Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 — Themes and Context

A Frame of Authenticity

Jones's introduction is less a preface than a credential. He describes the Pawkunnawkuts (Gayheads) as a remnant of a once-numerous nation, reduced to about five hundred souls and restricted to a promontory. He notes that while white customs had made "sad inroads" on the primitive Indian character, enough remained to make them objects of "ardent and profitable interest." This framing is crucial: Jones positions himself as an eyewitness, not a fabulist. He also includes a note citing Purchas' Pilgrims to gloss the name Hobbamock, the Indian devil, showing his effort to anchor the traditions in documented sources. The reader is thus invited to treat the tales as ethnographic artifacts rather than mere inventions.

The Narragansett Origin of Rum

One of the most striking excerpts recounts a Narragansett tradition about the arrival of alcohol. The narrative describes a "Little Man" (the Evil Spirit) who presents a bottle of rum to the Narragansetts, who taste it and find it "a great deal better than the Good Spirit's corn." The scene is vivid: a white man falls down "kicking as a frog swims" after drinking, and the bottle is passed around. The bargain is sealed: the Evil Spirit's white men will supply rum, and the Indians will become his servants. The tale ends with a bitter note: the Great Spirit sometimes withers the corn, and the Evil Spirit often lets the pale faces drink up all the rum before it reaches the Indians. This story encapsulates the collection's recurring concern with the destructive impact of European contact.

Movement Between Worlds

The excerpts show a pattern of movement between the human and spirit worlds. In the Narragansett tale, the Little Man appears suddenly from a canoe, speaking a language "none of them understood, any more than they understood the cry of the catamount." The boundary between ordinary and supernatural is porous: spirits take animal forms, and animals speak. Jones's notes reinforce this, citing Roger Williams's observation that Hobbamock appears "in the shape of a man, a deare, a fawne, an eagle, &c., but most ordinarily at a snake." This fluidity shapes the narrative structure, where scenes shift without warning from domestic life to encounters with the divine or diabolical.

Recurring Images of Transformation

Throughout the excerpts, transformation is a key motif. The Narragansetts are given bows and arrows by the Little Man, which lead them into "bloody wars." The rum makes them "dogs, and bears, and hogs, and wild cats." The bottle itself is described with a simile: "a strange-shaped thing, which had a long neck to it like the ugly bird which cries in the brakes in the beginning of darkness." These images link material objects to animal and spiritual realms. Jones's editorial hand is light, but his selection of traditions emphasizes moments where identity shifts—human to beast, free to enslaved, sober to maddened. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a people caught between two worlds, their own traditions struggling to make sense of colonial intrusion.

Jones's collection rewards readers who attend to the interplay between the tales and their framing. The introduction and notes are not mere appendages but part of the work's argument for authenticity. The traditions themselves are often stark, blending wonder with warning. Readers should note how Jones handles the tension between preserving indigenous voices and shaping them for a nineteenth-century audience—a tension that gives the volume its peculiar texture.

I often think of Jones’s old volume, with its whiskey-stained spirits and patient Gayhead voices, and it leads my hand to the Magyar tales. The Folk-Tales of the Magyars Collected by Kriza, Erdélyi, Pap, and Others — Reading Notes keeps a similar quiet ache—how a people’s stories hold their wounds without ever saying so plainly. Both smell of woodsmoke and memory.