July 4, 1908.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
9 
added that I referred only to his necessities. Of 
course he needed strong rum to meet such a 
danger. At this the old man was satisfied, and 
then the rum bottle had to be circulated, after 
which the men were more cheerful. For my- 
jelf I make it a point never to use alcoholic 
beverages when exploring in the tropics, but 1 
have always a supply for the men, who are ac¬ 
customed to it from childhood, and often are 
badly in need of stimulants. 
It was now bedtime, and preparations were 
quickly made. The toldas (mosquito bars of the 
country made of cotton muslin) were hung be¬ 
tween stakes driven down into the ground, 
blankets were spread under them, and each 
crawled into his nest secure from insects or 
attacks from animals, for a jaguar or panther 
will circle around a tolda, but has never been 
known to attack—the things seems so white and 
mysterious for them. 
I lay awake for a time listening to all the 
sounds of the night in the forest and thinking 
of the leon coronado. It is probable that a 
4; 
The Origin of the 
Edited and sent in by 
HIS tribe of Indians say that the Great 
Spirit made Mt. Tahoma* the first of all. 
Boring a hole in the sky, using a large 
stone as an auger, he pushed down snow and 
ice until they had reached the desired height, 
then stepped from cloud to cloud down to the 
great icy pile, and from it to the earth where 
he planted the first trees by merely putting his 
finger into the soil here and there. The sun 
began to melt the snow, the snow produced 
water, the water ran down the side of the moun¬ 
tain, refreshed the trees and made rivers. The 
Great Spirit gathered the leaves that fell from 
the trees, blew upon them and they became 
birds. He took a stick and broke it into pieces. 
Of the small end he made fishes and of the 
middle of the stick made animals—the grizzly 
bear excepted, which he formed from the big 
end of the stick, appointing him to be master 
over all the others. Indeed this animal grew 
so large, strong and cunning that the Creator 
somewhat feared him, and so hollowed out Mt. 
Tahoma as a wigwam for himself where he 
might reside while on earth in the most perfect 
security and comfort. So the smoke was soon 
to be seen curling up from the mountain where 
the Great Spirit and his family lived and still 
live, though their hearth fire is alight no longer, 
now that the w'hite man is in the land. This 
was thousands of snows ago. 
After this came a late and severe spring time 
in which a memorable storm blew' up from the 
sea, shaking the huge lodge to its base. The 
Great Spirit commanded his daughter, then 
little more than an infant, to go up and bid the 
• wind to be still, cautioning her at the same time 
not to put her head out into the blast, but only 
to thrust out her little arm and make a sign 
♦Mount Rainier, or Mount Tacoma, as it is now called, 
in the State of Washington, has always been called by 
the Dwamish Indians Mount Tahoma, signifying Spirit 
, Mountain- __ 
panther inhabitating the higher mountains where 
it is cold will grow to greater size and develop 
unusual ferocity. The hair might possibly grow 
longer about the neck as a protection from cold, 
but the brindled stripes seem hardly possible, 
though some such appearance might have come 
from an irregular growth of hair. 
The story of the crowned lion is so persistent 
in the mountainous parts of northern South 
America that it may have some foundation in 
fact, as all accounts agree in the main particu¬ 
lars, though some tell of spots in place of 
brindles, and there is just the possibility of a 
cross at rare intervals between a jaguar and a 
panther, but this seems very improbable; and 
it may be that this story is nothing more than 
an interesting example of how a legend may 
become firmly established among an imaginative 
people, and the prototype of the leon coronado 
is perhaps the crowned lion of the British coat 
of arms so extensively advertised and circulated 
by merchants as a trade mark in Spanish 
America. 
Dwamish Indians 
Dr. A. J. Woodcock 
before she delivered her message. The eager 
child hastened up to the hole in the roof, did 
as she was told, and then turned to descend; 
but her curiosity impelled her to look at the 
forbidden world outside, and the rivers and 
trees, at the far ocean and the great waves that 
the storm had made as hoary as the forest when 
the snow is on the firs. So she stopped and put 
out her head to look. Instantly the storm took 
her by the long hair and blew her down to the 
earth, down the mountainside, over the smooth 
ice and soft snow, down to the land of the 
grizzly bears. 
