Part 27

Howichinaipa went ahead: went south for some distance; the Mapchemaina followed soon after; went to the place where Howichinaipa had made the fire. When they came up, there was a good large fire at a place called Wewauna, half a mile from Hakamatu.

"Come to the fire, wait a while before we start, talk and get ready to hunt," said Howichinaipa.

Ten men went on farther south to find deer, while the others waited at the fire. Those ten men went south quickly; then five turned east, and five turned west to meet again at Wewauna. They came back about the same time, but not one of them saw deer or game of any kind. Every one wondered that there was no game in any place. Ahalamila and Howichinaipa began to dispute and then to quarrel because the ten men could find no deer.

Howichinaipa was angry; he was offended because Jupka had named him first, then changed his mind and called Ahalamila to sing for deer. He was angry, too, and jealous because he wanted one of Ahalamila's wives who was his own wife's sister. Howichinaipa's wife was a Chuhna, and Ahalamila's wife was her only sister. Howichinaipa wanted to have the two sisters as his wives; he wanted both of them. For these two reasons the Mapchemaina could find no deer that day. Howichinaipa had power over the deer, and had sent them all under ground. The ten men had looked in a great many places; they had run south, east, west, and could find no deer. Then the whole party turned to the southeast; they went to Chupirkoto. Some said, "What is the use in going farther? We can find no deer to-day. Ahalamila told us that we should find deer. Where are they? We cannot see them."

"I do not know," said Ahalamila, "why we find no deer. I sang and danced last night. I dreamed that I saw deer, that I saw them south of Jigulmatu."

"You will not see deer or any other game to-day," said Howichinaipa; "you cannot find deer, no matter how much you sing and dance. You are not able to find deer, but you have a nice wife. She is very pretty."

"The deer were coming," said Ahalamila, "but you stopped them, you drove them away;" and he sprang at Howichinaipa to strike him. Howichinaipa dodged and went down through the ground.

All the people took sides and began to fight; some were for Ahalamila, others were on Howichinaipa's side. Howichinaipa sprang out from under the ground, stood before Ahalamila; shot at him. Ahalamila dodged and shot too; Howichinaipa dodged very quickly.

They fought on in this way, fought hard, moved toward Jigulmatu, fighting all the time. At last Ahalamila was struck and fell dead; Topuna was killed too, and Hitchinna. A great many tried to kill Howichinaipa; but he dodged all the time, dodged so well, so quickly that not one of all his enemies could hit him. Jihkulu helped Howichinaipa; never stopped fighting for a moment.

They fought all the way to Hwitalmauna just south of Jigulmatu; the battle there was very hard, and people fell on both sides. There are many rocks at Hwitalmauna now, and these rocks are the Mapchemaina killed in that first battle.

Ahalamila's friends fought hard against Jihkulu and spent many arrows, but could not hit him, for he had a robe of rabbit skin around his body.

"We must hit that Jihkulu, we must kill him," said Ahalamila's friends.

"You need not talk like that," said Jihkulu; "you cannot kill me. I am the best fighter in all this world. I have been in every part of it; no one has ever hit me, no one has ever hurt me."

Jihkulu shot at Jewina, but missed. "You can't hit me!" cried Jewina. Jihkulu shot off Jewina's coyote skin, and then he killed him. Jewina had dreamed a long time before that if he wore coyote skin in battle he would not be killed, and that was why he wore it; but when Jihkulu shot off the skin, he killed him easily.

Now Jupka was lying in the sweat-house on Jigulmatu, and he heard the noise and shouting at Hwitalmauna. "They are fighting; I must stop the battle!" cried he. So he ran south--rushed into the middle of the fight.

"I want both sides to stop!" shouted Jupka.

The battle was at an end right there; all followed Jupka to Jigulmatu. That evening he said, "You will hunt in the north to-morrow." All were in the sweat-house then and were listening. Jupka spoke to them some time, and then they all talked at once; it seemed as though the house would burst when they were talking.

Next day they found deer in the north, and found them in plenty. Each had one to bring back to the sweat-house. When they were coming home through thick brushwood, Popila wished to please Ahalamila's friends, and made himself a bear to kill Howichinaipa, who fought the day before with Ahalamila and killed him.

The bear came out and threw his arms around a clump of brush in which Howichinaipa was. Howichinaipa slipped out in time and ran. The bear rushed after him, hunted him, and almost caught him at a rock near Hakamatu. Howichinaipa sprang on to the rock and said,--

"I am nearly dead; I wish this rock to open; I am too tired to run; I can go no farther."

The rock opened, and Howichinaipa dropped in. The bear rushed up, stuck his head and fore paws after Howichinaipa; but the rock closed, and the bear was caught and killed.

