Native American Indian Legends of Prehistoric Race of Giants
American Antiquarian 1911
Prehistoric Races of America and Other Lands by L.S. Curry
Dr. Curry was a missionary in the early days in the wilds of Michigan, is one of these missionaries who went among the Indians at Sault Ste. Marie, among the Chippewas at L'Anse and other places in the Northern Peninsula. He devoted years of time and study to the Indian, and finally learned to comprehend the Red Man, his ways, his, "inner life", and the meaning of his traditions, oral history, and religion, as no man ever before him had succeeded in doing. He, early in his career, came to the conclusion that the religion and so-called traditions meant something other than the wierd, and fancy flight of imagination, but how to obtain the key to the problem involved was itself a problem which for many years defied his most earnest efforts, but at length he was adopted into one of the tribes to which he was a missionary, and because of this, and in accordance with their unwritten law, he must, of necessity be taught the lore of the tribe together with its meaning as it was interpreted by them. Thus, at last, was opened to Dr. Curry the door he had so long striven to unlock, and as he spoke fluently several of the Indian dialects he encountered no difficulty in understanding their, "inner meaning".
After years spent in attempting to reconcile the apparent contradictions in cosmogony,chronology, ethnology, ect., Dr. Curry, while stationed at Newberry Michigan, opened for himself a way for the solution of many of the problems that up to that time had defied every scientist, and at the same time smoothed out all the apparent inconsistencies; but we shall, at this point allow Dr. Curry to speak for himself:
"An elder brother was the first to give me any light upon the subject. Upon what authority, he spoke, I know not, but this I do know, he must have had some good foundation for his statements. He said in substance as follows: A very long time ago a large race of people lived there as farmers and lumbermen, and a small race who had whiskers came down the Ottawa river from the northwest and made war on the large race and killed the most of them, but when the small men came in contact with the Indians they found the latter more than a match, for, the Indians turned on them and nearly annihilated them, and the remnants of both the giants and the small men left the country.
Mississippi as a Province, Territory, and State
by J.F.H. Claiborne 1880
The Choctaws preserve a dim tradition that, after crossing the Mississippi, they met a race of men whom they called the Na-hon-lo, tall in stature and of fair complexion, who had emigrated from the sunrise. They had once been a mighty people but were then few in number, and soon disappeared after the incoming of the Choctaws. This race of men were, according to tradition, tillers of the soil and peaceable. There had likewise been a race of cannibals, who feasted on the bodies of their enemies. They too were giants and utilized the mammoth as their burden bearers. They kept them closely herded, and as they devoured everything and broke down the forest, this was the origin of prairies.
