Compare this American custom with the religious ceremony of an ancient Italian tribe:
"Three thousand years ago the Hirpani, or Wolves, an ancient Sabine tribe of Italy, were wont to collect on Mount Soracte, and there go through certain rites, in memory of an oracle which predicted their extinction when they ceased to gain their living as wolves do, by violence and plunder. Therefore they dressed in wolf-skins,
[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 247.
2. Ibid.]
{p. 201}
ran with barks and howls over burning coals, and gnawed wolfishly whatever they could seize."[1]
All the tribes of the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times banded into one common confederacy, unanimously located their earliest ancestry near an artificial eminence in the valley of the Big Black River, in the Natchez country, whence they pretended to have emerged. This hill is an elevation of earth about half a mile square and fifteen or twenty feet high. From its northeast corner a wall of equal height extends for nearly half a mile to the high land. This was the Nunne Chaha, properly Nanih waiya, sloping hill, famous in Choctaw story, and which Captain Gregg found they had not yet forgotten in their Western home.
"The legend was, that in its center was a cave, the house of the Master of Breath. Here he made the first men from the clay around him, and, as at that time the waters covered the earth, he raised the wall to dry them on. When the soft mud had hardened into elastic flesh and firm bone, he banished the waters to their channels and beds, and gave the dry land to his creatures."[2]
Here, again, we have the beginnings of the present race of men in a cave, surrounded by clay and water, which covered the earth, and we have the water subsiding into its channels and beds, and the dry land appearing, whereupon the men emerged from the cave.
A parallel to this Southern legend occurs among the Six Nations of the North. They with one consent looked to a mountain near the falls of the Oswego River, in the State of New York, as the locality where their forefathers saw the light of day; and their name, Oneida, signifies the people of the stone.