"The O-kee-pa, an annual ceremony to the strict observance of which those ignorant and superstitious people attributed not only their enjoyment in life but their very existence; for traditions, their only history, instructed them in the belief that the singular forms of this ceremony produced the buffaloes for their supply of food, and that the omission of this annual ceremony, _with its sacrifices to the waters_, would bring upon them a repetition of _the calamity_ which their traditions say once befell them, destroying _the whole human race_ excepting one man, who landed from his canoe on a high mountain in the west.[205] This tradition, however, was not peculiar to the Mandan tribe, for among one hundred and twenty different tribes that I have visited in North, South, and Central America, not a tribe exists that has not related to me distinct or vague traditions of such a calamity in which one or three or _eight_ persons were saved above the waters on the top of a high mountain. Some of them, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, and in the plains of Venezuela and the Pampa del Sacramento in South America, _make annual pilgrimages_ to the _fancied summits_ where the antediluvian species were saved in canoes or otherwise, and under the mysterious regulations of their medicine (mystery) men tender their prayers and sacrifices to the Great Spirit to ensure their exemption from a similar catastrophe."--P. 2. [204] "O-kee-pa, a Religious Ceremony, and other Customs of the Mandans," Trübner & Co. London, 1867. Mr Catlin's statements are attested by the certificates of three educated and intelligent men who witnessed the ceremonies with him, and is further corroborated by a letter addressed to Mr Catlin by Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, the celebrated traveller among the North American Indians, who had previously referred to them (he spent a winter among the Mandans).