There appears, throughout the whole race, to be the vestiges of a tradition of the creation and the deluge, two great and striking points in the history of man, which, however he wandered, he would be most likely to remember. They uniformly attribute their origin to a superior and divine power. They do not suppose that they came into existence without the act of this pre-existing almighty power, who is called NEO, or OWANEO. This is the third great and leading point in their traditions. And these three primary vestiges of the original history of the race are to be found among the rudest tribes, between the straits of Terra del Fuego and the Arctic Ocean, notwithstanding the amount of grotesque and puerile matter which serves as the vehicle of the traditions.
Between the creation and the deluge and the present era of the world, there is nearly an entire blank. Ages have dropped out of their memory, with all their stirring incidents of wars and migrations, and the first reliable truth we hear is, that at such a time they lived on the banks of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Lakes, or the St. Lawrence, &c. Nothing but this kind of proximate origin could indeed be expected to be retained. They acknowledge relationship to no prior race of man. We see that they are sui generis with, and much resemble some of the eastern nations in color and features. Physiologists have never been able to detect a bone or muscle, more or less, than the Caucasian race possess. Philologists listen to their speech and admit that in one tribe or another they possess all the powers of articulate utterance known to that race. We know by this kind of evidence, physical and moral, that they are a branch of the original Adamic stock, without reference to the pages of revelation, where we learn the same truth, and are told in so many words, that “God out of one flesh, formed all men.” And we must perforce infer, that the Indian race is of foreign origin, and must have crossed an ocean to reach the continent.
Ask not the red sage to tell you how? or when? or where? He knows it not, and if he should pretend to the knowledge, it would be the surest possible evidence, philosophically considered, that his responses were fabulous. Three hundred and fifty-three years only has America been known to Europe, and yet should we strike our history out of existence, what should we know of the leading facts of the discovery and the discoverer from Indian tradition? Still the inquisitive spirit of research leads us to ask, where were this race eighteen hundred and forty-five years ago? or at the invasion of Britain by Julius Cæsar? or at the outpouring of the Gothic hordes under Alaric or Brennus? Scandinavian research tells us they were here in the 10th century. The Mexican picture writings inform us that some of them reached the valley of Mexico in the 11th century. Welsh history claims to have sent one of her princes among them in the 12th century. The mounds of the Mississippi valley do not appear to have had an origin much earlier. The whole range of even historical conjecture is absolutely limited within eight or nine hundred years. Nothing older, of their presence here certainly, is known, than about the time of the crowning of Charlemagne, A. D. 800, unless we take the Grecian tradition of Atlantis.
That we have nothing in the way of tradition older than the dates referred to, is no positive proof that the tribes were not upon the continent long prior. There are some considerations, in the very nature of the case, which argue a remote continental antiquity for these tribes. It is hardly to be supposed that large numbers of the primitive adventurers landed at any one time or place; nor is it more probable that the epochs of these early adventurers were very numerous. The absolute conformity of physical features renders this improbable. The early migrations must have been necessarily confined to portions of the old world peopled by the Red Race—by a race, not only of red skins, black hair and eyes, and high cheek bones, who would reproduce these fixed characteristics, ad infinitum, but whose whole mental as well as physiological development assimilates it, as a distinct unity of the species. While physiology, however, asserts this unity, in the course of the dispersion and multiplication of tribes, their languages, granting all that can be asked for on the score of original diversity, became divided into an infinite number of dialects and tongues. Between these dialects, however, where they are even the most diverse, there is a singular coincidence in many of the leading principles of concord and regimen, and polysynthetic arrangement. Such diversities in sound, amounting, as they do in many cases, for instance, in the stocks of the Algonquin and Iroquois, to an almost total difference, must have required many ages for their production. And this fact alone affords a proof of the continental antiquity of the American race.
[c.] Indian Cosmogony.
Origin of the Continent, of the Animal Creation, and of the Indian Race: The Introduction of the Two Principles of Good and Evil Into The Government of the World.
Iroquois tradition opens with the notion that there were originally two worlds, or regions of space, namely, an upper and lower world. The upper was inhabited by beings similar to the human race; the lower by monsters, moving in the waters. When the human species were transferred below, and the lower sphere was about to be rendered fit for their residence, the act of their transference or reproduction is concentrated in the idea of a female, who began to descend into the lower world, which is depicted as a region of darkness, waters and monsters. She was received on the back of a tortoise, where she gave birth to male twins, and expired. The shell of this tortoise expanded into the continent, which, in their phraseology, is called an “island;” and is named by the Onondagas, AONAO. One of the infants was called Inigorio, or the Good Mind; the other, Inigohatea, or the Bad Mind. These two antagonistical principles, which are such perfect counterparts of the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Zoroaster, were at perpetual variance, it being the law of one to counteract whatever the other did. They were not, however, men, but gods, or existences, through whom the “Great Spirit,” or “Holder of the Heavens,” carried out his purposes. The first labor of Inigorio was to create the sun out of the head of his dead mother, and the moon and the stars out of other parts of the body. The light these gave, drove the monsters into deep water, to hide themselves. He then prepared the surface of the continent, and fitted it for human habitation, by diversifying it with creeks, rivers, lakes and plains, and by filling these with the various species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. He then formed a man and woman out of earth, gave them life, and called them “Ea-gwe-ho-we,” or, as it is more generally known to Indian archæologists, Ong-we-Hon-we; that is to say, a real people. [[D].]
Meanwhile the Bad Mind created mountains, waterfalls, and steeps and morasses, reptiles, serpents, apes, and other objects supposed to be injurious to, or in mockery of mankind. He made attempts also to conceal the land animals in the ground, so as to deprive man of the means of subsistence. This continued opposition to the wishes of the Good Mind, who was perpetually busied in restoring the effects of the displacements and wicked devices of the other, at length led to a personal combat, of which the time and instruments of battle were agreed on. They fought for two days, the one using deer’s horns, and the other flag roots, as arms.[18] Inigorio, who had chosen horns, finally prevailed; his antagonist sunk down to a region of darkness, and became the Evil Spirit, or Kluneolux,[19] of the world of despair. Inigorio, having obtained this triumph, retired from the earth.
[18] By reference to the Algonquin story of the combat between Manabozho and his father, the West Wind, as given in Algic Researches, vol. 1, p. 134, it will be seen that the weapons chosen by the parties were the same as those employed by Inigorio and Inigohatea, namely, deer’s horns and flag roots.
[19] Oneida.