Now the grizzly bears were then somewhat 
different from what they are at present. In 
appearance, it is true, they were much the same, 
but they walked then on their hind legs like 
men and talked and carried clubs, using the fore 
limbs as men use their arms. At the foot of 
the mountain, at the place where the child was 
blown to, lived a family of grizzlies. The father 
grizzly was returning from the hunt with his 
club on his shoulder and a young elk in his 
hand when he saw the little shivering waif lying 
on the snow with her hair all tangled about her. 
The old grizzly, pitying and wondering at the 
strange forlorn creature, lifted it up and car¬ 
ried it in to his wife to see what should be done. 
She, too, was pitiful, and fed it from her own 
breast, bringing it up as one of their family. So 
the daughter of the Great Spirit grew up, and 
the eldest son of the old grizzly married her, 
and their offspring was neither grizzly nor Great 
Spirit, but man. 
Very proud, indeed, was the whole grizzly 
nation of the new race, and uniting their 
strength from all parts of the country, they 
built the young mother and her family a moun¬ 
tain wigwam near that of the Great Spirit, and 
this structure of theirs is known to this day as 
Nisqually Butte. Many years passed away, and 
at last the grandmother grizzly became very 
feeble, and felt that she must soon die. She 
knew that the girl she had adopted was the 
daughter of the Great Spirit, and her conscience 
troubled her in that she had never let him know 
anything of the fate of the child. So she called 
all the grizzlies together to the new lodge and 
sent the eldest grandson up on a cloud to the 
summit of Mt. Tahoma, to tell the father that 
his daughter yet lived. When the Great Spirit 
heard this he was so glad that he immediately 
ran down the mountain on the south side to¬ 
ward where he had been told his daughter was, 
and such was the swiftness of his pace that the 
snow melted here and there along his course as 
it remains to this day. 
The grizzlies had prepared for him an honor¬ 
able reception, and as he reached his daughter’s 
home he found them standing by thousands in 
two files on either side of the door with their 
clubs under their arms. He had never pictured 
his daughter as aught but the little child he 
had loved so long ago, but when he found that 
she was a mother, and that she had been betrayed 
into the creation of a new race his anger over¬ 
came him. He scowled on the grandmother 
grizzly so terribly that she died at once. At 
this all the grizzly bears gave a great cry, but 
the exasperated father, taking his lost darling 
on his shoulders, turned to the armed host, and 
' in his anger cursed them: 
“Peace,” he said. “Be silent forever! Let 
no articulate word ever again pass your lips, 
neither stand anymore upright, but use your 
hands as feet and look downward until I come 
again.” 
The Great Spirit then passed away to his moun¬ 
tain, carrying his daughter; and her, or him, no 
eye has seen since. The grizzlies never spoke 
again nor stood up, save, indeed, when fighting 
for their life, w'hen the Great Spirit still permits 
them to stand as in the old time and to use their 
fists like men. 
Such is the account of the origin of the 
Dwamish-Nisqually Indians just as I heard it 
from the lips of Chief Sarinac one night when 
we were storm bound in the mountains in the 
winter of 1872. No Dwamish Indian tracing his 
descent from the spirit mother and the grizzly 
as here described will kill a grizzly bear, and 
if by an evil chance a grizzly kills a Dwamish 
Indian in any place, that spot becomes memor¬ 
able, and every Indian that passes the place casts 
a stone there till, in time, a great pile is thrown 
11n H. S. Peterson. 
Among the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum 
the skeleton of a dog was found stretched over 
that of a child. It was conjectured on their dis¬ 
covery that this dog, from his position, was 
attempting to save the child when the eruption 
of Vesuvius was fatal to the city. The opin¬ 
ion was confirmed by a collar which was found 
of curious workmanship. Its inscription stated 
that the dog was named Delta, and belonged to 
a man called Severinus, whose life he had saved 
on three occasions; first, by dragging him out 
of the sea when nearly drowned; then, by driv¬ 
ing off four robbers who attacked him unawares; 
and lastly, by his destroying a she wolf, whose 
cubs he had taken in a grove sacred to Diana, 
near Herculaneum.—Dogs and their Ways. 
1 
