Note III-26 — Chapter III · ITINERARY, CONCLUDED: LEECH LAKE TO ST. LOUIS, FEBRUARY 1ST-APRIL 30TH, 1806.

Pike's observation strikes me as much more "singular" than the Fox Indian's opinion. Many of us have been taught that the whole world was once drowned, excepting one favored family, and we have also been told how it was repeopled. That is one advantage which an enlightened Christian has over Lo, the poor benighted Indian. The savage simply accepts that one of the deluge-myths which his own ancestors elaborated to suit themselves. But the Christian has the Word of God himself, bound up in many different editions of various dates, for the truth of that particular deluge-myth which the Jews appropriated, with variations to suit their own tribal vanity, from the Chaldeans. They invented very little except their precious Jehovah, who was less polished and less agreeable a god than most of those who were elaborated by the more civilized tribes who surrounded and generally whipped the Jews. The Noachian narration, like the Genesis relation of both the Elohistic and the Jehovistic scribes, was borrowed from one of the myths that clustered about the legendary character known as Gisdhubar, Izdubar, etc., alleged descendant of the last antediluvian monarch Hasisadra, who became known to the Greeks through Berosus as Xisuthros. The original of this deluge-myth was recovered from the cuneiform characters by Geo. Smith of the British Museum in 1872, and may be read in English and various other modern languages, to the great edification of the faithful, no doubt: see it, e. g., in the charming and readily accessible book, The Story of Chaldea, by Zénaïde A. Ragozin, 2d ed., 8vo, N. Y., G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1888, p. 301 and p. 314. After the aqueous allegations had been reduced to writing in Hebrew characters, and generations of Jewish rabbis had tinkered the text to suit themselves with Masoretic points, and various anonymous scribes had turned it into Septuagint Greek and Vulgate Latin, some people in England who had never heard of the original, could not have read a word of it if they had handled the very bricks on which it was first stamped, and do not appear to have been informed on the subject by the Holy Ghost, gave us their English version of the words of God duly "authorized" by "the wisest fool in Europe," as the Duc de Sully called James I. The most credible items in this account are that the elephant took his trunk with him and stood behind it in the ark, but that the cock and the fox were worse off for baggage, having only a comb and a brush between them; yet I also believe just as firmly that the raven which Noah let fly was the original progenitor of the Petit Corbeau who lived in the village of Kapoja, near St. Paul, Minn.