Howichinaipa came out and stood beside the bear. "I am tired," said he. "I was almost dead. You tried your best to kill me, but I am hard to kill." Then he took his flint knife, cut around the bear's neck and behind his two fore paws, and skinned him, put the skin on his shoulder, and started for Jigulmatu. He came behind the others, reached home at dusk. He hung the skin near the door, and said,--

"We shall hear what Ahalamila's friends will say to-morrow morning."

Popila's mother heard what her son had done, and when she saw the bearskin she cried and rolled upon the ground. Next day the old woman was sweeping; she swept out a little red-eared boy, a Pakalai Jawichi, and as she swept, he squealed. Popila Marimi took him up, took a deerskin, and made a blanket of it, and put the little fellow in this deerskin. She boiled water then with hot rocks and washed him, and every time she washed she sprinkled flint dust on the little boy to make him strong. He could creep around next morning; but she said:

"Stay in one place; you must not move. There may be poison in some place; if you touch it, it will kill you. Stay right where I put you."

The second day the boy could talk. "You cry all the time, grandmother; why do you cry?" asked he.

"Do not ask that question, grandson; it makes me grieve to hear you. All my people were dead except my son; now he is killed and I have no one."

The fifth day the boy was walking around the house outside.

"Grandmother," said he, "make a great fire."

She made a fire in the sweat-house. The boy stood near the central pillar and sang, "Hála watá, hála watá."

He fell asleep while sweating; slept till morning. Next day when he woke he said to his grandmother, "What am I to do with my hands?"

The old woman gave him a flint knife and said, "I have had this a long time; take it now and fix your hands with it."

His fingers were joined together as far as the first joint, and she showed him how to separate them from each other. He cut the little finger first, then the third, the second, and the first. The thumb he called big finger; and when the five fingers were separated and free of each other, she told him to call the thumb the big finger, and call it one, the next two, the next three, the next four, and the little finger five.

This was the first time that counting was ever done in the world. And when Jupka made the Yana, he gave them hands like Pakalai Jawichi's.

When his left hand was finished, Pakalai Jawichi said, "I don't know how to cut with my left hand."

The old woman helped him to free the fingers of the right hand. When all his fingers were free, the boy was able to shoot, and he wanted a bow and arrows.

The old woman brought all the bows of her dead kindred; he broke all but one, which had a string made from the shoulder sinews of a deer. He took that and went out. This day Howichinaipa hid himself in a cedar-tree: he was watching a bird. Pakalai Jawichi knew that he was there, and called with the voice of the bird that Howichinaipa was watching. Howichinaipa came down on the tree lower and lower, looking to see where the call came from.

Pakalai Jawichi was hidden in a tree opposite, where Howichinaipa could not see him; he kept calling, and Howichinaipa kept coming down. Pakalai Jawichi had a good sight of him.

"If I hit him in the body," thought he, "the arrow will not hurt him; I must hit him in the outside toe."

He did that, and Howichinaipa fell to the ground wounded. Pakalai Jawichi pinned him to the earth with one arrow, then with another; pinned his two sides to the ground with two rows of arrows. Pakalai Jawichi ran home.

"Oh, grandmother!" cried he.

"What is the matter?" asked the old woman; "you came near falling into the fire."

"There is some one out here; I want you to see him."

The old woman took her cane and followed Pakalai Jawichi.

"Do you see that person lying there?"

The old woman looked, and saw the person who had killed her son, saw him pinned to the earth. She was so glad that she cried, she dropped down then, and rolled on the ground; after that she jumped up and danced around his body, danced many times, danced till she was tired.

"Hereafter," said Pakalai Jawichi, "everybody will call you Howichinaipa. You will be a person no longer; you will be only a little bird, with these arrow-marks on both sides of your breast."

He became a little bird then and flew away, the little bird which we call Howichinaipa.

Next morning after the second hunt Jupka heard loud shouting in the east; a great Mapchemaina had thrust his head above the edge of the sky. This person had beautiful feathers waving on his head. Jupka had made him shout, and he said to him,--

"Every time you rise up and show yourself to the people of Jigulmatu you must shout in that way."

This great person in the east had two dogs; they were small, but very strong. "Which of you is coming with me?" asked he that morning. "I want a good dog; I am always afraid when I travel in the daytime."

"I will give you a name now," said Jupka to this person in the east. "All people will call you hereafter by the name which I give now. The name which I give you is Tuina. You will be known always by this name. And your name," said he to the dog, "will be Machperkami."

When Tuina was ready to start, he made his small dog still smaller, very small; put him under the hair on the top of his head, and tied him in there.

When all dressed and ready, with the dog fastened in his hair, Tuina became as full of light as he is in our time. Before he was dressed and armed and had his dog on his head Tuina had no brightness, but when he started he filled this whole world with light, as he does now in the daytime.

