Here we seem to have a reminiscence of the cave-dwellers, looking out at the terrible tempest from their places of shelter.
[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 91.]
{p. 204}
The child of the Great Spirit exposes herself too much, is caught by the wind and blown down the mountain-side, where she is found, shivering on the snow, by a family of grizzly bears. These grizzly bears evidently possessed some humane as well as human traits: "They walked then on their hind-legs like men, and talked, and carried clubs, using the fore-limbs as men use their arms." They represent in their bear-skins the rude, fur-clad race that were developed during the intense cold of the Glacial Age.
The child of the Great Spirit, the superior race, intermarries with one of the grizzly bears, and from this union came the race of men, to wit, the Indians.
"But the Great Spirit punished the grizzly bears by depriving them of the power of speech, and of standing erect--in short, by making true bears of them. But no Indian will, to this day, kill a grizzly bear, recognizing as he does the tie of blood."
Again, we are told:
"The inhabitants of central Europe and the Teutonic races who came late to England place their mythical heroes under ground in caves, in vaults beneath enchanted castles, or in mounds which rise up and open, and show their buried inhabitants alive and busy about the avocations of earthly men. . . . In Morayshire the buried race are supposed to be under the sandhills, as they are in some parts of Brittany."[1]
Associated with these legends we find many that refer to the time of great cold, and snow, and ice. I give one or two specimens:
In the story of the Iroquois, (see p. 173, ante,) we are told that the White One, [the Light One, the Sun,] after he had destroyed the monster who covered the earth with