So pleased were they with all that they saw that they built mounds in all the more beautiful valleys they passed through, so that the Master of Life might know that they were not an ungrateful people. In this new country did they conclude to remain, and here did they establish their national government with its benign laws. Time passed on, and the Choctaw nation became so powerful that its hunting grounds extended even to the sky. Troubles now arose among the younger warriors and hunters of the nation, until it came to pass that they abandoned the cabins of their forefathers, and settled in distant regions of the earth. Thus from the very body of the Choctaw nation have sprung those other nations which are known as the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, the Creeks or Mukogees, the Shawnees and the Delawares. And in the process of time the Choctaws founded a great city, wherein their more aged men might spend their days in peace; and, because they loved those of their people who had long before departed into distant regions, they called this city _Yazoo_, the meaning of which is, _home of the people who are gone_. THE DANCING GHOSTS. That beautiful phenomenon known to the white man as the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, is called by the Chippeway Indians _Je-bi-ne-me-id-de-wand_, or the Dancing Ghosts. The legends accounting for it are numerous, and the following, which was related to the translator by a Chippeway hunter, named _Keesh-Chock_, or Precipice Leaper, is quite as fantastic as the phenomenon itself. That it is a very ancient tradition is evident from the fact that the sacrifice to which it alludes has not been practiced by the Chippeways for at least a century.