am's Peak, Parnassus, Olympus! How full
of suggestion are these names! And poetic figures in sacred writings are
full of allusion to the beauty, nobility, and endurance of the hills.

It is little known that many of our own mountains are associated with
aboriginal legends of the Great Spirit. According to the Indians of
California, Mount Shasta was the first part of the earth to be made. The
Great Spirit broke a hole through the floor of heaven with a rock, and on
the spot where this rock had stopped he flung down more rocks, with earth
and snow and ice, until the mass had gained such a height that he could
step from the sky to its summit. Running his hands over its sides he
caused forests to spring up. The leaves that he plucked he breathed upon,
tossed into the air, and, lo! they were birds. Out of his own staff he
made beasts and fishes, to live on the hills and in the streams, that
began to appear as the work of worldbuilding went on. The earth became so
joyous and so fair that he resolved at last to live on it, and he
hollowed Shasta into a wigwam, where he dwelt for centuries, the smoke of
his lodge-fire (Shasta is a volcano) being often seen pouring from the
cone before the white man came.

According to the Oregon Indians the first man was created at the base of
the Cascade Range, near Wood River, by Kmukamtchiksh, "the old man of the
ancients," who had already made the world. The Klamaths believe
Kmukamtchiksh a treacherous spirit, "a typical beast god," yet that he
punishes the wicked by turning them into rocks on the mountain-sides or
by putting them into volcanic fires.

Sinsinawa Mound, Wisconsin, was the home of strange beings who occupied
caverns that few dared to enter. Enchanted rivers flowed through these
caves to heaven. The Catskills and Adirondacks were abodes of powerful
beings, and the Highlands of the Hudson were a wall within which Manitou
confined a host of rebellious spirits. When the river burst through this
bulwark and poured into the sea, fifty miles below, these spirits took
flight, and many succeeded in escaping. But others still haunt the
ravines and bristling woods, and when Manitou careers through the Hudson
canon on his car of cloud, crying with thunder voice, and hurling his
lightnings to right and left as he passes, the demons scream and howl in
rage and fear lest they be recaptured and shut up forever beneath the
earth.

The White Mountains were held in awe by Indians, to whom th