"Aboriginal history on this continent," says Schoolcraft, "is more celebrated for preserving its fables than its facts. A world growing out of a tortoise's back---the globe reconstructed from the earth clutched in a muskrat's paw, after a deluge,---such are the fables or allegories from which we are to frame their ancient history." Such criticism seems unjust. Napoleon Bonaparte, who was certainly a much greater man than Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, was fond of saying that history is a lie agreed upon. Now if we agree to this---and many of us do---we cannot impugn consistently the Ojibways' stories of their origin, their forbears, their achievements and their gods. When an Indian good friend of mine tells me that the demi-god Manibosho found safety in a tree when the world was deluged, and afterward builded another world from the abysmal ooze which a hell-diver brought him, I am an interested listener. Further, when I am told that the Sault rapids were once at Iroquois Point, where a giant dam stretched from cape to cape, and that Manibosho killed his wife for not guarding the dam in his absence, I am convinced. For I have seen the old lady lying there on the Goulais side of Gros Cap, turned to red stone and half submerged in the waters of Lake Superior.  Believed by Ojibways At least I am as much convinced as my informant would be if I told him the story of Noah and the Ark. Neither version is capable of proof, each must be taken on faith. Great numbers of Ojibway Indians, commonly called Chippewas have believed the stories I am about to relate. For all I know, many of them still believe. These stories are placed in the opening chapters of this book, with a brief examination of the ancient life of the Bowating Indians, in order that you may better understand the reaction of Indian to white man in the recorded history which follows. Every normal white man or woman is just naturally interested in Indians. They were our first families. Their roving lives, wild and free, their deer and bear hunting, their burnings at the stake, the devilishly painted face, the tomahawk, the scalping knife, the necklace of scalps, the medicine man, the unsurpassed Indian orator in council, the pipe of peace,----ah, what a teasure trove of breathless interest are these! He who eyes for the first time an old Indian stone axe, instinctively visualizes the skulls it has split. The child on your knee by the evening fire craves Injun stories. There's a wonderfully satisfying thrill in the yelling, galloping Indian at the Wild West show.  The Home of Manito We of the North take a decent pride in the wildness of our ancient Indians. They were as fierce, as gentle, as highminded, as eloquent, as cruel, as efficient in their ways as any other tribes the continent has mothered. This north country was the home of Manito, The Great Spirit. It was the abiding place of Manibosho, Protector of all good Chippewas. And by the way, when you pronounce the name of the Chippewas' demigod, bring it up as it were from the bottom of your lungs, accent on the last syllable almost to the point of coughing---Manibo-sho, a most remarkable being worthy of your deepest consideration, whose grandmother was a toad, and whose great-grandmother was the Moon. You may doubt this statement, but I defy you to disprove it. And his true, his authentic home was on the very spot where this book is written and printed. Once upon a time the banks of St. Mary's River at the rapids were the greatest Indian camping place in the whole Northwest if not in America. Here was the Chippewa capital, the great central meeting-place from time immemorial. Here was the joining of the three greatest lakes--Gitchi Gumi, or Superior; Meetchigong, or Michigan; and Tionnontateronnon, or Huron and Georgian Bay. Hither the northern Indian gravitated by birch-bark canoe in summer, or by snow-shoe over the smooth frozen surfaces in winter. The deer-hunting was good. The rapids afforded a seldom failing supply of delicious whitefish, a food of which one never tires. The fertile clay meadows along the river yielded hardy Indian corn abundantly. Fire-wood was plentiful. The Chippewas were powerful and content, and held their wigwams and the revered resting place of their dead against all comers. It was a northern Indian paradise. The Story of Wabish Let us go back in fancy to the year 1600, half a century or so before the fist white man ascended the mighty river, and consider the life of a typical Chippewa Indian in the vicinity of what is now Sault Ste. Marie. Wabish was born at dawn of a June morning on the present site of the Sault Ste.Marie postoffice. He first saw the light of day in a pole and bark wigwam, one of many constructed here by the women of his band. Their hands had cut and dragged from the woods near by the