of Hiawatha (which, in another form, is pronounced Tahionwatha) seems to
have begun more than a century ago; for Pyrteus, the Moravian
missionary, heard among the Iroquois (according to Heckewelder) that the
person who first proposed the league was an ancient Mohawk, named
Thannawege. Mr. J. V. H. Clarke, in his interesting History of Onondaga,
makes the name to have been originally Ta-oun-ya-wat-ha, and describes
the bearer as "the deity who presides over fisheries and
hunting-grounds." He came down from heaven in a white canoe, and after
sundry adventures, which remind one of the labors of Hercules, assumed
the name of Hiawatha (signifying, we are told, "a very wise man"), and
dwelt for a time as an ordinary mortal among men, occupied in works of
benevolence. Finally, after founding the confederacy and bestowing many
prudent counsels upon the people, he returned to the skies by the same
conveyance in which he had descended. This legend, or, rather, congeries
of intermingled legends, was communicated by Clark to Schoolcraft, when
the latter was compiling his "Notes on the Iroquois." Mr. Schoolcraft,
pleased with the poetical cast of the story, and the euphonious name,
made confusion worse confounded by transferring the hero to a distant
region and identifying him with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the
Ojibways. Schoolcraft's volume, which he chose to entitle "The Hiawatha
Legends," has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to
Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Taronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway
stories concerning Manabozho and his comrades form the staple of its
contents. But it is to this collection that we owe the charming poem of
Longfellow; and thus, by an extraordinary fortune, a grave Iroquois
lawgiver of the fifteenth century has become, in modern literature, an
Ojibway demigod, son of the West Wind, and companion of the tricksy
Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese
traveler, during the middle ages, inquiring into the history and
religion of the western nations, had confounded King Alfred with King