es, led to a confusion
between the two, which has misled some investigators. This deity bears,
in the sonorous Mohawk tongue, the name of Aronhiawagon, meaning "the
Holder of the Heavens." The early French missionaries, prefixing a
particle, made the name in their orthography, Tearonhiaouagon. He was,
they tell us, "the great god of the Iroquois." Among the Onondagas of
the present day, the name is abridged to Taonhiawagi, or Tahiawagi. The
confusion between this name and that of Hiawatha (which, in another form,
is pronounced Tayonwatha) seems to have begun more than a century ago;
for Pyrlaeus, the Moravian missionary, heard among the Iroquois
(according to Heckewelder) that the person who first proposed the league
was an ancient Mohawk, named Thannawege. Mr. J. V. H. Clark, in his
interesting History of Onondaga, makes the name to have been originally
Ta-oun-ya-wat-ha, and describes the bearer as "the deity who presides
over fisheries and hunting-grounds." He came down from heaven in a white
canoe and after sundry adventures, which remind one of the labors of
Hercules, assumed the name of Hiawatha (signifying, we are told, "a very
wise man"), and dwelt for a time as an ordinary mortal among men,
occupied in works of benevolence. Finally, after founding the
confederacy and bestowing many prudent counsels upon the people, he
returned to the skies by the same conveyance in which he had descended.
This legend was communicated by Clark to Schoolcraft, when the latter was
compiling his "Notes on the Iroquois." Mr. Schoolcraft, pleased with the
poetical cast of the story and the euphonious name, made confusion worse
confounded by transferring the hero to a distant region and identifying
him with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the Ojibways. Schoolcraft's
volume, absurdly entitled "The Hiawatha Legends," has not in it a single
fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois
deity Aronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway stories concerning Manabozho and his
comrades form the staple of its contents. But it is to this collection
that we owe the charming poem of Longfellow; and thus, by an
extraordinary fortune, a grave Iroquois lawgiver of the fifteenth century
has become, in modern literature, an Ojibway demigod, son of the West
Wind, and companion of the tricksy Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and
the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveller, during the middle ages,
inquiring into the history and religi