George Keith,[99] who in 1807 was a fur-trader on the Mackenzie River, gathered and recorded much valuable material as to the customs and ideas of the Beaver Indians of that region, who belonged to the Ojibway family. In one of his stories Keith gives the Indians’ explanation of how certain birds got their colors: it was during the time of a great flood. At that period all birds were white, but l’épervier (the sharp-shinned hawk), l’émerillon (the goshawk), and l’canard de France (mallard) agreed to change to a plumage in colors—how it was to be done the Indians were unable to say. The story proceeds:
Immediately after this event the corbeau [raven] made his appearance. “Come,” says l’épervier to the corbeau, “would you not wish to have a coat like mine?” “Hold your tongue!” rejoined the corbeau. “With your crooked bill is not white handsomer than any other color?” The others argued with the corbeau to consent, but he remained inflexible, which so exasperated l’épervier and the others that they determined to avenge this affront, and each taking a burnt coal in his bill they blacked him all over. The corbeau, enraged at this treatment, and determined not to be singular, espied a flock of étourneaux [blackbirds] and, without shaking off the black dust of his feathers, threw himself amongst them and bespattered them all over with black, which is the reason for their still retaining this color.
Further south, on Puget Sound, once lived the tribe of Twanas, who held that in former times men painted themselves in various hues, whereupon Dokblatt, their culture-hero, who notoriously was fond of changing things, turned these men into birds, which explains the present diversity in avian plumage.
The Arawaks of Venezuela, however, account for this matter by saying that the birds obtained their gay feathers by selecting parts of a huge, gaudily colored water-snake that the cormorant killed for them by diving into the water; yet the cormorant, with great modesty, kept for himself only the snake’s head, which was blackish.
Most explanatory stories concern single kinds of birds, and inform us how they got the peculiar features by which we identify them with their names; and here we get back to the nearctic raven. A history of the exploits of this personage—bird, bird-man or bird-god—who is the hero of more tales than any other of the giants that flourished in the formative period of the northern Indian’s world, would fill a big book. “The creator of all things and the benefactor of man was the great raven called by the Thlingit Yel, Yeshil or Yeatl, and by the Haida Ne-kilstlas. He was not exactly an ordinary bird but had ... many human attributes, and the power of transforming himself into anything in the world. His coat of feathers could be put on or taken off at will like a garment, and he could assume any character whatever. He existed before his birth, never grows old, and will never die.” So Mr. (now Admiral) Niblack, U. S. N., characterized this supreme magician;[100] and Dr. E. W. Nelson[101] adds that this creation-legend is believed by the Eskimos from the Kuskoquim River in southern Alaska northward to Bering Strait, and thence eastward all along the Arctic Coast. The purely mythological relation of this widely revered northwestern raven is thus summarized by Brinton[27]: