Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold

E-text prepared by D. Alexander, Meredith Bach, the Carbon County Public Library (Rawlins, Wyoming), and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

THE STRANGER WATCHES THE LAUGH-MAKER AND THE BEARS.
The authors wish to acknowledge the courtesy of The Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and The Woman's Home Companion, in giving permission to include in this volume several stories which first appeared in their pages.
These scattered leaves from the unwritten school-book of the wilderness have been gathered together for the children of to-day; both as a slight contribution to the treasures of aboriginal folk-lore, and with the special purpose of adapting them to the demands of the American school and fireside. That is to say, we have chosen from a mass of material the shorter and simpler stories and parts of stories, and have not always insisted upon a literal rendering, but taken such occasional liberties with the originals as seemed necessary to fit them to the exigencies of an unlike tongue and to the sympathies of an alien race.
Nevertheless, we hope and think that we have been able to preserve in the main the true spirit and feeling of these old tales—tales that have been handed down by oral tradition alone through many generations of simple and story-loving people. The Creation myths and others rich in meaning have been treated very simply, as their symbolism is too complicated for very young readers; and much of the characteristic detail of the rambling native story-teller has been omitted. A story that to our thinking is most effectively told in a brief ten minutes is by him made to fill a long evening by dint of minute and realistic description of every stage of a journey, each camp made, every feature of a ceremony performed, and so on indefinitely. True, the attention of his unlettered listeners never flags; but our sophisticated youngsters would soon weary, we fear, of any such repetition.