|
 |  | Monday November 23, 2009 2:43 AM |
 | | Native American Myths and Legends | |
How Coyote made the Columbia River
Long ago, when Coyote was the big man on the earth, this valley was
covered by a big lake. At that time there was no Columbia River. West
of us, between the lake and the ocean, was a long ridge of mountains.
But the Columbia River did not go through it. Indians today believe
that.
Coyote was smart enough to see that salmon would come up from the
ocean to be food for his people here if he would make a hole through
the mountains. So he went down to a place near where Portland is now,
and with his powers he dug a hole through the mountains there. The
water went through the hole and on to the ocean.
The water in the big lake up here was drained, and the water flowing
out of it made the Columbia River. Coyote got the Columbia to flow
through that hole, the way it does today. Then the salmon came up
the river to this part of the country. His people after that had
plenty to eat.
When he dug that hole through the mountains, Coyote made a kind of
bridge. You have heard about it--a broad rock bridge that went
across the river. People could walk from one side of the Columbia
to the other. A long time afterward, an earthquake broke the bridge
down. The rocks that fell into the water formed the Cascades of the
Columbia. They made it hard for boats to go up and down the river
there.
(Inland Northwest - Colville)
The version of the story was told by Peter Noyes, a Colville Indian, in
1951, who claimed he had first heard it nearly eighty years previously.
In the last half-century, geologist have come to belive
that vast parts of the Inland Northwest were covered by lakes.
The last one was at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago.
from
Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest
, edited by Ella E. Clark,
University of California Press, 1953
Last Updated
December 23, 2004
|
