# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/Explorers and Aborigines

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EXPLORERS AND ABORIGINES
CANADA, from its earliest settlement, has been to most white Americans a dark, cool land of mystery. Only since its railroads joined East and West together, since the frontier settlements of the last generation developed into cities, since the farming districts of the prairie began to draw their hardy populace from older lands, has it become known to our southern millions that it is a country differing in little from their own, the same in speech and spirit, akin in laws and faith and manners. The history of the republic and that of the colony were the same down to the time of the Revolution, yet Canada's northern position, its settlement by the French, the individuality of its native tribes, its exploration by missionaries, its imagined remoteness, gave rise to tales that, while not verified, had reason for being. The history of the province is full of romance. The legends that have grown from it compel the attention no more than the tales of conquest, diplomacy, daring, and difficulty, and those new reports of wealth on the ​Yukon. Many of the unwritten tales run counter to record, others so merge in it that it is impossible to separate them, but, as they have character, romance, humor, or quaintness, they deserve to be saved from the assaults of commercialism and commonplace.
Long before the time of Cabot, Cartier, Roberval, Champlain, and Hudson, Canada was known, in Norse tradition, and it is claimed that Basque and Breton fishermen caught cod on the Grand Banks a century before Columbus's day. Canada was the first part of America to be discovered, and Bjarne Herjulfsson, son of an Icelander who had moved to Greenland, reached Cape Breton in the year 986, while trying to join his father in his new home. Fourteen years later Leif Ericsson, son of the Icelandic jarl, Eric the Red, tried to find this new land. It is not known exactly where he went ashore, but Labrador was first sighted: Helluland, he called it; "a country of no advantages." Next he passed Markland, with its flat beaches and its woods: Nova Scotia? And Vinland, which is any place you please, was last explored. Somewhere, possibly on the Penobscot, was the city of crystal and silver, Norumbega, Norombega, Norumbeque, and maybe Aranbega, Arambek, and Lorembek. Newfoundland, oldest of the British colonies, was one of the first regions that seemed to promise wealth, for it did not take the explorers long to find that its waters swarmed with fish. Indeed, the ​Portuguese name of Bacalhaos, long borne by Newfoundland, means codfish. Nor was Labrador without its promise in the eyes of those same Portuguese, for the name, which is in their tongue, means laborer. (It is not Le Bras d'Or, the arm of gold, for Cape Breton has its Bras d'Or.) "King Emanuel, having heard of the high trees growing in the northern countries, and having seen the aborigines, who appeared so well qualified for labor, thought he had found a new slave-coast like that which he owned in Africa, and dreamed of the tall masts he would cut and the men-of-war he would build from the forests." Mistaken man! The power of the Latin races in North America was brief, and it left few marks in comparison with that of the Anglo Saxons who so soon possessed the land and who almost alone have made it what it is. Though racked by frequent wars in those dark times, the country advanced a little after every struggle, and the builders of air-castles, the founders of visionary empires, were jostled aside if they loitered in the way of progress.
The Indians themselves throw little light on their own history, and if facts were originally embodied in their fantastic myths, the forms of these parables have in almost every case concealed the meanings. That in the days of unwritten history there were great political and military movements there is no doubt,—movements that to the red dwellers in this land were as momentous as the wars and changes ​in Europe were to the Greeks and Romans. We have reason to believe that men existed here long before the last of the North American glaciers, and that they were driven toward the warm belt by its advance; that there are relations between the Alaskans and the Aztecs; that the Canadian Indians drove the mound-builders southward six hundred years ago. The "great horned snake" of Ontario, against which they battled, may have been the snake-shaped forts of these mound-makers, like those remaining in the Ohio Valley. Their man-god, Michabo, or Hiawatha, "drives the serpents to the south." On Moose Mountain, Assiniboia, are cairns with lines of stones radiating from them, the early work of mound-builders, or imitations of it by their conquerors, who relate that the stones were placed there by the spirit of the winds.
Various theories as to the origin of the Indians account for them (1) as autochthonous, or self-created: a legitimate theory, since the geologic age of this country qualifies it to have been not merely the original land of the Indians, but the cradle of the human race; (2) as members of the lost tribes of Israel; (3) as survivors of the sunken continent of Atlantis; (4) as Phoenicians; (5) as Carthaginians; (6) as Greeks; (7) as Chinese, who reached these shores in 458 A.D.; and (8) as Mongols, who arrived in the thirteenth century. The latter theory, which would have assumed the peopling of a vast continent in a couple of hundred years, is of course ​absurd, but an identity of certain Canadian and certain Asiatic tribes is at least suggested by likeness in their beliefs and customs, such as their tribal work and government, traditions, religious faiths, superstitions, way of regarding women, treatment of guests, sacrifices, burials, funerals, the wearing of feathers, use of bark utensils, form of weapons, dog feasts, games, emblems, pipe-smoking, serpent-worship, serpent-charming, sacred animals, dances, figures of oratory, and monosyllabic speech. In their free, sane life the physical adequacy of the Indians should have been maintained, and there is no reason to suppose that as a family they have deteriorated, in spite of the allegation that in the Ontario government park, at Rondeau, Lake Erie, the skeletons of well-proportioned men seven and one-half feet high have been unearthed. The later history of the red race is too familiar to recount, and it is most sad. When some royal commissioners in eastern Canada had the audacity to ask a native chief what claim his people had to the country, he replied only, "There lie our grandfathers; there lie our fathers; there lie our children." To the first settlers the idea that the savage could be a creature of sentiment was preposterous, and that he should wish to hold his ancestral woods and fields no less so. Bitter has been the strife that has driven him from his old estate. He is an outcast in his own land, a victim of wrongs uncounted and cruelties as dire as those with which he has retaliated on the aggressors. ​But he is not what so many have painted him. In many of his traditions it will be seen that he has a moral sense as keen as any one's, and courage to live to it; that he is a man.