The Siwash, Their Life, Legends, and Tales: Puget Sound and Pacfic Northwest

by J. A. Costello

CHAPTER XXIII
A LEGEND OF THE FIRST FLOOD

The story of the big flood is common to all the tribes around Puget Sound. The mountain referred to is usually the loftiest mountain nearest them. The Lummi Indians refer to Mt. Baker, the upper Stillaguamish to Mt. Pilchuck and the Nisquallies to Mt. Rainier, and each of them call their mountain Ta-ho-ma, from which is derived the name Tacoma. Ta-ho-ma means a lofty mountain, but does not refer to any peak in particular.

It was a long time ago, just after the breaking up of the great winter, that the sky opened and a terrible rain and snow deluged the world and the water kept on rising higher and higher until the great mountains were covered beneath it and ice and snow, and the bones of bear and deer and clam shells and fishbacks and logs floated on top of the water and settled on the mountain tops as the flood subsided. That is why the mountains are always covered with ice and snow. This also accounts for the presence of logs upon the tops of the mountains where trees have not grown and fish bones and clam shells and the like may be seen where they could not now exist.

Another legend of similar nature but more appropriately giving the Indian tradition of the first man and woman is told by one writer as follows:

There once fell upon the earth a long terrible rain; the Whulge arose; it filled the mountain walls, and all the tribes perished except one man. He fled before the rising waters up the sides of Mt. Rainier. The waters rose and covered the mountain. They swept over his feet; they came to his knees, to his waist. He seemed about to be swept away, when his feet turned to stone.

Then the rain ceased. The clouds broke and the blue sky came again, and the waters began to sink.

The one man stood there on top of Rainier. He could not lift his feet; they were rocks. Birds flew again, flowers bloomed again, but he could not go.

The Spirit of All Things came to him. “Sleep,” said he. And the one man with stone feet slept.

As he slept there the Spirit of All Things took from him a rib and made of it a woman. When he awoke there stood his wife ready-made on the top of Mt. Rainier. His stone shoes dropped off and the happy pair came down the mountain to the wooded paradises of the Whulge on the sunset sea. Here sprung the human race at the foot of Rainier.