Myths and Legends
over it. A storm set in, heaping the billows on shore until the church was undermined, and with a crash it fell into the seething flood. But the curse had passed, and when a new chapel was built the old evils had deserted L'Anse Creuse.
MACKINACK
NOT only was Mackinack the birthplace of Hiwawatha: it was the home of God himself—Gitchi Manitou, or Mirchi Manitou—who placed there an Indian Adam and Eve to watch and cultivate his gardens. He also made the beaver, that his children might eat, and they acknowledged his goodness in oblations. Bounteous sacrifices insured entrance after death to the happy hunting-grounds beyond the Rocky Mountains. Those who had failed in these offerings were compelled to wander about the Great Lakes, shelterless, and watched by unsleeping giants who were ten times of the stature of mortals.
These giants still exist, but in the form of conical rocks, one of which—called Sugar-Loaf, or Manitou's Wigwam—is ninety feet high. A cave in this obelisk is pointed out as Manitou's abiding-place, and it was believed that every other spire in the group had its wraith, whence has come the name of the island—Michillimackinack (place of great dancing spirits). Arch Rock is the place that Manitou built to reach his home from Sunrise Land the better. There were many such monuments of divinities in
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