young trees constituting the framework of the dwelling. These trees had been trimmed and stuck in the ground in a quadrangular parallelogram, the longest sides running from the entrance to the back of the hut. Two trees were planted in front, forming the door and two at rear, where the seat of honor was raised. The side rows of trees had been bent forward at their tops, and the ends twisted around each other and secured with tough bast of the cedar tree. The skeleton thus formed was clothed with apakwas or rolls of birch-bark, the operation of covering having begun at the bottom. The second row humg down over the first, thus shedding the rain, and a third and fourth row completed the sides. Other apakwas were thrown crossways over the hut, and were weighted with stones hanging from cords of sinews. There was a smoke-hole in the center of the roof, and a mat of deer-skins over the space left as a doorway. Immediately after his birth young Wabish ke pe nace---for so his father named him---was stretched out by the midwives in the waiting cradle or tikinagan. His tender limbs were laid straight on a board of poplar wood on which a thin peeled frame, also of poplar, was fastened, conforming in shape to his body, and standing up like the sides of a violin from its sounding-board. A stout mat over this completed a cavity in which he was carefully packed in a mixture composed of dry moss, rotted cedar wood and the wool from the seeds of water-reeds and cat-o'-nine tails. But first his feet were placed exactly perpendicular, parallel, and close together. Thus, even in the cradle, care was taken that they should not turn outward. A Chippewa Indian must be a good walker, and Wabish, when he grew up, covered a good inch more ground at each step than the coming white men who turned their feet out. There was the winter to think of, too, and the straight ahead footing on snow-shoes. The women paid great attention to his nose also, and tried to pull it out as long as the cartilage remained soft, for a large nose was an ornament among the Chippewas. Names Dreamed by Others Shortly after the boy's birth, his father proceeded to dream for a name for him. You must understand that some Chippewa fathers named their children after a particular phenomenon of nature occuring about the time of its birth. Others commemorated in such names the happening of anything unusual among the people or animals in the vicinity of the birthplace. But commonly a name was selected that was based on one of the fantastic dreams constantly experienced by the Indians, and which exerted so tremendous an influence on their daily lives. The father, then, dreamed for a name, and having seen a gull in his dream, he called the boy Wabish ke pe nace, The White Bird. When the lad grew old enough to have companions they shortened his name of course to Wabish, which is to say, White. Wabish is the Chippewa name for rabbit, the animal which turns white in winter. Wabish was well named, for the day came when he was as fleet as any rabbit, when he could run down and tire out the fleet-footed deer in the forest, especially after snow had fallen. But in the council-house and on formal occasions he was, when grown to man's estate, Wabish ke pe nace, and he took as his device and painted on his war axe the totem sign of his band, the Crane. Early Training for War In the years of his childhod even his toys were warlike. He played with arrowheads and flints, and his father made for him a tiny war-club, lightly weighted at the end with pebbles sewn in deerskin. He tickled the ribs of his playmates with real arrows shot from a small bow. He learned to swim in the river's shallow waters where Brady Field now stretches, for at the time the river bank was just north of the lodge where he was born. He learned to ,make rabbit-snares and dreamed of the day when he might dead-fall a bear. He wore crackly hides of the red deer, skins scraped, stretched, tanned and sewed by his mother. The spring of the year found him on Sugar Island with his parents, where they gashed hundreds of trees for the sweet sap which he never tired of licking from his fingers. He helped to make the birch-bark kettles---inflammable receptacles which did not burn when filled with sap and hung over the fire. He collected dozy maple wood and moss for his father, who each morning started the fire in no time by holding a flintstone over the tindery mass and striking sparks into it with a piece of granite. It was almost as handy as a pocket full of matches. When the hunting was poor and the whitefish failed to run in the rapids, Wabish lived for days on maple sugar and waxed fat on it. He knew where the wild onions and cucumbers grew in season and found many a bed of truffles or Indian potatoes in the black loamy soil on the edge of the swamp. He took his meat roated