756 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



Though there is not a tribe in America but what have some theory of man's crea- 

 tion, there is not one amongst them all that hears the slightest resemblance to the 

 Mosaic account. How strange is this, if these people came from a country where in- 

 spiration was prior to all history ! 



The Mandans believed they were created under the ground, and that a portion of 

 the people reside there yet.* 



The Choctaws assert that "they were created crawfish, living alternately under 

 the ground and above it, as they chose ; and coming out at their little holes in the 

 earth to get the warmth of the sun one sunny day, a portion of the tribe was driven 

 away and could not return ; they built the Choctaw village, and the remainder of the 

 tribe are still living under the ground." 



The Sioux relate with great minuteness their traditions of the Creation. They say 

 that the Indians were all made from the *' red pipe stone," which is exactly of their 

 color ; that the Great Spirit, at a subsequent period, called all the tribes together at 

 the Red Pipe Stone Quarry, and told them this : " That the red stone was their flesh, 

 and that they must use it for their pipes only." 



Other tribes were created under the water ; and at least one-half of the tribes in 

 America represent that man was first created under the ground, or in the rocky cav- 

 erns of the mountains. Why this diversity of theories of the Creation, if these people 

 brought their traditions of the Deluge from the land of inspiration ? 



How far these general traditions of a flood relate to an universal deluge, or to local 

 cataclysms (of which there have evidently been one or more, over portions of the 

 American continent) or whether there has been an universal deluge, and at what 

 period, it is difficult to determine. 



One thing, however, is certain — the Indian traditions everywhere point distinctly 

 at least to one such event, and amongst the Central and Southern tribes, they as dis- 

 tinctly point to two such catastrophes, in which their race was chiefly destroyed ; 

 and the rocks of their countries bear evidence yet more conclusive of the same calam- 

 ities, which probably swept oif the populations in the plains, and, as their traditions 

 say, left scattered remnants on the summits of the Andes and the Rocky Mountains. 



Since that epoch for those epochs) their descendants have wandered off into the fer- 

 tile plains where climate and a greater abundance of game and fish have invited them, 

 peopling in time the whole continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and the 

 West India and other islands. 



These scattered people have arranged themselves into different tribes, with lan- 

 guages dialectic or idiomatic, but without exception bearing evident physiological 

 traits of the ancient pareht stock, with local and tribal differences produced by dif- 

 ferent habits of life, and varieties of climates, and differences of food on which they 

 subsist. 



The Crows, of whom I have spoken in a former chapter, and also at greater length 

 in the first volume of this work, still inhabiting a part of the Rocky Mountains in 

 North America, with the Apaches and several other tribes in New Mexico, still exhibit 

 in bold relief the original type, which is seen so well preserved in the stone monu- 

 ments of Yucatan and ancient Mexico, and the same unmistakable, though less con- 

 spicuous, is traceable through the alto-Peruvian tribes ; the Moxos, the Chiquitos, 

 the Cochabambas, and others yet to the south. 



The Crows are living Toltecs (or Aztecs), and history abounds in proof that the Tol- 

 tecs in Mexico and the Aztecs in Yucatan and Guatemala came from the mountains in 

 the north. 



The Aztecs emigrated farther to the south and east than the Toltecs, and to a more 

 fertile country, but lower in position, by which means, in the second cataclysm, their 

 magnificent cities were submerged, and their populations exterminated, but their im- 



* See an account of their astonishing mode of celebrating annually the subsiding of the Deluge, ac- 

 companied with their various modes of voluntary torture, recently published by Triibner, CO, Pater, 

 noster Kow. " 0-kee-Pa : a religious ceremony of tho Mandans. Tliirteen colored illustrations. By 

 George Catlin." 



