I conclude with a sun-myth of the Pallawonaps, who lived on Kern River in Southern California:—Pokòh made all things. Long ago the sun was a man. The sun is bad and wishes to kill all things, but the moon is good. The sun's rays are arrows, and he gives a bundle to every creature, more to the lion, fewer to the coyote, etc.; but to none does he give an arrow that will slay a man. The coyote wished to go to the sun, and he asked Pokòh the road. Pokòh pointed out to him a good road, and the coyote traveled on it all day, but the sun turned round, so he traveled in a circle, and came back at night to the place whence he had started in the morning. A second time he asked Pokòh, and a second time he came back in a circle. Then Pokòh told him to go straight to the eastern edge of the earth, and wait there until the sun came up. So the coyote went and sat down on the hole where the sun came up, with his back turned to the east, and kept pointing with his arrow in every direction, pretending he was going to shoot. The sun came up under him, and told him to get out of the way. But the coyote sat there until it became so warm that he was obliged to coil up his tail under him. Then he began to get thirsty, and asked the sun for water. The sun gave him an acorn-cup full, but this did not satisfy the coyote's great thirst. Next his shoulders began to get warm, so he spat on his paws and rubbed his back with them. Then he said to the sun, Why do you come up here, meddling with me? But the sun said, I am not meddling with you; I am traveling where I have a right to travel. The coyote told him to go round some other way, that that was his road, but the sun insisted on going straight up. Then the coyote wanted to go up with him, so the good-natured sun took him along. Presently they came to a path with steps like a ladder, and as the sun went up he counted the steps; when they got up above the world, the coyote found it getting hot and wanted to jump down, but the distance was too great. By noon the sun was very hot and bright, and he told the coyote to shut his eyes. He did so, but he opened them quickly again, and so kept opening and shutting them all the afternoon, to see how fast the sun was sliding down. When the sun came down to the earth in the west, the coyote jumped off on to a tree, and so clambered down to the ground.[XII-111]
Such are the Myths of the Farthest West, such the endeavors of these men unenlightened, according to our ideas of enlightenment, to define the indefinable, such the result of their 'yearning after the gods.' Most of their myths and beliefs are extravagant, childish, meaningless, to our understanding of them, but doubtless our myths would be the same to them. From the beginning of time men have grappled with shadows, have accounted for material certainties by immaterial uncertainties. Let us be content to gather and preserve these perishable phantoms now; they will be very curious relics in the day of the triumph of substance.
THE NATIVE RACES
OF THE
PACIFIC STATES.
LANGUAGES.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL REMARKS.
Native Languages in Advance of Social Customs—Characteristic Individuality of American Tongues—Frequent Occurrence of Long Words—Reduplications, Frequentatives, and Duals—Intertribal Languages—Gesture-Language—Slavé and Chinook Jargons—Pacific States Languages—The Tinneh, Aztec, and Maya Tongues—The Larger Families Inland—Language as a Test of Origin—Similarities in Unrelated Languages—Plan of this Investigation.
In nothing, perhaps, do the Native Races of the Pacific States show signs of age, and of progress from absolute primevalism, more than in their languages. Indeed, throughout the length and breadth of the two Americas aboriginal tongues display greater richness, more delicate gradations, and a wider scope, than from the uncultured condition in which the people were found, one would be led to suppose. Until recently, no attention has been given by scholars to these languages; now it is admitted that the more they are studied the more do new beauties appear, and that in their speech these nations are in advance of what their general rudeness in other respects would imply. Nor is there that difference in the construction of words and the scope of vocabularies between nations which we call civilized and those called savage, which, from the difference in their customs, industries, and polities we should expect to find; from which it is safe to infer that in progress, after the essential corporeal requirements are satisfied, the necessities of the intellect, of which speech is the very first, are not only met, but are developed and gratified beyond what the actual necessities of the body demand. That is, speech or no speech the body must be fed or the animal dies, but with the absolute necessities of the body supplied, the intellect and its supernumeraries shoot forward beyond their relative primeval state, leaving bodily comforts far behind. Hence, in the very outset of what we call progress, we see the intellect asserting its independence and developing those organs only which in their turn assist its own development. Again, under certain conditions, two nations having advanced materially and intellectually side by side up to a certain point, may from extrinsic or incidental causes become widely separate; one may go forward intellectually while the two remain together substantially; one may go forward materially while mentally there is no apparent difference. The causes which give rise to these strange inequalities we cannot fathom until we can minutely retrace the progress of the people for thousands of ages in their history; we only see, in the many examples round us, that such is the fact. A people well advanced in art and language may, from war or famine, become reduced to primeval penury and yet retain traces of its former culture in its speech, but by no possibility can rude and barbaric speech suddenly assume depth and richness from material prosperity; from all of which it is safe to conclude that language is the surest test of the age of a people, for the mind cannot expand without an improvement in speech, and speech improves only as it is forced slowly to develop under pressure of the mind.