228 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



account of the matter ; but a boy on the opposite side of 

 the continent would get a very different explanation. He 

 would be told that Raven did it. Raven — or the raven — 

 was the mythical ancestor or culture hero, as ethnologists 

 would say, of the foremost clan of the Tlingit tribe, 

 whose territory was in southern Alaska. He was present 

 at the making of the world and its people, and did many 

 marvellous things. While he was at Sitka arranging 

 affairs in the new world he assigned to all the birds, one 

 by one, the place of their resort and their habits, and his 

 good nature is shown by the fact that to the robin and 

 the hummingbird he assigned the duty of giving pleasure 

 to men, the former by its song and the latter by its beauty. 

 By and by the birds dressed one another in different ways, 

 so that they might easily be recognized apart. They tied 

 the hair of the blue jay up high with a string, put a striped 

 coat on the little woodpecker, and so on. The Kwakiutl 

 coastal Indians of British Columbia deny this, however. 

 They say the birds did not select their own costumes, but 

 that one of their ancestors painted all the birds he found 

 at a certain place. When he reached the cormorant his 

 colors were exhausted and he had only charcoal left, hence 

 the cormorant is wholly black. 



George Keith," who in 1807 was a fur-trader on the 

 Mackenzie River, gathered and recorded much valuable 

 material as to the customs and ideas of the Beaver 

 Indians of that region, who belonged to the Ojibway 

 family. In one of his stories Keith gives the Indians' ex- 

 planation of how certain birds got their colors: it was 

 during the time of a great flood. At that period all birds 

 were white, but lepervier (the sharp-shinned hawk), 

 l'emerillon (the goshawk), and l'canard de France 

 (mallard) agreed to change to a plumage in colors — how 



