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.