Bohkuina had made a road for Tuina to travel on; he had made this road in the sky, and Tuina went straight along to the west by it, till he reached the great water. When he was ready to plunge into the water, a hatenna (grizzly bear) of the water was coming out and saw him. Tuina put his hands out and motioned with his arms as if they were wings, motioned as if to jump in.

"Tuina is coming!" said the grizzly bear of the water. "It will be too hot here if he comes. Let us make ready and go to high mountains. We cannot stay here if Tuina comes."

A great crowd of water grizzlies came out of the ocean and went away to the mountains. Tuina jumped into the water, and it rose on all sides, boiled up, rolled away over the shore, every kind of shell of the ocean went to land at the same time.

Tuina went far into the water, way down to the bottom; he went through the bottom, deep under the water and the ground, and returned to the east.

Long before that Jupka had made a road under the earth for Tuina to travel on, a road back to the east. Jupka turned the earth bottom upward, and made this road right through from west to east; and before Tuina started Jupka said to him,--

"I have made a road, a straight road under the earth for you, a good road; there are no rocks on it, all is smooth. Bohkuina made the road on the sky, the road from east to west for you to run on; I made the road down below, the road under the earth from west to east. When you reach the east, you will rest a while, rise in the morning, come up and go west again on the road which Bohkuina made; you will do this every day without failing; you will do this all the time."

When Jupka stopped talking, Tuina went west, went back in the night on Jupka's road; and so he does always.

The day after Jupka had talked with Tuina, given him his name and his work, he said, "I will make Yana now, and I will give them a good country to live in."

He took buckeye-sticks, broke off a large number; he wished to lay them down on the top of Jigulmatu and make Yana. He put down the first stick and said, "I will call this one Iwilau Yana" (Yana of the middle place).

When he had said these words, a man rose up before him, a Yana.

"You will stay here in this middle country," said Jupka. "You will be chief."

Jupka put down another buckeye-stick, and it became a Yana woman at Jupka's word. He put down a third stick, which became a boy.

"This is an orphan without father or mother," said Jupka; and he called the boy Hurskiyupa.

Jupka put other buckeye-sticks, a large number of them, around the first Yana, the chief, and made common people. They all stood around the chief and Jupka said to them,--

"This is your chief; he will tell you what to do; you must obey him and do what he commands."

"Now," said Jupka, "what will the people of the middle country eat? what shall I give them?" and he thought a while. "You will eat clover," said he, "and roots. I will give you sticks to dig these roots. You will eat fish, too, and venison. Eat and be strong, be good Yana people. When the chief wants a deer, he will call you together and say, 'I wish to eat venison; I want you to go out, I want you to hunt deer and bring home venison to eat.' You must obey the chief always."

NOTES

The following notes are put in as condensed a form as possible. They are confined to explanations of the actors or characters in the myths, and to information concerning the meaning of names of persons and places.

The myths from one to nine inclusive are Wintu, from ten to the end Yana. These two nations, though neighbors, are not related; their languages are radically different.

* * * * *

In 1895 I made a journey to California in consequence of an arrangement with the late Charles A. Dana, editor of "The Sun." According to this arrangement, Mr. Dana was to publish on consecutive Sundays such myth-tales as I might think of sufficient value to appear in his paper. Those myths were to be found by me in California, Mexico, and Guatemala.

I began at the source of the Sacramento River, and worked down to the mouth, my last stopping-place being the extensive hop-fields in the lower valley.

In San Francisco I wrote the following short account of the Wintus. That done, I set out for Mexico.

In the city of Guadalajara I copied the myths obtained in California and sent them to "The Sun." After that I worked at "Quo Vadis," the greater part of which I translated in Guadalajara.

All the myths in this volume were published in "The Sun," and appeared as a part of a series pertaining to Indians in California, Mexico, and Guatemala.

Only the California part has been published thus far.

After leaving Guadalajara I spent almost a year in Guatemala and Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Among the last places which I visited was Palenque. A view of one part of the ruins of this remarkable and mysterious city appears as a frontispiece to the present volume.

THE WINTUS

The Wintus are a nation or stock of Indians who before the coming of white men owned and occupied all that part of California situated on the right bank of the Sacramento, from its source near the foot of Mount Shasta to its mouth at the northern shore of San Francisco Bay.

These Indians extended into Trinity County on the west, and still farther to the mountain slope which lies toward the Pacific. Only a small number of them, however, were on the western declivity. The great body of the nation lived on the eastern slope of the Coast Range and in the Sacramento Valley. Some of their finest mental productions are connected with the upper course of the Sacramento and with the MacCloud River, or Wini Mem.

