(See p. 115)
The following is an extract from Dr. Daniel G. Brinton's work, the _Myths
of the New World_.
"As in oriental legends, the origin of man from the earth was
veiled under the story that he was the progeny of some mountain
by the embrace of Mithras or Jupiter, so the Indians often
pointed to some height or some cavern as the spot whence the
first of men issued, adult and armed, from the womb of the
All-mother Earth. The oldest name of the Alleghany Mountains is
Paemotinck, or Pemolnick, an Algonkin word, the meaning of which
is said to be "The origin of the Indians."
"The Witchitas, who dwelt on the Red River among the mountains
named after them, have a tradition that their progenitors issued
from the rocks about their homes, and many other tribes, the
Tahkalis, Navajos, Coryoteras, and the Hailians, for instance,
set up this claim to be autochthones....
"All those tribes, the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chicasaws,
and Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times
banded into one common confederacy under the headship of the
last-mentioned, 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....
"A parallel to this southern legend occurs among the Six Nations
of the north. They with one consent, if we may credit the account
of Cusic, looked to a mountain near the falls of the Oswego
River, in the State of New York, as the locality where the
forefathers first saw the light of day, and that they had some
such legend the name Oneida, people of the Stone, would seem to
testify....
"An ancient legend of the Aztecs derived their nation from a
place called Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caverns, located north of
Mexico. Antiquaries have indulged in all sorts of speculations
as to what this means.... Caverns and hollow trees were in fact
the homes and temples of our first parents, and from them they
went forth to conquer and adorn the world; and from the inorganic
constituents of the soil acted on by Light, treated by Divine
Force, vivified by the Spirit, did in reality the first of men
proceed.
"This cavern, which thus dimly lingered in the memories of
nations, occasionally expanded to a nether world, imagined to
underlie this of ours, and still inhabited by beings of our
kind, who have never been lucky enough to discover its exit. The
Mandans and Minnetarees, on the Missouri River, supposed this
exit was near a certain hill in their territory...."--_Myths of
the New World_, pp. 224-8.
Mr. Edward B. Tylor, Oxford, suggests that the legend referred to may be
that described in Falkner's account of the Moluches.
"They believe that their good deities made the world, and that they
first created the Indians in their caves, gave them the lance, the bow
and arrows, and the stone-bowls, to fight and hunt with, and then turned
them out to shift for themselves. They imagine that the deities of the
Spaniards did the same by them.... They have formed a belief that some
of them after death return to their divine caverns," etc. (Falkner's
_Description of Patagonia and the adjoining parts of South America,
etc._, chap. v. pp. 114-5, by Thomas Falkner, Hereford, 1774.)
See also Edward B. Tylor's _Early History of Mankind_, p. 313.--ED.