Algonquin Songs and Legends

by Algernon Blackwood

I

It seems strange that a tribe of Redskins, whose favourite method of torturing their captives was to make them walk barefoot over a fire of hemlock coals until relieved by death, could also have produced so tender and delicate a song of the stars as the following:

We are the stars which sing,
We sing with our light.
We are the birds of fire.
We fly across the heaven.
Our light is a star;
We make a road tor spirits,
A road tor the Great Spirit.
Among us are three hunters,
Who chase a bear;
There never was a time
When they were not hunting.
We look down on the mountains,
This is the Song of the Mountains.

And there is a similar strange charm in many another song of the Algonquin (New England) Red Indians, whose legends and traditions, orally chanted from generation to generation, have been saved from oblivion by the literal translations of Professor Dyneley Prince and the late Charles Leland.^[1] They constitute an uncommonly interesting bit of aboriginal literature, and of a race now so rapidly perishing that “in fifty years there will be hardly a single representative left.” Both Prince and Leland, familiar with their many dialects, collected the songs and stories by taking them down from the mouths of Indians whose confidence they gained, and in these translations have kept the primitive, irregular rhythm of the original. The results cannot fail to interest all who love real poetry and feel sympathy with Nature, wild Nature especially; and many of the poems, tales of adventure or of love, have a tender delicacy of treatment that is quite exquisite, yet comes strangely from tribes so savage and so cruel in their daily life. “Few, indeed, are those,” says Leland, “who ever suspected till of late years that every hill and dale in New England had its romantic legend, its beautiful poem or its marvellous myth⁠—the latter equal in conception and form to those of the Edda⁠—or that a vast collection of these traditions still survives in perfect preservation among the few remaining Indians of New England and the Northeast Coast.” The best, from a literary point of view, comments Prince, are from the Passamaquoddy branch of the Algonquins: “I need only call the reader’s attention to the very remarkable song recording the attack of the squirrels on Lappilatwan, who dwelt in the birch tree, ‘ever sitting with his mouth open,’ to which I know no parallel in any other literature. Lappilatwan was a tree-fungus who sang the ‘signal song to all wood-birds, worms and insects to go to sleep,’ and also announced the breaking of a beautiful day. The squirrels envied him his nest, and decided to evict him, and he was only saved from this humiliation by the flies, after a terrible battle in which there were many scalps taken on both sides. The sympathy of the poet is on the side of the flies, and his description of the fight is also a description of an Indian attack: only a few squirrels could rush up the birch tree at one time, whereas the flies came upon them from all sides. Their ‘sharp spears’ did effective work; the battle waged till sunset, and then the cry of the fungus at sunset proclaimed the first victory: ‘Lappilatwan, Fair tree-fungus, Sits with mouth open.’”

Soon as they heard it,
All of the warriors,
Squirrels and insects,
Valiant mosquitoes,
Humble hornets,
Bold bumblebees,
Wild, whizzing wasps,
Gallant, merry midges,
Went to their wigwams.
Lappilatwan
Had faith in his warriors.

Next morning his sunrise-cry was the signal for renewed hostilities; the flies were unequal to a night attack, though they spent the dark hours “sharpening their spears, Dipping them in poison, Loud was their buzz.”

Winged warriors
By many thousands
Swarmed on the foe;
Many a horsefly
Beheld no more
His wife and children;
Many a hornet
Sat no more
By the fire of his wigwam;
The dying bumblebee
Chanted his death song.

and at sunset the fair tree-fungus sang his little evening-song in safety:

All was over.
High on the birch-tree
Untouched by a foeman⁠—
Sat the Watchman⁠—
The flies were victorious!

“The humour,” says Professor Prince, “is as Greek as the form is Norse.” The adjectives describing the various insects are significant, and anyone who has hunted in these woods will appreciate the terror of the flies and rejoice in their discomfiture. “Lappilatwan, the Singer in the Dusk,” is a Passamaquoddy song, as already noted. “The wonderful song of Nipon, the Summer, and the truly tender legend of the loves of the Leaf and the Firebird serve still further to illustrate the purity of Passamaquoddy thought and diction.”

Nipon, a beautiful woman, dressed in green leaves, lived near the sun, and her grandmother, the Rain, who dwelt far away, but sometimes came to visit her, warned her against Pûn, the winter. She must never go into the Northland or she would die. There is a charming description of the longing that came over Nipon to investigate for herself:

One fair morning
She sat by her wigwam
In the bright sunshine,
And looking afar
At the Latogwesnuk (Northland)
All that she saw
Seemed strangely lovely
As if enchanted.
No human being
Was in the Northland;
A wonderful land:
Broad shining lakes,
High blue mountains,
Bright rolling rivers,
All strange and sweet.
Something came over her
She knew not what;
A dream or a voice;
There was no help,
She must rise and go
Unto the Northland.

