Castoroides ohioensis, the Pleistocene giant beaver,
compared to a modern beaver (Castor castor).
Many
experts believe that a people’s mythology and legends begin as tales of actual
events passed down by being told and retold through the generations. Tale
becomes myth at some point when the actual connections of memory between the
living generation and the generations in the stories are lost. Such myths and
legends can properly be classified as cultural fossils making the study of
creatures of myth applicable to the study of the influence of fossils upon the
belief of the people. Many tribes granted a prominent place in their mythology
to the giant beaver, including; the Cree, Chippewa, Hidatsa, Jicarilla Apache, Algonquin, Cheyenne,
and others, but perhaps the greatest number of beliefs and legends came from
the Northwest Coast peoples.
The giant beaver (Castoroides) had
evolved during the Pleistocene in North America. In North America Castoroides
ranged from Alaska to Florida, and was particularly abundant around the Great
Lakes. It lived in lakes and ponds bordered by swamp, and had short legs with
large webbed feet, suggesting that it was a powerful swimmer. Adults were as
large as a black bear, probably reaching 200 kg. in weight and 2.5 meters in
length.
Kiksadi pole, Wrangell, Alaska. The bottom figure is
Wishpoosh, the giant beaver. Photo Peter Faris, 2001.
Among
people of the northwest coast giant beavers were important totem and ancestral
animals. The Kiks’adi totem pole in Wrangell, Alaska, was carved about 1895 by
William Ukas. It shows the crests of the Kiks’adi clan of the Stikine Tlinget
including the crest of the giant beaver Killisnoo.
A
Yakima story entitled “How the Coyote Made the Indian Tribes” sheds some
interesting light on the origin of the Columbia River. A giant beaver had
inhabited Lake Cle Elum on the eastern side of the Cascades. His name was
Wishpoosh and he abused the people so that Coyote decided to help them. Coyote
and Wishpoosh got into a fight in Lake Cle Elum and caused an earthquake which
made a large hole in the lake, and it began to rain. Wrestling with each other
and refusing to give in, Coyote and Wishpoosh rolled down the eastern slope of
the Cascades to Kittitas valley, where the waters made a great lake. The combat
continued on, Coyote and Wishpoosh, struggling with the waters rushing behind
in their wake. They cut the channel for the Yakima River, created a second
lake, and tore through Union Gap. The waters overflow this path and form
another lake in the Walla Walla country. The fight then took an abrupt turn to
the left and the Oregon-Washington border channel of the Columbia was made to
the Pacific Ocean. This Yakima story is echoed in several other tribal
traditions where only part of the sequence is mentioned; the Colville, Sanpoil,
and Okanogan tribes all repeat parts of this story.
In 1953 Ella Clark published a myth
that she attributed to both Colville and Lake Indian Informants that credited
Coyote with the creation of the Columbia River in its present configuration. In
that myth Coyote ordered the four kinds of salmon to swim up the Columbia and
made the beaver their chief. “The people of many tribes will come here to
fish,” Coyote said to Beaver. “You will be chief over all of them. You must
share the salmon with everyone who comes.”
Beaver drawn from Haida button blanket,
1890. Peter Faris, 2003.
In Northwest Coast symbolism Beaver
is identified by two main characteristics. Although Beaver always has ears and
rounded nostrils, the two most identifying symbols are the tail and the two
large incisor teeth. – The incisor teeth are close together and not pointed as
are the canines of the bear or wolf. Many of these characteristics are
illustrated by the beaver image drawn from a Kaigani Haida button blanket
collected ca. 1890. Now in the collection of the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa,
OK, the image was made by sewing mother-of-pearl buttons on wool and flannel
fabric.
Tsagaglalal (She Who Watches), The Dalles,
Washington. Photo: Peter Faris, 2000.
South of Puget Sound there are a
few carved sites on the lower Columbia that reflect the classic Northwest
Style. A noteworthy example is the pecked and painted head of Tsagaglalal (She Who Watches), a legendary woman ruler
who was turned to stone by Coyote. It is very skillfully pecked into basaltic rock
above the Columbia River at the present site of The Dalles Dam. Remains of red
paint on the rock suggest that the lines of many of the petroglyphs were
originally filled with paint that has eroded away.
Tsagaglalal overlooks the cemetery
area of the Wishram Indian town of Nixlu’idix at The Dalles. This was a trading
center which had attracted people from throughout the Columbia Plateau, and
even farther. Traders came here in ocean-going canoes from southern Alaska, and
northern California, and horse-men came from the Mandan villages in North
Dakota. Trade flourished and tons of salmon and other goods changed hands in
the trade fairs that attracted thousands of people each year. Lewis and Clark
came to Nixlu’idix in October 1805 and recorded in their journals twenty large
wooden plank houses, each home to three families. From April through
mid-October the various species of salmon migrated upriver to their spawning
grounds providing the Wishram with large quantities of fish. Clark recorded 107
stacks of dried salmon and estimated their total weight at over 10,000 pounds.
In
a 1990 paper James Keyser wrote on possible interpretations of the Tsagaglalal
petroglyph. “The ethnographic approach to interpreting this petroglyph has
considerable historical depth. Before 1910 Edward S. Curtis reported the story
of the ancient Wishram woman chief which is associated with the petroglyph.
Coyote got to Nixlu’idix, the furthest upriver village and asked the villagers,
“Are you living well?”“You must ask our
chief,” said the people, “she is living up there in the rocks.” “She sees
everything that is going on.” So Coyote climbed up to her and said, “Soon the
world is going to change and women will no longer be chiefs. You stay here and
watch the people who are coming.” With that, Coyote threw her up onto the rim
rock to watch from there forever (Keyser 1990: page S-3).
Keyser relied on this ethnographic
data for interpreting Tsagaglalal and, noting the proximity of the petroglyph
to the above-mentioned cemetery, assigned a funerary interpretation to the
image of Tsagaglalal. They may, however, be completely unrelated with the
petroglyph predating the cemetery. In such a case the Wishram may have
considered Tsagaglalal to have a funerary significance that had nothing to do with
the idea behind its original creation.
I believe that we need to go back to
earlier mythologies and folk-memories to identify Tsagaglalal. In style the
petroglyph is recognized as representing stylistic elements of Northwest Coast
rock art. In Northwest Coast portrayals of Beaver the ears are rounded and the
mouth is shown as slightly open with a square in the middle representing the
beaver’s characteristic incisor teeth. Tsagaglalal also has these
characteristics. Additionally, we have seen that among the mythologies of
people of that area Wishpoosh the Giant Beaver was instrumental in creating the
features of the landscape, particularly the Columbia River and many of its
falls, rapids, and other features. I suggest that Tsagaglalal portrays the Giant
Beaver, chief of all the salmon and thus the benefactor of the Wishram people
who resided there and depended upon them for their living, looking out over The
Dalles which it created, and which proved to be so vital to the fishing economy
of the Wishram people who lived there.
REFERENCES:
Clark,
Ella E.
1966 Indian
Legends of the Northern Rockies, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Keyser,
James D.
1990 Tsagaglalal
– She Who Watches: Rock Art As An Interpretable Phenomenon, Journal of
Interpretation, Volume 14, Number 2.
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