HIAWATHA.
[14] "On the mountains of the prairie." (Mt. Catlin, etc.) Located near the boundary between Minnesota and Dakota, near the head waters of the Mississippi.
[15] This quarry, located near the hills or mountains, was very famous among the Indians, who by common consent had made the adjacent territory neutral ground. Here they came and provided themselves with pipes, very necessary to the Indian's happiness. To apply the stone to any other use than that of pipe-making would have been sacrilege in the native's mind. From similarity in color, they even fancied it to have been made, at the great deluge, from the flesh of the perishing Indian.
[16] In Northern Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River, the scene of a terrible massacre by the Indians and Tories in 1778. Campbell wrote Gertrude of Wyoming on the incidents of that July 5th.
[17] A section of Alabama, taking its name from the chief defeated by De Soto in 1540.
"The Falls of Minnehaha." (The Scenery about Fort Snelling, etc.)
THE DESCENDING STAR.
This legend is related by Kah-ge-ga-gah-bawh, chief of the Ojibway Nation, or Chippewas, in his "Traditional History of the Ojibway Nation" purporting to be the first volume of Indian history written by an Indian. In common with his forest brethren, he "was brought up in the woods." Twenty months passed in a school in Illinois constituted the sum-total of his schooling. But he had learned the traditions of his people, as was customary, from the lips of the chief, his father.
Through the stilted language of this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain and crystallize this poetic beauty in the preceding metrical version of the Indian legend.