The voice of the Rain, “a-wailing, though she could not see her,” came to warn in vain. Nipon yielded to the spell and went⁠—months and months of travel, until one day she noted that “as she followed, the land went onward, and as she travelled, It travelled before her”⁠—a touch of vivid description that betrays a race accustomed to covering distances so immense that the country appears to go with one instead of being left behind. Then “something she never had known came over her: She felt the cold! An unseen power Now drove her onward; Will had departed. Her dress of green grew yellow and faded, Her hair turned white, The sun grew dim, she was very weak, The beautiful mountains were heaps of snow, The lovely rivers and lakes were ice⁠—all in the North.”

A striking description follows of the battle between the warm winds, summoned by Granny Rain, and the cold winds sent forth by Pûn; it is full of poetry and deep Nature-feeling, and the storming of the winds is vividly and boisterously given. Of course, the South comes out victor. Pun grows more and more uncomfortable: “Even as he spoke, The sweat dropped from him, His face grew thin, His feet seemed smaller, And the mild south winds Were ever warmer, And bigger grew the drops Upon Pûn’s face; His strength had left him. Down he fell, And in his falling A leg was broken!” He recalls his icy winds and sets Nipon free. Her return home is as tender a description of the coming of summer over the cruel, desolate forests of Algonquin country as one could wish to read. The girl’s dress grew greener, days and shadows longer, the hills were blue, the rivers rushed, flowers unfolded, and as Nipon’s hair turned darker, her face grew lighter, fairer, sweeter, as it had been in her early beauty, until at last “the butterflies knew her again.” The scolding she received from Granny Rain, who was waiting in her wigwam⁠—“The ancient Rain-mother, weaker and older, and worn and weary”⁠—is a model of dignified warning, advice and rebuke:

Thou hast well-nigh killed me!
By disobedience
Thou hast brought suffering
On me and all things.
But for my battle
With Pûn, the winter,
All life had perished:
Never again though,
While life is in me,
Can I venture
On such a struggle!
Be this thy warning
Else will Pûn,
The cruel winter,
Conquer all things,
And ice and snow
Forever and ever
Cover the world.

After a brief description of another Passamaquoddy lyric, “The Scarlet Tanager and the Leaf,” we may pass on to look at the even more interesting songs of the Indian Witchcraft lore. Should this little notice send a few readers to the original, they will find themselves well repaid. This love-story of the Fire Bird and the Leaf, “merry little Mipis,” has an exquisite quality that quotations can hardly reproduce. “Mipis, when spring is coming and summer is shining, climbs a tree, and there, all summer, dressed in green, he rocks in the branches, listens all day to the birds and the breezes and goes to sleep to the song of the owl.” In the autumn he dresses himself in scarlet, but with the colder nights changes this to brown or yellow, “curls himself up like a bear for winter, lets go his hold and falls to the ground. And there he sleeps, all under the snowdrift, till he hears the bluebird calling.” Then up he climbs again and enjoys another summer. His meeting with the Fire Bird and their falling in love together is very sweetly told: Mipis was “stretching himself” in the morning sunshine when he heard wonderful singing, and on looking up, saw before him “a beautiful merry little bird-girl, dressed in garments of brilliant scarlet.” He promptly enquired who she was:

I am the Little Fire.
When I fly in the forest
And meet in my way a bar of sunshine,
I look, as I enter and leave the shadow,
Like a red flame which leaps up in darkness,
And then falls asleep in the night again.

And she proceeds to explain that she has been sent to find him as a reward by The Mighty Mountain, who “well loves my music.” The Leaf, however, is suspicious at first, having been warned by his grandmother that “even the smallest insect may eat your life out. A worm so little that it can pass through the prick of a needle, even as a rabbit runs through a valley, or a fish swims free up a river, may cut your stem or blight your beauty.” Instead of arguing, the Fire Bird sings. Leaves and butterflies stop to listen; even the ants stop running. Mipis melts:

And as the music grew tender and stronger,
And as in one long soft note it ended,
Little Leaf said to her: “Be my own,”

Their subsequent adventures in the little wigwam they built in the topmost branches of the safest tree, whither she carried him in her bill, are too long to quote in full. They were safe from Indian arrows, as from Tempest, Little Whirlwind and Big Whirlwind; but they were not safe from Storm⁠—who swept him from the arms of his love and carried him into captivity. His sorrow, and the sorrow of Little Fire in her search for him, are deliciously given in the song, until at length, after many adventures, she discovers his dungeon and sets him free in the spring:

Leaving death behind, with love before her,
She saw from afar on the great tree rising
A bright Red Leaf which shone in the sunset;
Straight was her flight as that of an arrow,
Fast as an arrow when she beheld him.
And the Red Leaf leapt as if smit by an arrow,
When all in a moment her arms were round him.
Then, without an instant’s warning,
All his darkness was turned to daylight,
And the Red Wing burst into tears of rapture.

