Chap. I.] IROQUOIS LEGENDS. 15 



multitudes by his pestilential breath. Mortally 

 wounded at length by the magic arrow of a child, 

 he rolled down the steep, sweeping away the forest 

 with his writhings, and plunging into the lake be- 

 low, where he lashed the black waters till they 

 boiled with blood and foam, and at length, exhaust- 

 ed with his agony, sank, and perished at the bottom. 

 Under the Falls of Niagara dwelt the Spirit of the 

 Thunder, with his brood of giant sons ; and the 

 Iroquois trembled in their villages when, amid the 

 blackening shadows of the storm, they heard his 

 deep shout roll along the firmament. 



The energy of fancy, whence these barbarous 

 creations drew their birth, displayed itself, at a later 

 period, in that peculiar eloquence which the wild 

 democracy of the Iroquois tended to call forth, and 

 to which the mountain and the forest, the torrent 

 and the storm, lent their stores of noble imagery. 

 That to this imaginative vigor was joined mental 

 power of a different stamp, is witnessed by the caustic 

 irony of Garangula and Sagoyewatha, and no less 

 by the subtle policy, sagacious as it was treacherous, 

 which marked the dealings of the Iroquois with 

 surrounding tribes.^ 



1 For traditions of the Iroquois see Schoolcraft, N.otes, Chap. IX. Cu- 

 sick, History of the Five Nations, and Clark, Hist. Onondaga, I. 



Cusick was an old Tuscarora Indian, who, being disabled by an acci- 

 dent from active occupations, essayed to become the historian of his 

 people, and produced a small pamphlet, written in a language almost 

 unintelligible, and filled with a medley of traditions in which a few grains 

 of truth are inextricably mingled with a tangled mass of absurdities. 

 He relates the monstrous legends of his people with an air of implicit 

 faith, and traces the presiding sachems of the confederacy in regular 

 descent from the first Atotarho downwards. His work, which was printed 



