[Footnote A: The greater part of the Indians of the Western Continent believe themselves descended from, or colonies of, the Lenni Lenapes, and hence give to that tribe the epithet, "grandfather." Several of the tribes have a tradition, that they came from beyond the Rocky Mountains.]
[Footnote B: Oniagarah, Niagara: the former is the Indian pronunciation of the name of that celebrated cataract.]
[Footnote C: See the note relating to the Mammoth in the tradition of "The Coming of Miquon."]
The Lenapes were living in their lodges, warring upon the Flatheads, feasting upon the salmon, and drinking the juice of the sacred bean[A], when it happened to one of their young warriors, that he dreamed a dream. Wangewaha, or the Hard Heart, though his years were but few, was one of the most celebrated chiefs of the nation. His days were but those of a young eagle; yet the bravest, even those who had watched the nut-tree from its sprout to its bloom, ranged themselves in battle under his faultless command, in the chase followed the ken of his eagle eye. He had struck more dead bodies, he had stolen more horses, he had taken more scalps, than any man of his nation. He could follow the trail of a glass snake from sun to sun, he could see the wake of a fish a fathom below the surface of the water. When he cast his eye upon a young maiden, she became his without a wrestle(1); when he told the revelations of the spirit of sleep, the aged men and wise councillors never called their truth in question, but acted upon them without reflection, believing them to be the voice of the Great Spirit, speaking through his favourite son. If he excelled in war and perilous pursuits, he excelled as much in those pastimes and games, wherewith the warrior in times of peace and rest beguiles the tedious hours. When Wangewaha struck the ball, its flight was above the soaring of the bird of morning, and he never rose from the game of bones(2) without giving proof that he was the favourite of heaven.
[Footnote A: Intoxicating bean.--See Long's First Expedition to the Rocky Mountains.]
It was a beautiful night in the month in which the Indians gather their first green corn, when, as the chief lay sleeping on his bed of skins, with the mother of his youngest child on his arm, he saw strange things in his slumbers. He dreamed that the bands of the Lenni Lenapes had taken the bones of their fathers from the burying places of the nation, loaded their women with pemmican and dried corn, folded up their tents, and departed towards the regions of their great father, the sun. He saw mountains, whose summits breathed fire, and others, which were the abode of the snow spirit--now noisy with the war of the Holy People above the clouds, and now with the hissing of the Great Serpent in the deep, awful, and inaccessible valleys of the bright old inhabitants.[A] They overcame, he thought, the impediments of fire and storm; they charmed away the wrath of the evil spirits, and looked at length from the eastern ridge of those mighty hills upon the interminable glades and prairies spread out in their shade. Onward they went, he thought, till at length they saw rolling before them a mighty river, upon whose banks abode a nation of warriors, whose size was much greater than that of the Lenape, and who dwelt behind hills of their own making, whence they would make incursions into the territories of the neighbouring tribes. Before him stood one of the maidens of the land. She was beautiful as a straight tree, as a meadow of flowers, as a tree covered with blossoms, as a clear sky lit up with stars. Her voice was sweeter than the notes of the Mocking-Bird[B], and her eye brighter and softer than the eye of the mountain-goat. She wore a cloak made of the tender bark of the mulberry-tree, interlaced with the white feathers of the swan, and the gay plumage of the snake-bird, and the painted vulture. Strings of shells depended from her ancles, and flowers were braided into her hair. When she spoke to the young Lenape, it was with a soft voice, as if it would assure him, that the heart which dwelt within was as gentle as that voice, and as mild as that eye. He thought he wooed that maiden to be his wife, but, when she would have become such, and he would have pressed to his bosom the lovely flower of the giant people, there only appeared a little white dove which flew away, and nestled in the branches of the great medicine trees[C].