The acute observation of Nature and the childish simplicity are qualities one would naturally expect to find in Indian poetry. It is the tenderness and delicacy that are rather surprising. The same “brave” that could walk upon hemlock coals until he dropped without uttering a single cry could also chant these exquisite, compassionate lyrics, so soft with human feeling, round the fire to his squaws and children.

II

“The Passamaquoddies, like their other Algic kindred,” says Professor Prince, “were firm believers in the almost unlimited power of their wizards, belief in the existence of many of whom still remains, subordinate, of course, to the Catholic doctrine, which nearly all the Indians profess⁠—there being, I am informed, only three or four Protestant Passamaquoddy families.”

The most interesting and curious of these sorcery tales relate the strange companionship between the squaws and serpents (generally a wizard disguised), the power of the magicians to sink into the hard ground⁠—a phenomenon characteristically American, according to Prince⁠—and the use of telepathy, or communicating with one another at great distances by thought. The other tales are of the usual animistic kind⁠—giants, spirits in lake and tree and mountain, and demons in snow and wind and tempest.

A characteristic song of a squaw and a snake may be given; it is typical of many others: “In the North, dwelt by a great fair lake, an Indian and his wife, a very beautiful woman given to strange, wild dreams; passion was in her blood.” Thus it begins, and goes on to relate how she “saw one day through the ice a pair of wonderful eyes gazing at her with such power that they charmed her. Glittering all over with shining silvery plates, the owner of the eyes slid out upon the shore, announcing himself as Atosis, King of all the Serpents.”

Little she cared for his nature,
She talked with him of love,
She returned his fond embraces;
Every day she came to meet him,
And often in the night⁠—

until her husband noticed her frequent absences, and asked her where she went. “To get fresh air,” was the ingenuous, but hardly satisfactory reply. Saying that he was going away for three days’ hunting, he returned unexpectedly on the second, and found the wigwam empty. As he sat, rekindling the fire, she entered. He enquired point-blank where she got the “bright, shining silver scales,” and she replied, “My silver brooches.” On the following day he went hunting again, but this time concealed himself and watched the wigwam from the forest. He saw his wife fall into Atosis’ arms:

The husband in awe and anger
Went forth to other people,
And left his wife forever.

Her parents, however, came “to enquire,” and found that she had given birth to offspring⁠—serpents. “Do not return,” she said, “till the ice is here in winter. When you come again you will see me, but never know me.”

Years after, three Indian hunters,
Who had heard this wondrous story,
Sought by the lake for the wigwam.
It was standing still, but empty,
And all the wood about it
Was full of great black serpents
Which from the grass uprising,
Would look them in the face,
Then glide away in silence.

A characteristic, though hardly a pretty song! One that is less sinister tells of the little Indian boy who was kidnapped by a bear, though it contains a modern touch, introduced later, of course, about a rifle. Some Indians, living by a lake, went hunting moose, “the wary moose,” and left the children behind in camp, “as is the Indian way,” and a boy, who could barely walk, crawled away into the bush and got lost. “When morning dawned he thought he saw his mother drawing near, and, rushing to her side, he held her fast in firm embrace. This was a she bear, shaggy, great and strong as oxen twain. She seized the lad, and bore him off, and fed him in her den,” and the search party failed to find him, so that he “all winter long the baby lay, warmed by the sleeping bear.”

He ran away, but soon was caught and to his kind restored,
But during many years that lad was wild as any bear!

There is humour in the tale of a wizard and a Christian priest who were taken captive in an attack by Mohawks and forced to walk on hemlock coals as the most torturing death that could be devised. The priest was sent on first, whereupon the wizard, resorting to his magic arts, sprang in ahead of him, laughing, “and danced and danced, until his feet did fry, and sizzle hot like bacon in a pan,” yet without a sign of discomfort or pain. The Mohawks fled in awe. Then the priest said to the wizard:

“O my son,
Thou shouldst repent and turn thee from thine art
Unto God’s ways, and ever keep the faith.”
Then quoth the Wizard laughing: “Father mine,
Had I repented and eschewed mine art,
Then were we both of us dead men this day!”

