The various tribes and families of American Indians held different views as to the origin of the world. Some views differed but slightly, while in other instances absolutely dissimilar stories were told. One of the Algonkin tribes told how the queen of heaven, Atahensic, had a grievous quarrel with her lord, Atahocan. Furious, the king of the heavens seized his wife and threw her over the walls of the sky. Down, down, she fell toward the vast abyss of waters which filled all space. But as she was about to sink into the water, suddenly a tortoise raised its back above the surface of the waters, and thus afforded her a resting place. The tortoise grew to an immense size, and finally became the dwelling place of all human beings. The Indians believed that the attempts of the tortoise, wearied of one position, to settle itself more comfortably, caused the earthquakes. A tradition of the Ottawa Indians is that the earth was found in the claws and jaws of a muskrat. It grew and grew upon the surface of the water, and the Great Spirit, who sat above watching its growth, sent out a wolf and told him to run around the earth and then return to him, that he might see how large the new island had become. Within a short time the wolf was back, so the Great Spirit knew that the earth had not yet become very large. Later he sent out the same messenger again, and this time the wolf was gone for two years. A third time he sent the wolf forth, and as he returned no more, the Great Spirit knew that the earth had become a huge place, fit to live upon. In the legends of the Athapasca, as in those we have just read, we hear of the great world of water. A mighty bird, "whose eyes were fire, whose glances were lightning and the clapping of whose wings was thunder," suddenly flew down and moved along the surface of the water. Instantly the earth rose and remained above the surface of the water, and this same all-powerful bird then called into being the different animals. The Quiché have a similar legend, but it is very quaintly phrased: "This is the first word and the first speech. There were neither men nor brutes; neither birds, fish, nor crabs, stick nor stone, valley nor mountain, stubble nor forest, nothing but the sky. The face of the land was hidden. There was naught but the silent sea and the sky. There was nothing joined, nor any sound, nor thing that stirred; neither any to do evil, nor to rumble in the heavens, nor a walker on foot; only the silent waters, only the pacified ocean, only it in its calm. Nothing was but stillness, and rest, and darkness, and the night." A mighty wind passed over the surface of this water, and at the sound of it the solid land arose. The Indian legends as to the creation of man are as varied as those of the creation of the world. Some relate that human beings simply sprang from trees or from stones, but most of them agree in regarding the Great Spirit, uncreated and eternal, as the creator of man.