INTRODUCTION TO MYTHS AND LEGENDS
COUNTLESS ages back, lost in the seas of antiquity, thousands of years before the Christian Era, the Indian people began--no one knows how. Did they spring from the soil, or migrate, by some aimless wandering, across the Bering Strait from ancient Mongolia, or did they actually descend from Noah, after the Flood? Their many centuries of known history is full of wonderful happenings.
California was a mythical land of romance long before the white man discovered it. Somehow the tales of a country rich in sunshine, fruits and gold crept out to the ears of explorers, although the tale-bearers were unknown. California is still a land of romance. Its history runs back through periods of civilization whose traditions are picturesquely fascinating. Our thoughts of early days are so tinted with tales of the Dons and the Missions that we don't always realize that before the Don the redskin ruled, and that our whole state, once upon a time, was an Indian hunting ground. The Indians who fought and hunted throughout the length and breadth of the state tried, even as we do now, to account for things. Where we use science they used imagination, and
Many of these legends, even those accepted as authentic by leading ethnologists, have no doubt been more or less embellished in translation, and garbled by countless repetitions. Some of them are conflicting and contradictory to a degree. All of them, however, are interesting, more or less poetic, and serve the purpose of an added fascination in the objects or localities with which they are connected.