"The author of these volumes has stamped upon his page much of the intellectual existence of the simple children of the forest, and bequeathed us a detail map of their terra incognita--their fireside amusements in legendary lore."
I am willing to notice this and some other criticisms of this work as popular expressions of opinion on the subject. But it is difficult for an editor to judge, from the mere face of the volumes, what an amount of auxiliary labor it has required to collect these legends from the Indian wigwams. They had to be gleaned and translated from time to time. Seventeen years have passed since I first began them--not that anything like this time, or the half of it, has been devoted to it. It was one of my amusements in the long winter evenings--the only time of the year when Indians will tell stories and legends. They required pruning and dressing, like wild vines in a garden. But they are, exclusively (with the exception of the allegory of the vine and oak), wild vines, and not pumpings up of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are not, perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, have been a fuller adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what a world of verbiage must have been retained. The Indians are prolix, and attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only does not help forward the denouement, but is tedious and witless to the last degree. The gems of the legends--the essential points--the invention and thought-work are all preserved.
Their chief value I have ever thought to consist in the insight they give into the dark cave of the Indian mind--its beliefs, dogmas, and opinions--its secret modes of turning over thought--its real philosophy; and it is for this trait that I believe posterity will sustain the book.
A literary friend, of good judgment, of Detroit, writes (19th): "Your tales have reached me, and I have read them over with a deep interest, arising from a double source--the intrinsic value of such stories and the insight they give of Indian intellect and modes of thought. They form a truly important acquisition to our literary treasures, as they throw a light oft the Indian character which has been imparted from no other quarter. They form a standard by which to determine what is true and what is false in the representations made heretofore of the aboriginal nations on most prominent subjects. No one will doubt that you render the genuine Indian mind and heart. Those who conform to these renderings will pass muster; the rest will be rejected. Let Mr. Cooper and others be thus measured."
24th. Muk-kud-da Ka-niew (or the Black War Eagle), chief of the coasts of Arenac, brought me an antique pipe of peculiar construction, disinterred at Thunder Bay. It was found about six feet underground; and was disclosed by the blowing down of a large pine, which tore up a quantity of earth by its roots. The tree was two fathoms round, and would make a large canoe. With the pipe were found two earthen vases, which broke on taking them up. In these vases were some small bones of the pickerel's spine. He saw also the leg bones of an Indian, but the upper part of the skeleton appeared to be decomposed, and was not visible. He thinks the tree must have grown up on an old grave. The pipe consisted of a squared and ornamented bowl, with a curved and tapering handle, all made solid from a sort of coarse terra cotta. He says it was used by taking the small end in the mouth, and thinks such was the practice of the ancient Indians, although the mode is now so different by their descendants. The chief ornament consists of eight dots on each face, separated by longitudinal strokes, leaving four in a compartment. If the tree was four feet diameter, as he states, it denotes an ancient occupation of the shores of Lake Huron, which was probably of the old era of the mining for copper in Lake Superior.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
American antiquities--Michilimackinack a summer resort--Death of Ogimau Keegido--Brothertons--An Indian election--Cherokee murders--Board of Regents of the Michigan University--Archaeological facts and rumors--Woman of the Green Valley--A new variety of fish--Visits of the Austrian and Sardinian Ministers to the U.S.--Mr. Gallup--Sioux murders--A remarkable display of aurora borealis--Ottawas of Maumee--Extent of auroral phenomena--Potawattomie cruelty--Mineralogy--Death of Ondiaka--Chippewa tradition--Fruit trees--Stone's preparation of the Life and Times of Sir William Johnson--Dialectic difference between the language of the Ottawas and the Chippewas--Philological remarks on the Indian languages--Mr. T. Hulbert.
1839. June 25th. ALEX V.V. BRADFORD, Esq., of New York, being about to publish a work on American antiquities,[93] solicits permission to use some of my engravings. I am glad to see an increasing interest in our archaeology, and hope to live to see the day when the popular tastes will permit books to be published on the subject.
[93] This work was published, I think, in 1841.