Mary Austin

The Basket Woman Mary Austin

In preparing this volume of western myths for school use the object has been not so much to provide authentic Indian Folk-tales, as to present certain aspects of nature as they appear in the myth-making mood, that is to say, in the form of strongest appeal to the child mind. Indian myths as they exist among Indians are too frequently sustained by coarse and cruel incidents comparable to the belly-ripping joke in Jack the Giant Killer, or the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, and when presented in story form, too often fall under the misapprehension of the myth as something invented and added to the imaginative life. It is, in fact, the root and branch of man's normal intimacy with nature.