Prince also gives one or two short tales that various Indians chanted to him on a moose-hunting expedition. I well remember hunting moose with Prince, and how his interest in the Redskins was so keen that he would turn aside, forgetting the game altogether, and hold conversations with Indians encountered on the way:

“When I was fifteen years I saw a man
Who had become a demon of the wood,
A Mikumwess with power to change his size,
And art to sink into the rocky soil
Up to his ankle-joints or knees, as though ’twere sand.
I saw myself the tracks where he had sunk
Into a soil all full of rocks and roots.”

Another Indian claimed telepathic powers for a member of his family as follows:

“My father was a wizard and had power
To call unto his partner miles away.
I’ve often heard him singing in the night,
All low and weird, and when the morning dawned,
He’d tell me what his partner’s luck had been,
I never knew his magic skill to fail.”

A third refers to the very rare practice of wizards eating one another in order to absorb into themselves double magic power:

“My brother told me, many years ago,
Some wizards had a quarrel, and they slew
One of their number, took his corpse away,
And ate it on the isle of Grand Manan,
Sitting upon a ledge above the sea.”

The main body of legends, from which these songs of love and sorcery have been taken, deal with the doings of Kuloskap, the Master, Lord of Beasts and Men, who was the culture-hero of the entire Algonquin family, a sort of Hiawatha. Kuloskap was a god-man of truly Indian type, at once the creator and the friend of man. The name means “liar,” yet was meant as a compliment. “He is called the deceiver,” explains Prince, “not because he deceives or injures man, but because he is clever enough to lead his enemies astray⁠—the highest possible virtue to the early American mind.” These legends were all written out, or spoken by friendly Indians to Leland and Prince, and they tell in quaint, vividly descriptive language the achievements of Kuloskap for the good of these red children whom he dearly loved. He was, of course, a wizard-in-chief, and it is interesting to note the numerous points the system has in common with other cosmologies⁠—the world covered with a flood, Kuloskap’s retiring into the wilderness when he wanted to increase his power by prayer and fasting, and how he finally rose to his giant wigwam in the sky, where his children may always reach him in prayer, and whence he watches over the world. Having created men out of an ash tree, he next created the animals and named them, asking each in turn what it would do if it met an Indian, and, according to their answers, making them smaller, gentler, less dangerous. The rattlesnakes were originally Redskins who mocked at his prophecy of a flood and shook their rattles at him in defiance⁠—turtle-shells with pebbles in them; he made the loons his messengers, hence their strange human cry before they dive; he tied one wing of Wuchosen, the great Eagle, because its two wings together made the winds dangerous; and he met all the sorcerers on their own ground and beat them easily at their own diabolical games; Winpe, a kind of miniature Satan, he killed at a single stroke of his giant bow. The tracings on birch bark illustrating the first article show some of these heroic deeds. His leaving the world was caused by his disgust at human wickedness:

All were in turn ungrateful,
And, while they feared the Master,
Grew every day more wicked,
Forgetting him in their hearts;
And roared in the land.

He invited everybody, men and beasts, to a great feast, whereat he himself kept “grim and solemn silence.” Then they knew:

All knew that the Chief was going,
And knew, too, why he would leave them.

Like Hiawatha, he entered his great stone canoe (it was first an island) and sailed away until he was lost to view. And a wonder came to pass then, for “all the beasts, who, before, had spoken but one common language, now talked in different tongues; each with a tongue of his own understood the others no more. So they parted from one another, and fled into the forest; and, since that day of parting, they have never met in council, and never again will meet till the day when all sins and sorrows will be in full forgiven, forgiven and forgotten, and their Lord, the great Kuloskap, shall return to restore his children to the age of sunshine and plenty, in joy and peace forever.” Alone, the great white Snowy Owl, who most had loved him, went far into the North, where it sings to this day, “1 am sorry, I am sorry,” and the loons, his messengers, go “ever wailing, wailing sadly, because they cannot find him.”

Of all his heroic doings, however, the tenderest, and the most true to life, is the description of the only defeat he ever experienced⁠—by the Baby. Its humour is delicious. The Baby met his direst spells and his most bewitching songs with “Goo! Goo!” “Back smiled the Baby, but it did not budge.”

Now to this very day, whene’er you see
A baby well contented, crying “Goo!”
Or crowing in this style, know that it is
Because he then remembers in great joy
How he in strife, all in the olden time,
Did overcome the Master, conqueror
Of all the world, For that, of creatures all,
Or beings which on earth have ever been
Since the beginning, Baby is alone
The never yielding, and invincible.

1. “ Kuloskap the Master, and Other Algonquin Poems.” Translated metrically by Charles Godfrey Leland, M.A. Harvard, and John Dyneley Prince, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins Professor in Columbia University. (Funk and Wagnalls, New York and London.)