Nothing in nature, except perhaps the rising and setting of the sun, has impressed mankind more than the fearsome phenomena of a thunder-storm. Such a storm in the Rocky Mountains, or among the Californian Sierras, is truly terrifying in its magnificence, and it is none the less so in the Alps or Himalayas or on the volcanic summits of Central Africa. The lightnings dart about the darkly clouded peaks, and the thunder-crashes leap from cliff to cliff in echoes that stun one, for they seem like vast iron missiles hurled by Titanic strength, and rebounding from crags that are falling in prodigious ruin—perhaps on your head.

On the plains, too, such a storm may be fearfully grand, for amid rolling thunders and a tremendous downpour of rain come an incessant flash and sparkle of lightnings that illuminate the prairie with a violet flame almost blinding in its glare. A person who did not comprehend the physical meaning of such a display might well be excused for trembling in awe and terror—moreover, the danger is real.

I believe that almost from the first there were wise men, the philosophers of their time, who understood that the clouds were fleeting masses of fog, that rain was the water pressed out of them, and that the lightning and its associated rumble were somehow as natural as the blowing of the wind. The mass of wondering and terrified people, however, could not think of the rush and noise and glare of stormy weather otherwise than as something produced by living beings of huge, mysterious and usually destructive power; and they were as real to them, although invisible, as are the electric currents and tremendous air-vibrations to us. Among the aboriginal Chinese electricity was represented as residing on the mountains in the form of birds, and their Thunder-god is pictured with a bird’s beak and claws, and armed with a drum and hammer.

“The drama of mythology,” De Gubernatis tells us, “has its origin in the sky; but the sky may be either clear or gloomy; it may be illumined by the sun or by the moon; it may be obscured by the darkness of night, or the condensation of its vapors into clouds.... The god who causes rain to fall, who from the highest heaven fertilizes the earth, takes the form now of a ram, now of a bull; the lightning that flies like a winged arrow, is represented now as a bird, now as winged horse; and thus, one after another, all the shifting phenomena of the heavens take the form of animals, becoming at length now the hero himself, now the animal that waits upon the hero, and without which he would possess no supernatural power whatever.”

To the minds of the redmen in the eastern part of the United States the violent storms frequent in summer were somehow produced by vague supernatural beings spoken of as Thunder-gods; but on the open prairies and plains of the West, where even more terrific electric disturbances occur, and also along the Northwest Coast and in Alaska, they were attributed to birds of enormous size, who darkened the rain-clouds with their shadows and produced thunder by flapping their wings and lightning by opening their eyes, shooting flaming arrows, and so forth. Some tribes believed in one such bird only, others in a family or flock of them variously colored, while still others declared that the agent was a giant who clothed himself in a huge bird-skin as a flying-dress.

If one asked what any one of these creatures was like, the answer usually was that it resembled a colossal eagle. The Comanches and Arapahoes described it to Dr. Mooney as a big bird with a brood of small ones, and said that it carried in its claws a quantity of arrows with which it strikes the victims of lightning. This reminds us of the bird of Jove in classic fable, clutching the javelins of his master, the Thunderer; and a comic touch is that these southern Indians called the eagle stamped on our coins by their thunder-bird’s name, innocently supposing that our national emblem was their “baa,” the lightning-maker!

The Mandans, a Dakotan tribe, say that the thunder-bird has two toes on each foot—one before and one behind; and the Algonquian Blackfeet represent it on their medicine-lodges by simply drawing four black bird-claws on a yellow shank. When it flies softly, as is usually its way, according to the Mandans, it is not heard by mankind, but when it flaps its wings violently a roaring noise is produced. It breaks through the clouds to force a way for the rain, and the glance of its fiery eyes appears in the lightnings. “We don’t see the thunder-birds,” a Winnebago Indian explained. “We see their flashes only.”

This terrifying creature dwelt on a remote mountain, or on some rocky elevation difficult of access, and built a nest as big as a village, surrounded by the bones and horns of the great animals on which it preyed. Every tribal district seems to have had at least one pair. The Indians about Lake Superior believed that theirs were at home on the beetling heights of that bold promontory on the northern shore of the lake long celebrated as Thunder Cape. This is, for natural reasons, a theatre of electric action, which the Chippeways accounted for by the fiction of a magic bird—quite as natural in its way as is the meteorology. At any rate the redmen feared to climb the mountain and prove their theory, for they said men had been struck by lightning there in impious attempts at investigating the bird-god—the old story of religious interference with scientific curiosity. These same people held that their thunder-bird sat on her eggs during fair weather, and hatched out her brood in the storm—which hatching was the storm.

“A place,” says the ethnologist Mooney,^[77] “known to the Sioux as Waqkina-oye, ‘the Thunderer’s nest’—... is in eastern South Dakota in the neighborhood of Big Stone Lake. At another place, near the summit of the Coteau des Prairies, in eastern South Dakota, a number of large round boulders are pointed out as the eggs of the thunder-bird. According to the Comanches there is a place on upper Red River where the thunder-bird once alighted on the ground.... The same people tell how a hunter once shot and wounded a large bird which fell to the ground. Being afraid to attack it alone on account of its size, he returned to camp for help, but on again approaching the spot the hunters heard the thunder rolling and saw flashes of lightning shooting out from the ravine where the bird lay wounded. On coming nearer the lightning blinded them so that they could not see the bird, and one flash struck and killed a hunter. His frightened companions then fled back to camp, for they knew it was a thunder-bird.”

