INDIAN COSMOGONY. 235 
following pages, to record such facts as shall 
seem to be most novel, and to corroborate, 
in my humble measure, occasional others 
which have before been related. With this 
view, I shall proceed to notice, in the present 
chapter, such leading characteristics of the 
aborigines generally, as shall seem most note- 
worthy; and then, in those that follow, ask the 
reader's attention to many peculiarities which 
make the most conspicuous differences be- 
‘tween them. : 
No aboriginal nation or people has ever yet 
been discovered, to my knowledge, which has 
not professed to have a mysterious ancestry 
of a mythical character. It is interesting to 
mark the analogies and the differences be- 
tween their various systems. Although among 
some tribes who have lived much in commu- 
nication with the whites, their cosmogony has 
been confounded very much with the Mosaic 
or Scripture account, so that it is now often 
difficult to distinguish clearly the aboriginal 
from the imported, yet all the Americo-Indian 
tribes have more or less preserved their tra- 
ditions on this subject. The old full-blood 
Choctaws, for instance, relate that the first of 
their tribe issued from a cave in Nunnewaya 
or Bending Mountain, in the ‘ Old Nation,’ 
east of the Mississippi; yet this tradition has 
but little currency among the young men and 
mixed-bloods of the tribe. The minute ac- 
count of this supposed origin cannot now be 
readily procured; yet some idea may be 
formed of it from a kindred tradition among 
