The old
people declared that they had heard from their progenitors that all of
these stories were once sung; that they themselves remembered when many
of them were poems. This was fully proved by discovering manifest
traces of poetry in many, and finally by receiving a long Micmac tale
which had been sung by an Indian. I found that all the relaters of this
lore were positive as to the antiquity of the narratives, and
distinguished accurately between what was or was not pre-Columbian. In
fact, I came in time to the opinion that the original stock of all the
Algonquin myths, and perhaps of many more, still existed, not far away
in the West, but at our very doors; that is to say, in Maine and New
Brunswick. It is at least certain, as the reader may convince himself,
that these Wabanaki, or Northeastern Algonquin, legends give, with few
exceptions, in full and coherently, many tales which have only reached
us in a broken, imperfect form, from other sources.
This work, then, contains a collection of the myths, legends, and
folk-lore of the principal Wabanaki, or Northeastern Algonquin, Indians;
that is to say, of the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots of Maine, and of
the Micmacs of New Brunswick. All of this material was gathered
directly from Indian narrators, the greater part by myself, the rest by
a few friends; in fact, I can give the name of the aboriginal authority
for every tale except one.
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