In contrast to this the Eskimos of the lower Yukon Valley tell of a former man of their race who dared, after others had failed, to raid the lair of and kill a gigantic fowl that for a long time had preyed as a “man-eater” on the village of their ancestors; and they have held this man in high honor as a hero to this day.

This conception of a thunder-and-lightning-producing bird has a prominent place among the notions of the native inhabitants of the northwestern American coast-country, where the attributed characteristics and deeds vary with local surroundings and tribal peculiarities. In one place a storm was supposed to result from its activity in catching whales; and a Chehalis legend has it that Thunderbird sprang from a whale killed by South Wind. As soon as it was born South Wind followed it, and Ootz-Hooi, the giantess, found its nest and threw the eggs down a cliff. From these eggs sprang the Chehalis people. The Tlingit, of the Southern Alaskan coast-region, account for the great amount of rain that falls in a thunder-shower by explaining that the thunder-bird carries a lake on its back. A conventional representation of the thunder-bird as it appears to the Haidas of this Northwest Coast decorates the title-page of this book.

The Salish Indians of the Thomson River region, in southern British Columbia, believe that the thunder-bird uses its wings as bows to shoot arrows, i.e., lightnings. “The rebound of his wings in the air, after shooting, makes the thunder. For this reason the thunder is often heard in different parts of the sky at once, being the noise from each wing. The arrowheads fired by the thunder are found in many parts of the country. They are of black stone and of very large size.” The last statement may refer to meteoric stones, or it may be purely fanciful. A common belief among the farmer-folk of Europe is that the smooth, chisel-shaped tools or weapons of prehistoric (Neolithic) men, frequently turned up by the plow, and known technically as “celts,” are thunderbolts; but this is only incidental to the present theme.

The raven is a hero-bird among the Cherokees, who say that he became black by attempting to bring fire from a hollow tree that had been set on fire purposely by “the Thunderer” by means of lightning. The bird did not succeed, and blackened its plumage forever.

In Japan the ptarmigan, a dweller on mountain-tops, is called rai-cho, “thunder-bird,” and is “sacred to the God of Thunder,” as Weston expresses it, adding that “pictures of them are often hung up in farmers’ cottages as a charm against lightning.”

Thunderstorms are usually accompanied by much wind, and the common conception of birds as the agent of wind, or the wind itself, has been exhibited briefly in another chapter; it prevailed not only among our American Indians but in various other parts of the world, including South Africa—or did, when men were less skeptical of such ideas than now. In ancient Sanskrit mythology the delicate white cirrus cloud drifting overhead was a fleeting swan, and so also was it in the creed of the early Scandinavians and to our wild Navahoes—a good illustration not only of independent and parallel images for an idea, but of the likeness of human minds under great diversity of race and conditions. Black clouds were thought of by the Norse folks as “ravens coursing over the earth and returning to whisper the news in the ear of listening Odin,” as Baring-Gould expresses it. The immemorial resemblance traced between bird and cloud is not far-fetched: and recurs to the modern poet as it did in olden times to the Psalmist when he spoke of the wings of the wind. “The rushing vapor is the roc of the Arabian Nights, which broods over its great luminous egg, the sun, and which haunts the sparkling Valley of Diamonds, the starry sky.... If the cloud was supposed to be a great bird, the lightnings were regarded as writhing worms or serpents in its beak.... The lightning-bolt, shattering all it struck, was regarded as the stone dropped by the cloud-bird.”^[54]

In the Kalevala Puhuri, the North Wind, father of Pakkanen, the Frost, is sometimes personified as a gigantic eagle.

These facts and considerations prepare the way for legends that began to be told in the very beginning of things, because then, and until yesterday, all ordinary folks thought them true as well as interesting; and they are repeated even now as curiosities of primitive faith—stories of birds and plants called “openers.”

The oldest, perhaps, is the Rabbinical legend of Solomon, who desired to obtain a stone-breaking “worm” (so the idea was even then ancient!) in possession of Asmodeus, the Demon of Destruction. Asmodeus refused to fetch it, and told Solomon that if he wanted this magic creature (whose name was schamir) he must find the nest of “the,” not “a,” moorhen and cover it with a plate of glass so that the mother-bird could not get access to her young. This was done. When the moorhen returned and saw the situation she flew away, brought the schamir from its hiding-place, and was about to lay it on the glass, which it would break; but Benaiah, Solomon’s agent, who lay in wait, shouted, and so frightened the bird that she dropped the schamir, whereupon Benaiah picked it up, as he had planned to do. It was by aid of this “worm,” which shaped the stone-work for him, that Solomon was able to build his Temple without sound of hammer or saw. Other versions assert that a raven or an eagle was the bird, and that the magic glass-breaker was a stone brought from the uttermost East.

