id and sterile, but
he destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and
guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.[171-1] The woods he
stocked with game; and having learned from the great tortoise, who
supports the world, how to make fire, taught his children, the Indians,
this indispensable art. He it was who watched and watered their crops;
and, indeed, without his aid, says the old missionary, quite out of
patience with such puerilities, "they think they could not boil a pot."
Sometimes they spoke of him as the sun, but this only figuratively.[171-2]

From other writers of early date we learn that the essential outlines of
this myth were received by the Tuscaroras and the Mohawks, and as the
proper names of the two brothers are in the Oneida dialect, we cannot
err in considering this the national legend of the Iroquois stock. There
is strong likelihood that the Taronhiawagon, he who comes from the Sky,
of the Onondagas, who was their supreme God, who spoke to them in
dreams, and in whose honor the chief festival of their calendar was
celebrated about the winter solstice, was, in fact, Ioskeha under
another name.[172-1] As to the legend of the Good and Bad Minds given
by Cusic, to which I have referred in a previous chapter, and the later
and wholly spurious myth of Hiawatha, first made public by Mr. Clark in
his History of Onondaga (1849), and which, in the graceful poem of
Longfellow, is now familiar to the world, they are but pale and
incorrect reflections of the early native traditions.

So strong is the resemblance Ioskeha bears to Michabo, that what has
been said in explanation of the latter will be sufficient for both. Yet
I do not imagine that the one was copied or borrowed from the other. We
cannot be too cautious in adopting such a conclusion. The two nations
were remote in everything but geographical position. I call to mind
another similar myth. In it a mother is also said to have brought forth
twins, or a pair of twins, and to have paid for them with her life.
Again the one is described as the bright, the other as the dark twin;
again it is said that they struggled one with the other for the mastery.
Scholars, likewise, have interpreted the mother to mean the Dawn, the
twins either Light and Darkness, or the Four Winds. Yet this is not
Algonkin theology; nor is it at all related to that of the Iroquois. It
is the story of Sarama in the Rig Veda, and was written in Sanscrit,
und