eings of our kind, who have never been
lucky enough to discover its exit. The Mandans and Minnetarees on the
Missouri River supposed this exit was near a certain hill in their
territory, and as it had been, as it were, the womb of the earth, the
same power was attributed to it that in ancient times endowed certain
shrines with such charms; and thither the barren wives of their nation
made frequent pilgrimages when they would become mothers.[229-1] The
Mandans added the somewhat puerile fable that the means of ascent had
been a grapevine, by which many ascended and descended, until one day an
immoderately fat old lady, anxious to get a look at the upper earth,
broke it with her weight, and prevented any further communication.

Such tales of an under-world are very frequent among the Indians, and
are a very natural outgrowth of the literal belief that the race is
earth-born.

Man is indeed like the grass that springs up and soon withers away; but
he is also more than this. The quintessence of dust, he is a son of the
gods as well as a son of the soil. He is the direct product of the great
creative power; therefore all the Athapascan tribes west of the Rocky
Mountains--the Kenai, the Kolushes, and the Atnai--claim descent from a
raven--from that same mighty cloud-bird, who in the beginning of things
seized the elements and brought the world from the abyss of the
primitive ocean. Those of the same stock situate more eastwardly, the
Dogribs, the Chepewyans, the Hare Indians, and also the west coast
Eskimos, and the natives of the Aleutian Isles, all believe that they
have sprung from a dog.[229-2] The latter animal, we have already seen,
both in the old and new world was the fixed symbol of the water goddess.
Therefore in these myths, which are found over so many thousand square
leagues, we cannot be in error in perceiving a reflex of their
cosmogonical traditions already discussed, in which from the winds and
the waters, represented here under their emblems of the bird and the
dog, all animate life proceeded.

Without this symbolic coloring, a tribe to the south of them, a band of
the Minnetarees, had the crude tradition that their first progenitor
emerged from the waters, bearing in his hand an ear of maize,[230-1]
very much as Viracocha and his companions rose from the sacred waves of
Lake Titicaca, or as the Moxos imagined that they were descended from
the lakes and rivers on whose banks their villages were situated.