It is difficult to determine what the Wintu population was half a century ago, but, judging from the number of houses in villages, the names and positions of which have been given me by old men, I should say that it could not have been less than 10,000, and might easily have been double that number. At present there are not more than 500 Wintus in existence.

The Wintus have suffered grievously; great numbers have been killed by white men, others have perished by diseases brought in by strangers; but those who remain are strong and are more likely to increase than diminish. Times of violence have passed, and the present Wintus are willing and able to adapt themselves to modern conditions.

It may be of interest to readers of these myth tales to know something of the present condition of the Wintus.

In 1889, when I was in California, commissioned by Major Powell for the second time to make linguistic investigations among various tribes of the Pacific coast, a few Wintus came to me in Redding, California, and complained of their wretched condition. There was not a spot of land, they said, where they could build a hut without danger of being ordered away from it. "This country was ours once," added they, "but the white man has taken all of it." I told them to bring their people together, and invite also the Yanas, who had suffered more than all other people of that region, and then explain to me what was needed.

The two peoples met on a little stony field in a brushy waste outside the inhabited part of Redding. There they made speeches and discussed matters for three hours the first day and as many the second. They gave me all the points of what they wanted, which was simply that the United States should give each man of them a piece of land, with help to begin life on it. I jotted down in brief form what they had told me, read it to them, and they were satisfied. Next day the paper was copied in the form of a petition from the two nations to President Harrison. They signed the petition before a Redding notary, and gave it to me with a request to lay it before the President.

Early in 1890 I was in Washington. Anxious to win the case of my poor Indian friends,--or "Diggers," as some men are pleased to call them contemptuously,--I looked around for a Congressman of influence to go with me to support the petition before the President. I found no suitable person till I met my classmate and friend, Governor Greenhalge of Massachusetts, at that time a member of Congress. When he heard the tale of the Yana massacre and realized the sad plight of the Wintus, he offered at once to cooperate with me. He went to the President and explained the affair to him. Two or three days later he accompanied me to the White House. I gave the petition to President Harrison, who promised to favor it with his executive initiative. He did this so earnestly and with such emphasis that an agent was appointed very soon to find land for those Indians. The agent found land for them in various places, but within the radius of their former possessions. The condition of the Wintus at present is this: They have lands which are described, but in most cases the boundaries are not indicated by any material mark, or at least very few of them are; white men are trespassing, and it is impossible for the Indians to protect themselves till their boundaries are fixed tangibly. They will not have the means to begin serious work till they receive assistance. They are waiting now in hope that the Commissioner of Indian Affairs will have their lands surveyed, and that Congress will make a small appropriation for their benefit. This is the extent of their hopes and wishes. They are very glad to have land, and the majority of them will make fairly good use of it. When I met them in 1895, they were very grateful for the part which I had taken in settling them in life, adding that they could not have settled themselves unassisted. As to me, I cannot but make an emphatic acknowledgment of the generous and effective aid given by Governor Greenhalge.

"Olelbis," the first myth published in "The Sun" (March 29, 1896), was preceded by the following brief introduction:--

The Wintus, with whose creation-myths I begin this series, are a very interesting people. Their language is remarkably harmonious, rich, and flexible. It has great power of describing the physical features of the country in which it is spoken, as well as the beliefs and ideas of the Wintus themselves.

The picture of Olelbis, a being who lives in the highest and sees everything, is drawn more distinctly and with more realism than any character in other American religious systems, so far as I know.

The theory of creation evolved by the Indians of North America is complete, simple, and symmetrical. I have referred to it somewhat in the introduction to "Hero Tales of Ireland," in "Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland," and in "Myths and Folk-tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars." This theory is in brief as follows:--

There was a people in existence before the present race of men; in speaking of the present race of men, the tales have in view Indians only. This first people lived in harmony for a period of indefinite, unimaginable duration, without division or dissension,--undifferentiated, so to speak. This was the golden age of existence, a Nirvana preliminary to life as we know it at present, a Nirvana of the gods, as the Buddhist extinction of self is to be the Nirvana of just men when all shall be one in all and one in one. At last a time came when character appeared, and with it differences and conflicts. When the conflicts were past and the battles fought out, the majority of the first people were turned into all the animated things, walking, creeping, crawling, swimming, flying, that have ever been seen on the earth, in the water, or in the air. They were turned also into trees and plants of every kind,--some into heavenly bodies, others into remarkable stones and rocks, just as, in the Bible, Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt.

According to this theory, every individual existence which we see in the world around us is a transformed or fallen god. Every beast, bird, reptile, fish, insect, or plant was at one time a divinity of high or low degree, an uncreated person who had lived in harmony with his fellows from the beginning till the time when variety of character, or individuality, appeared and brought with it difficulties, or perhaps we might say, penalty. With individuality came conflicts; when those conflicts were over, creation was finished.