Descent of Man from Animals 163 



Choctaws are in like manner descended from real crawfish, which 

 used to live under ground, only coming up occasionally through the 

 mud to the surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, 

 taught them the Choctaw language, taught them to walk on two legs, 

 made them cut oft* their toe nails and pluck the hair from their bodies, 

 after which they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their 

 kindred, the crawfish, are crawfish under ground to this day 1 . The 

 Osage Indians universally believed that they were descended from 

 a male snail and a female beaver. A flood swept the snail down to 

 the Missouri and left him high and dry on the bank, where the sun 

 ripened him into a man. He met and married a beaver maid, and 

 from the pair the tribe of the Osages is descended. For a long time 

 these Indians retained a pious reverence for their animal ancestors 

 and refrained from hunting beavers, because in killing a beaver they 

 killed a brother of the Osages. But when white men came among 

 them and offered high prices for beaver skins, the Osages yielded to 

 the temptation and took the lives of their furry brethren 2 . The Carp 

 clan of the Ootawak Indians are descended from the eggs of a carp 

 which had been deposited by the fish on the banks of a stream and 

 warmed by the sun 3 . The Crane clan of the Ojibways are sprung 

 originally from a pair of cranes, which after long wanderings settled 

 on the rapids at the outlet of Lake Superior, where they were changed 

 by the Great Spirit into a man and woman 4 . The members of two 

 Omaha clans were originally buffaloes and lived, oddly enough, under 

 water, which they splashed about, making it muddy. And at death 

 all the members of these clans went back to their ancestors the 

 buffaloes. So when one of them lay adying, his friends used to wrap 

 him up in a buffalo skin with the hair outside and say to him, " You 

 came hither from the animals and you are going back thither. Do 

 not face this way again. When you go, continue walking 5 ." The 

 Haida Indians of Queen Charlotte Islands believe that long ago the 

 raven, who is the chief figure in the mythology of North-West 

 America, took a cockle from the beach and married it ; the cockle 

 gave birth to a female child, whom the raven took to wife, and from 

 their union the Indians were produced 6 . The Delaware Indians 

 called the rattle-snake their grandfather and would on no account 



1 Geo. Catlin, North American Indians* (London, 1844), n. p. 128. 

 3 Lewis and Clarke, Travels to the Source of the Missouri River (London, 1815), i. 12 

 (Vol. i. pp. 44 sq. of the London reprint, 1905). 



3 Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, Nouvelle Edition, vi. (Paris, 1781), p. 171. 



4 L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society (London, 1877), p. 180. 



5 J. Owen Dorsey, "Omaha Sociology," Third Annual Report of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology (Washington, 1884), pp. 229, 233. 



6 G. M. Dawson, Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands (Montreal, 1880), pp. 149 B sq. 

 (Geological Survey of Canada) ; F. Poole, Queen Charlotte Islands, p. 136. 



112 



