50 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. axn.32 



Part 2 also consists of Seneca legends and myths, which are 

 translations made expressly for tliis work from native texts recorded 

 by Mr. Hewitt in the autumn of 189G. Two of the texts so trans- 

 lated appear here, revised and edited, with a closely literal inter- 

 linear translation in English. The matter of Part 2 constitutes 

 about two-fifths of the whole, containing only 31 items, while there 

 are 107 in Part 1; but the latter narratives are uniformly much 

 longer than the former. 



The Seneca informants of Mr. Hewitt in the field were Mr. 

 Truman Halftown, Mr. John Armstrong, and Chief Priest Henry 

 Stevens, all of the Cattaraugus Reservation, N. Y. These worthy 

 men, wiio have all j)assed away, were uniformly patient, kind, and 

 interested. They were men whose faith in the religion of their 

 ancestors ennobled them with good will, manliness, and a desire to 

 serve. 



Special attention is drawn to the freedom of these Seneca narra- 

 tives from coarseness of thought and exj^ression, althougli in .some 

 respectable quarters obscenity seems to be regarded as a dominant 

 characteristic of American Indian myths and legendary lore. This 

 view is palpably erroneous and unjust, because it is founded on faulty 

 and inadequate material ; it is. moreover, governed largely bv the 

 personal equation. 



To form an impartial and correct judgmenrt, of the moral tone of 

 the myths and legends of the American Indian, a distinction must be 

 made between myths and legends on the one hand and tales and 

 stories which are related primarily for the indecent coarseness of 

 their thought and diction on the other; for herein lies the line of 

 demarcation between narratives in which the rare casual references to 

 indelicate matters ai-e wholly a secondary consideration and not the 

 motives of the stories, and those ribald tales in which the evident 

 motive is merely to pander to depraved taste by detailing the coarse, 

 the vulgar, and the filthy in life. 



It is, indeed, a most unfortunate circumstance in the present study 

 of the spoken literature of the North American Indians that the head- 

 long haste and nervous zeal to obtain bulk rather than quality in 

 collecting and recording it are unfavorable to the discovery and 

 acquisition of the philosophic and the poetic legends and myths so 

 sacred to these thoughtful people. The inevitable result of this 

 method of research is the wholly erroneous view of the ethical char- 

 acter of the myths and legends and stories of the American Indian, 

 to which reference has already been made. The lamentable fact that 

 large portions of some collections of so-called American Indian tales 

 and narratives consist for the greater part of coarse, obscene, and 

 indelicate recitals in no wise shows that the coarse and the indelicate 

 were the primary motives in the sacred lore of the people, but it does 

 indicate the need of clean-minded collectors of these narratives, men 



