The great Northwest--that wonderful frontier that called to itself a
world's hardiest spirits--is rapidly becoming a settled country; and
before the light of civilizing influences, the blanket-Indian has
trailed the buffalo over the divide that time has set between the
pioneer and the crowd. With his passing we have lost much of the
aboriginal folk-lore, rich in its fairy-like characters, and its
relation to the lives of a most warlike people.
There is a wide difference between folk-lore of the so-called Old World
and that of America. Transmitted orally through countless generations,
the folk-stories of our ancestors show many evidences of distortion and
of change in material particulars; but the Indian seems to have been
too fond of nature and too proud of tradition to have forgotten or
changed the teachings of his forefathers. Childlike in simplicity,
beginning with creation itself, and reaching to the whys and wherefores
of nature's moods and eccentricities, these tales impress me as being
well worth saving.
The Indian has always been a lover of nature and a close observer of
her many moods. The habits of the birds and animals, the voices of the
winds and waters, the flickering of the shadows, and the mystic
radiance of the moonlight--all appealed to him. Gradually, he
formulated within himself fanciful reasons for the myriad
manifestations of the Mighty Mother and her many children; and a poet
by instinct, he framed odd stories with which to convey his
explanations to others. And these stories were handed down from father
to son, with little variation, through countless generations, until the
white man slaughtered the buffalo, took to himself the open country,
and left the red man little better than a beggar. But the tribal
story-teller has passed, and only here and there is to be found a
patriarch who loves the legends of other days.
Old-man, or Napa, as he is called by the tribes of Blackfeet, is the
strangest character in Indian folk-lore. Sometimes he appears as a god
or creator, and again as a fool, a thief, or a clown. But to the
Indian, Napa is not the Deity; he occupies a somewhat subordinate
position, possessing many attributes which have sometimes caused him to
be confounded with Manitou, himself. In all of this there is a curious
echo of the teachings of the ancient Aryans, whose belief it was that
this earth was not the direct handiwork of the Almighty, but of a mere
member of a hierarchy of subordinate gods. The Indian possesses the
highest veneration for the Great God, who has become familiar to the
readers of Indian literature as Manitou. No idle tales are told of
Him, nor would any Indian mention Him irreverently. But with Napa it
is entirely different; he appears entitled to no reverence; he is a
strange mixture of the fallible human and the powerful under-god. He
made many mistakes; was seldom to be trusted; and his works and pranks
run from the sublime to the ridiculous. In fact, there are many
stories in which Napa figures that will not bear telling at all.
I propose to tell what I know of these legends, keeping as near as
possible to the Indian's style of story-telling, and using only tales
told me by the older men of the Blackfeet, Chippewa, and Cree tribes.