[ 2 Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, 257. Other old writers
make a similar statement. ]

Besides ascribing life and intelligence to the material world, animate
and inanimate, the Indian believes in supernatural existences, known among
the Algonquins as _Manitous_, and among the Iroquois and Hurons as _Okies_
or _Otkons_. These words comprehend all forms of supernatural being,
from the highest to the lowest, with the exception, possibly, of certain
diminutive fairies or hobgoblins, and certain giants and anomalous
monsters, which appear under various forms, grotesque and horrible,
in the Indian fireside legends. [ Many tribes have tales of diminutive
beings, which, in the absence of a better word, may be called fairies.
In the Travels of Lewis and Clarke, there is mention of a hill on the
Missouri, supposed to be haunted by them. These Western fairies
correspond to the _Puck Wudj Ininee_ of Ojibwa tradition. As an example
of the monsters alluded to, see the Saginaw story of the Weendigoes, in
Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, II. 105. ] There are local manitous of
streams, rocks, mountains, cataracts, and forests. The conception of
these beings betrays, for the most part, a striking poverty of
imagination. In nearly every case, when they reveal themselves to mortal
sight, they bear the semblance of beasts, reptiles, or birds, in shapes
unusual or distorted. [ The figure of a large bird is perhaps the most
common,--as, for example, the good spirit of Rock Island: "He was white,
with wings like a swan, but ten times larger."--Autobiography of
Blackhawk, 70. ] There are other manitous without local habitation,
some good, some evil, countless in number and indefinite in attributes.
They fill the world, and control the destinies of men,--that is to say,
of Indians: for the primitive Indian holds that the white man lives under
a spiritual rule distinct from that which governs his own fate. These