"In former times the father of the Indian tribes dwelt towards the rising sun. Having been warned in a dream that a deluge was coming upon the earth, he built a raft, on which he saved himself with his family and all the animals. He floated thus for several months. The animals, who at that time spoke, loudly complained and murmured against him. At last a new earth appeared, on which he landed with all the animals, who from that time lost the power of speech as a punishment for their murmurs against their deliverer." According to Father Charlevoix, the tribes of Canada and the valley of the Mississippi relate in their rude legends that all mankind was destroyed by a flood, and that the good spirit, to repeople the earth, had changed animals into men. It is to J. S. Kohl we owe our acquaintance with the version of the Chippeways--full of grotesque and perplexing touches--in which the man saved from the deluge is called Menaboshu.[65] To know if the earth be drying he sends a bird, the diver, out of his bark; then becomes the restorer of the human race and the founder of existing society. Catlin relates a story, current among the Mandans, of the earth being a great tortoise borne on the waters, and that when one day, in digging the soil, a tribe of white men pierced the shell of the tortoise, it sank, and the water covering it drowned all men, with the exception of one, who saved himself in a boat; and when the earth re-emerged, sent out a dove, who returned with a branch of willow in its beak. Here we have Noah's dove, as in the story of Tezpi and Menaboshu we have other birds substituted for it. But the native originality of this detail, as of the whole diluvian tradition among the Mandans, may well be doubted when we remember that the physical peculiarities of this curious tribe on the banks of the Missouri led Catlin to consider it of mixed blood, and partly white origin. In the songs of the inhabitants of New California allusion was made to a very remote period when the sea left its bed and covered the earth. The whole race of men and animals perished in this deluge, sent by the supreme god Chinigchinig, with the exception of a few who had taken refuge on a high mountain which the water failed to reach. The Commissioners of the United States who explored New Mexico before its annexation, tell of the existence of a similar tradition among the different native tribes of that vast territory. Other travellers give us kindred narratives, more or less strikingly resembling the Bible record. But for the most part they are too vaguely reported to be entirely trusted. VI.