This is the index to Indian stories as told by my great grandma Williamson from Des Moines Iowa, 1855.

Indian Stories by Great Grandma

Wampum

I was very fortunate as a child to have four living grandmothers, two grandmothers and two great grandmothers. My great grandma Chelnessee Rutledge Owen died in 1937, but other three filled my life with stories about Ireland, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

It is unfortunate that a child doesn't know what questions to ask grams, answers which would be so precious to us today.

So they told me stories that kids like to hear, about Indians, Civil War, fathers lost in battle, babies who died; storms, tornados, hail, floods, crops burned by drought, kinds of games they played as children and stories they learned from playmates.

I yearn to have just one more day with each of them, but alas, it can never be. But those beautiful memories from carefree times now remind me most painfully how little time we spent talking to our grandmothers. In contrast, consider the time that we now spend looking for information that they knew about all along.

These stories about Iowa, Illinois the great lakes and the Ohio Valley came from great grandmother, Martha Elizabeth Williamson, who in her own words, "I was borned 1864 in Demoin, Ioway." and her eldest daughter, Floy Mabel Beebe Pruitt who later repeated the stories with little or no change.

Through the ears of a child I listened with fascination to stories about Indians, some of these stories, a couple of them 5,000 to 10,000 years old, so old the tribal elders did not know how old they were.

It was a native tradition to pass down stories to their children, and in that manner keep their culture alive. They passed down stories verbally, but the old wise men kept records as symbols painted on animal hides, preserved and kept for centuries. Stories and history were kept alive in that manner.

There were legends passed down from earliest times in Iowa and Minnesota, despite the lack of a traditional written language, other than symbolic characterizations, and the tribes knew what their history was. Some of these stories were traditional stories about history; others in prose or rhyme.

As kids we thought the stories had funny titles; In retrospect the names derived from the contents of the story.

As an adult I have spent some time researching for written historical basis for some of the stories. Some facts in American history tend to support some parts of some stories, but the rest all remain unconnected.

Indian stories tend to fall into two categories, legend and history. We assume right away that ancient stories, those thousands of years old, are legend. But the contemporary, stories under five hundred years old, we must assume have some basis in fact, a grain of truth to them.

Legend is legend, read or listen to legend and take it as you will, and interpret it as you will. That is part of the fun of reading legends. They assume the status of folklore and part of the ancient social structure of the native societies whense they came.

GOTO Index of Indian Stories