Descent of Man from Animals 163 
Choctaws are in like manner descended from real crawfish, which 
used to live under ground, only coming up occasionally through the 
mud to the surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, 
taught them the Choctaw language, taught them to walk on two legs, 
made them cut off their toe nails and pluck the hair from their bodies, 
after which they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their 
kindred, the crawfish, are crawfish under ground to this day! The 
Osage Indians universally believed that they were descended from 
a male snail and a female beaver. A flood swept the snail down to 
the Missouri and left him high and dry on the bank, where the sun 
ripened him into a man. He met and married a beaver maid, and 
from the pair the tribe of the Osages is descended. For a long time 
these Indians retained a pious reverence for their animal ancestors 
and refrained from hunting beavers, because in killing a beaver they 
killed a brother of the Osages. But when white men came among 
them and offered high prices for beaver skins, the Osages yielded to 
the temptation and took the lives of their furry brethren?. The Carp 
clan of the Ootawak Indians are descended from the eggs of a carp 
which had been deposited by the fish on the banks of a stream and 
warmed by the sun® The Crane clan of the Ojibways are sprung 
originally from a pair of cranes, which after long wanderings settled 
on the rapids at the outlet of Lake Superior, where they were changed 
by the Great Spirit into a man and woman‘. The members of two 
Omaha clans were originally buffaloes and lived, oddly enough, under 
water, which they splashed about, making it muddy. And at death 
all the members of these clans went back to their ancestors the 
buffaloes. So when one of them lay adying, his friends used to wrap 
him up in a buffalo skin with the hair outside and say to him, “You 
came hither from the animals and you are going back thither. Do 
not face this way again. When you go, continue walking®” The 
Haida Indians of Queen Charlotte Islands believe that long ago the 
raven, who is the chief figure in the mythology of North-West 
America, took a cockle from the beach and married it ; the cockle 
gave birth to a female child, whom the raven took to wife, and from 
their union the Indians were produced’. The Delaware Indians 
called the rattle-snake their grandfather and would on no account 
1 Geo. Catlin, North American Indians’ (London, 1844), 1. p. 128. 
4 Lewis and Clarke, Travels to the Source of the Missouri River (London, 1815), 1. 12 
(Vol. 1. pp. 44 sq. of the London reprint, 1905). 
3 Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, Nouvelle Edition, v1. (Paris, 1781), p. 171. 
4 L, H. Morgan, Ancient Society (London, 1877), p. 180. 
5 J, Owen Dorsey, ‘“‘Omaha Sociology,” Third Annual Report of the Bureau of 
Ethnology (Washington, 1884), pp. 229, 233. 
8 G. M. Dawson, Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands (Montreal, 1880), pp. 1498 sq. 
(Geological Survey of Canada); F. Poole, Queen Charlotte Islands, p. 136. 
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