The Indian Fairy Book: From the Original Legends

by Cornelius Mathews

The Indian Fairy Book, published in 1869, retells for young readers a series of Native American legends from the Great Lakes region and beyond. As Cornelius Mathews explains in his preface, the stories had first been gathered and translated by the ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and Mathews reworked and developed them. Among them are The Celestial Sisters, The Boy Who Set a Snare for the Sun, Osseo, the Son of the Evening Star, The Origin of the Robin, The Red Swan and The Enchanted Moccasins: stories of magic transformations, tricksters, giants and spirits of sky and forest. They are filtered through a nineteenth-century American storyteller's voice, but they preserve the outlines of older oral traditions. The full text is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first story is free.