299 
Caribs of the West Indies ;* and Heckwelder gives the same 
testimony about the Delawares, Munsees, Tuscaroras, and 
other tribes of Iroquois lineage, and the Indians of Penn- 
sylvania and New York.t+ 
Thus much on one side. A little may be said on the 
other. 
Says Bancroft, “It is not till we reach the golden mean in 
central California that we find whole tribes subsisting on 
roots, herbs, and insects, having no boats, no clothing, no 
laws, no God, the lowest of their neighbours save only 
perhaps the Shoshones or Snake Indians on their east. In 
the vocabulary of the tribes at San Francisco Bay Father 
Junipero Serra in 1776, when he established the mission of 
Dolores, found no word for God, angel, or devil.’ + The 
Thlinkeets, too, Bancroft says, are said not to believe in 
any Supreme Being.$ Powers speaks of the same among 
the Patwins of California, but says it must be taken cum 
grano salis.|| EF. M. Galt received the same statement from 
the missionaries among the Peruvian Indians, who could find 
no ideas among them of a Supreme Being, or the soul’s im- 
mortality, except that they seemed to have a vague idea of an 
Kyil Spirit. J. Baegert, a German Jesuit missionary among 
the tribes of the California peninsula during seventeen years 
of the second half of the last century, dwells at length on the 
same statement among the Indians there ;** and Rev. J. M. 
Jemison, missionary among the Shoshones in Idaho, in a 
letter to the writer, says the same is true of those Indians. 
The Eskimo, and Tinnehs are stated also to have no belief 
in a Supreme Being, though they have in lesser divinities. ++ 
It may all be true. The writer is not prepared to deny it, 
yet it may be found that something takes the place of this 
Supreme Being in the belief of most of these Indians, for, as 
already stated, the Thlinkeets believe the raven to be the 
Creator.t{ Col. Bracket says of the Shoshones that they have 
not much idea of a God, though they believe in Tamapah or 
Sun-Father, who is the Father of the Day, the Father of us 
all, and who lives in the Sun;§§ and the California Deity 
* American Antiquities. 
+ Contributions to N. A. Ethnology, vol. iv. p. 49. 
£ Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific, vol. i. p. 400. 
§ Ibid., vol. iii. p. 145. 
|| Contributions to N. A. Ethnology, vol. iii. p. 224. 
“| Smithsonian Report, 1877, p. 311. *% Thid., 1864, p. 390, 
tt Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific, vol. iii. p. 141. 
tt P. 297 of this paper. 
$$ Smithsonian Report, 1879, p. 330. 
