warlike hordes of New
England, the Ottawas of the far north, and the western tribes perhaps
without exception, spoke of "this chimerical beast," as one of the old
missionaries calls it, as their common ancestor. The totem or clan
which bore his name was looked up to with peculiar respect. In many of
the tales which the whites have preserved of Michabo he seems half a
wizzard[TN-8], half a simpleton. He is full of pranks and wiles, but
often at a loss for a mea