This was printed by Rafinesque and Squier, but as it has no original text, as nothing is known of "John Burns," and as the document itself, even if reasonably authentic, has no historic value, I omit it.
General Synopsis of the Walam Olum.
The myths embodied in the earlier portion of the Walam Olum are perfectly familiar to one acquainted with Algonkin mythology. They are not of foreign origin, but are wholly within the cycle of the most ancient legends of that stock. Although they are not found elsewhere in the precise form here presented, all the figures and all the leading incidents recur in the native tales picked up by the Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, and by Schoolcraft, McKinney, Tanner and others in later days.
In an earlier chapter I have collected the imperfect fragments of these which we hear of among the Delawares, and these are sufficient to show that they had substantially the same mythology as their western relatives.
The cosmogony describes the formation of the world by the Great Manito, and its subsequent despoliation by the spirit of the waters, under the form of a serpent. The happy days are depicted, when men lived without wars or sickness, and food was at all times abundant. Evil beings, of mysterious power, introduced cold and war and sickness and premature death. Then began strife and long wanderings.
However similar this general outline may be to European and Oriental myths, it is neither derived originally from them, nor was it acquired later by missionary influence. This similarity is due wholly to the identity of psychological action, the same ideas and fancies arising from similar impressions in New as well as Old World tribes. No sound ethnologist, no thorough student in comparative mythology, would seek to maintain a genealogical relation of cultures on the strength of such identities. They are proofs of the oneness of the human mind, and nothing more.
As to the historical portion of the document, it must be judged by such corroborative evidence as we can glean from other sources. I have quoted, in an earlier chapter, sufficient testimony to show that the Lenape had traditions similar to these, extending back for centuries, or at least believed by their narrators to reach that far. What trust can be reposed in them is for the archaeologist to judge.
Authentic history tells us nothing about the migrations of the Lenape before we find them in the valley of the Delaware. There is no positive evidence that they arrived there from the west; still less concerning their earlier wanderings.
Were I to reconstruct their ancient history from the Walam Olum, as I understand it, the result would read as follows:—
At some remote period their ancestors dwelt far to the northeast, on tide-water, probably at Labrador ([Compare ante, p. 145]). They journeyed south and west, till they reached a broad water, full of islands and abounding in fish, perhaps the St. Lawrence about the Thousand Isles. They crossed and dwelt for some generations in the pine and hemlock regions of New York, fighting more or less with the Snake people, and the Talega, agricultural nations, living in stationary villages to the southeast of them, in the area of Ohio and Indiana. They drove out the former, but the latter remained on the upper Ohio and its branches. The Lenape, now settled on the streams in Indiana, wished to remove to the East to join the Mohegans and other of their kin who had moved there directly from northern New York. They, therefore, united with the Hurons (Talamatans) to drive out the Talega (Tsalaki, Cherokees) from the upper Ohio. This they only succeeded in accomplishing finally in the historic period ([see ante p. 17]). But they did clear the road and reached the Delaware valley, though neither forgetting nor giving up their claims to their western territories ([see ante p. 144]).