Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 8 | Page 2

of the peak,
taking pity on him, turned his feet to stone. The storm ceased, and the
waters fell away. The man still stood there, his feet a part of the peak,
and he mourned that he could not descend to where the air was balmy
and the flowers were opening. The Spirit of all Things came and bade
him sleep, and, after his eyes were closed, tore out one of his ribs and

changed it to a woman. When lifted out of the rock the man awoke, and,
turning with delight to the woman, he led her to the sea-shore, and
there in a forest bower they made their home. There the human race
was recreated.
On the shore of the Whulge in after years lived an Indian miser--rare
personage--who dried salmon and jerked the meat that he did not use,
and sold it to his fellow-men for hiaqua--the wampum of the Pacific
tribes. The more of this treasure he got, the more he wanted--even as if
it were dollars. One day, while hunting on the slopes of Mount Tacoma,
he looked along its snow-fields, climbing to the sky, and, instead of
doing homage to the tamanous, or divinity of the mountain, he only
sighed, "If I could only get more hiaqua!"
Sounded a voice in his ear: "Dare you go to my treasure caves?"
"I dare!" cried the miser.
The rocks and snows and woods roared back the words so quick in
echoes that the noise was like that of a mountain laughing. The wind
came up again to whisper the secret in the man's ear, and with an
elk-horn for pick and spade he began the ascent of the peak. Next
morning he had reached the crater's rim, and, hurrying down the
declivity, he passed a rock shaped like a salmon, next, one in the form
of a kamas-root, and presently a third in likeness of an elk's head. "'Tis
a tamanous has spoken!" he exclaimed, as he looked at them.
At the foot of the elk's head he began to dig. Under the snow he came
to crusts of rock that gave a hollow sound, and presently he lifted a
scale of stone that covered a cavity brimful of shells more beautiful,
more precious, more abundant than his wildest hopes had pictured. He
plunged his arms among them to the shoulder--he laughed and fondled
them, winding the strings of them about his arms and waist and neck
and filling his hands. Then, heavily burdened, he started homeward.
In his eagerness to take away his treasure he made no offerings of
hiaqua strings to the stone tamanouses in the crater, and hardly had he
begun the descent of the mountain's western face before he began to be
buffeted with winds. The angry god wrapped himself in a whirling
tower of cloud and fell upon him, drawing darkness after. Hands
seemed to clutch at him out of the storm: they tore at his treasure, and,
in despair, he cast away a cord of it in sacrifice. The storm paused for a
moment, and when it returned upon him with scream and flash and roar

he parted with another. So, going down in the lulls, he reached timber
just as the last handful of his wealth was wrenched from his grasp and
flung upon the winds. Sick in heart and body, he fell upon a moss-heap,
senseless. He awoke and arose stiffly, after a time, and resumed his
journey.
In his sleep a change had come to the man. His hair was matted and
reached to his knees; his joints creaked; his food supply was gone; but
he picked kamas bulbs and broke his fast, and the world seemed fresh
and good to him. He looked back at Tacoma and admired the splendor
of its snows and the beauty of its form, and had never a care for the
riches in its crater. The wood was strange to him as he descended, but
at sunset he reached his wigwam, where an aged woman was cooking
salmon. Wife and husband recognized each other, though he had been
asleep and she a-sorrowing for years. In his joy to be at home the miser
dug up all his treasure that he had secreted and gave of his wealth and
wisdom to whoso needed them. Life, love, and nature were enough, he
found, and he never braved the tamanous again.

THE DEVIL AND THE DALLES
In days when volcanoes were playing in the Northwest and the sternly
beautiful valley of the Columbia was a hell of ash and lava, the fiend
men of the land met at intervals on the heated rocks to guzzle and riot
together. It was at one of these meetings in the third summer after
Tacoma had stopped spouting that