414 GENERAL FACTS. 
forward. The coyote did everything, made everything. That is what his 
father told him, and his father’s father told him. If this Great Man had 
any existence in early days, why does he not appear sometimes in the real 
aboriginal legends? It is no argument against this theory that the names 
for the Supreme Being above given are purely Indian words. There are 
pure Indian words in many languages for such terms as ‘‘wheat”, “rye”, 
‘Gron”, “oun”, “ox”, “horse”, and a hundred others which they never 
heard of until they saw Europeans. They are very quick to invent names 
for new objects. 
Therefore I affirm without hesitation that there is no Indian equivaleit 
for ‘‘God”. There are numerous spirits, chiefly bad, some in human form, 
some dwelling in beasts and birds, having names which they generally refuse 
to reveal to mortals, and haunting chiefly the hills and forests, sometimes 
remaining in the Happy Western Land. Some of these spirits are those 
of wicked Indians returned to earth; others appear to be self-existent. 
There are great and potent spirits, bearing rule over many of their kind; 
and there are inferiors. All these spirits are to be propitiated, and their 
wrath averted. There is not one in a thousand from whom the Indians 
expect any active assistance; if they can only secure their non-interference 
all will go well. To the California Indians great Nature is kindly in her 
moods and workings, but these malign spirits constantly thwart her benefi- 
cent designs, and bring trouble upon her children. Nature was the Indian’s 
God, the only God he knew; and the coyote was his minister. 
In an article in the Atlantic Monthly, Prof. John Fiske says: “Dr. 
Brinton has shown that none of the American tribes had any conception of 
adevil * * * * * Barbaric races, while believing in the existence 
of hurtful and malicious fiends, have not a sufficiently vivid sense of moral 
abnormity to form the conception of diabolism.” If, by the devil, we are 
to understand a being the opposite and equal of God, this is true. Of 
course, the thin and meager imagination of the American savages was not 
equal to the creation of Milton’s magnificent, imperial Satan, or Goethe’s 
Mephistopheles, with his subtle intellect, his vast powers, his malignant 
mirth; but in so far as the Indian fiends or devils have the ability 
they are wholly as wicked as these. They are totally bad, they think only 