underdone. Sometimes his mother prepared it on spits from which the bitter bark had been carefully removed. Or for a change she would heat a rock red hot by building a fire upon it, afterwards roasting the meat on the surface where fire had been. This process she varied by firing a small pit which she used for an oven for the meat and fish. Some gritty sand came out with the food, but the sand was clean. And for many summer weeks he took his fill of strawberries and blueberries which grew in unbelieveable profusion all around. By and large he lived well, and if in the long winter the deer went far back into the country and the whitefish forsook the open rapids for a  time, he ususally found the family with a supply of jerked venison and smoked whitefish hanging from the cross-pieces of the paternal nest, and dined nearly as well as ever. River Was His Foster-Mother The mighty river was his foster-mother, as it is ours. For untold centuries it was the Chippewa highway. Winter and summer its heavenly manna of whitefish fed the multitudes. Wabish knew that the whitefish grew from the brain of a wicked adulteress who had been cast into the rapids to drown, and whose head had been dashed to pieces on the shining black rocks. Every now and then the medicine-man or jossakeed of the Saulteur Chippewas propitiated the fishing-nets of the tribe and persuaded them to make great catches of fish, by marrying the nets to young girls of the band with formal and solemn ceremonies. As it was indispensable that the brides should be virgins mere children were chosen. Now this may appear absurd to you, but did not the Spirit of the nets appear to the forefathers of the Chippewas, saying that he had lost his wife and must have another equally virtuous? Wabish realized that if the ceremony ws neglected, or girls provided who were not immaculate, he would catch no more fish, and he was grateful to the jossakeed accordingly. Fish Addressed from the Banks  The fish no less than the nets required propitiation. On an evening they were eloquently addressed from the banks at the foot of the rapids, flattered, complimented, and exhorted to come and be caught, with the assurance that the utmost respect would be shown to their bones. This oration was according to the form laid down from olden times, and while it lasted those present except the jossakeed were required to lie flat on their backs and refrain from speaking a word. In those days St. Mary's River and its environs swarmed with Manitos, little gods, very potent for good or evil, mostly evil. All Nature was spiritualized by Wabish and his friends. Every tree, rock, wind, stream and star had a spirit. The thunder was an angry spirit, the milky way was the path of spirits on their way to celestial hunting-grounds beyond the Northern Lights. the four cardinal points were spirits, the west being the oldest and the father of the others. Their mother was a beautiful girl who one day had permitted the west wind to blow upon her. Then there were endless legends of windigos, great giants and cannibals, and tiny spirits and fays who haunted the woods and the cataracts of Bowating and Tahquamenon. The Nibanaba mermaids, half fish, half woman, frolicked in the waters of Lake Superior. Many animals had a miraculous origin. The raccoon, for instance, was once a shell lying on the lake shore, until vivified by the sunbeam. The Chippewa name for raccoon, Ais e bun, means "he was a shell." Stones Contained Spirits Wabish never wantonly stepped on any of the big boulders in St. Mary's Rapids. He held them sacred, for he knew that a living spirit of flesh and blood breathed within their thin, hard shells. Once his father took Wabish to the funeral of a chief on Michilimackinac, and the boy's knees fluttered as he stood before Sugar Loaf, the abode of The One Great Spirit, the Maker of all. There he knelt in awed silence behind his father, who left votive offerings. Not his tribe alone worshipped here; hither came also the Hurons, Ottawas, Potawatomies, and Sioux in superstitious reverence. Even the blood-thirsty Iroqois, having drifted north on some wild foray, laid aside their arms for a moment and meditated here. For, eons before, the divine Gitchi Manito had taken residence in this mighty thumb of rock,when he flew from the north through Arch Rock to the Loaf. Wabish sensed the impenetrable dignity and majesty of the place and its occupant, and felt the ground was sacred. Indeed, so sacred had the ancient Chippewas held it, that Michilimackinac was inhabited by Indians only in comparative recent times. Formerly it was left to Gitchi Manito and the dead. It was the sanctuary of the benign Keeper of Souls, who welcomed in silence the supplications and sacrifices of his living red children and spread his protecting mantle over the shades of the departed.