The story travelled to Greece, and there became attached to the hoopoe, a small crested bird that figures largely in south-European and African wonder-tales. A hoopoe, runs the Greek story, had a nest in an old wall in which was a crevice. The proprietor, noticing the rent in his wall, plastered it over; thus when the hoopoe returned to feed her young she found that the nest had been covered so that she was unable to enter it.

Forthwith she flew away in quest of a plant called poa (the springwort?), and having found a spray returned and applied it to the plaster, which at once fell off from the crack and gave her free access to her nest. Then she went forth to seek food, but during her absence the master again plastered up the hole. The object was again removed by means of the magic poa, and a third time the hole was stopped and opened in the same way.

The springwort and several other flowering plants were credited in old times with a magical property in opening locks. “Pliny records the superstition concerning it almost in the same form in which it is now found in Germany. If anyone touches a lock with it the lock, however strong, must yield.... One cannot easily find it oneself, but generally the woodpecker [according to Pliny, also the raven; in Switzerland and Swabia the hoopoe; in the Tyrol the swallow] will bring it under the following circumstances: When the bird visits its nest the nest must be stopped up with wood. The bird will open it by touching it with a spring-wurzel. Meantime a fire or a red cloth must be placed near by, which will so frighten the bird that it will let the magic root fall.”

The English antiquary Aubrey (1626–97) records an anecdote of a keeper of a baronial park in Herefordshire who “did for exprinent’s sake drive an iron naile thwert the hole of the woodpecker’s nest, there being a tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to open it. He layed at the bottom of the tree a cleane sheet, and before many houres passed the naile came out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheet. They say the moonwort will do such things.” The moonwort is a fern which was formerly reputed to have power to draw nails out of horseshoes.

From such roots as these grew the superstitions and legends innumerable of plants that would cure a snake (another lightning-symbol) or other animal of wounds, or even restore the dead. A tradition of the Middle Ages is that two little birds were seen fighting till one was exhausted. “It went away and ate of a certain herb and then returned to renew the battle. When the old man who witnessed the encounter had seen this done several times he took away the herb on which the bird was wont to feed, whereupon the little bird, unable to find its plant, set up a great cry and died.” It is a foolish little story, but illustrative.

One reads of magic crystals, and of gems with marvellous properties that would open mountains in which princes or glittering treasures were hidden. A curious example of this is related by Leland^[97] anent the constant and ordinarily fruitless hunt for treasure in ancient Etruscan tombs, which went on in Italy for centuries. “When one would find a treasure,” the peasants told Leland, “he must take the door of the house in which he dwells and carry it forth into the fields at night until he comes to a tree. Then he must wait till many birds fly over him, and when they come he must throw down the door, making a great noise. Then the birds in fear will speak with a human voice, and tell where the treasure is buried.”

Much of this tinctures the mental life of many uneducated persons to this day. They will tell you now at Rauen, in Germany, that a princess is entombed alive in the Markgrafenstein, and that she and her wealth can be released only by one who will go there on a Friday at midnight carrying a white woodpecker—which would seem to make an albino of that species well worth searching for! The woodpecker of old was a “lightning-bird” because, among other reasons, it was supposed to get fire by boring into wood, as did primitive savages by means of the fire-drill; and its red cap was not only a badge of its office, but a lightning-symbol in general.

Let me illuminate this matter still more by quoting the comments of John Fiske^[98] on the mythical conceptions of this character that are so old, and so cherished among the unlearned:

Among the birds enumerated by Kuhn [author of The Descent of Fire] and others as representing the storm-cloud, are likewise the wren or kinglet (French roitelet); the owl, sacred to AthenÆ; the cuckoo, stork and sparrow; and the red-breasted robin, whose name Robert was originally an epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain parts of France it is still believed that the robbing of a wren’s nest will render the culprit liable to be struck by lightning. The same belief was formerly entertained in Teutonic countries with respect to the robin....

Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of schamir, is the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm, or plant or pebble is nothing more or less than the flash of lightning carried and dropped by the cloud....

The persons who told these stories were not weaving ingenious allegories about thunder-storms, or giving utterance to superstitions of which the original meaning was forgotten. The old grannies who, along with a stoical indifference to the fate of quails and partridges, used to impress upon me the wickedness of killing robins, did not add that I should be struck by lightning if I failed to heed their admonitions. They had never heard that the robin was the bird of Thor: they merely rehearsed the remnant of the superstition which had survived to their own times, while the essential part of it had long since faded from recollection. The reason for regarding a robin’s life as more sacred than a partridge’s had been forgotten; but it left behind, as was natural, a vague recognition of that mythical sanctity. The primitive meaning of a myth fades away as inevitably as the primitive meaning of a word or phrase; and the rabbins which told of a worm which shattered rocks no more thought of the writhing thunderbolts than the modern reader thinks of oyster-shells when he sees the word ostracism, or consciously breathes a prayer when he writes the phrase Good-bye.