One of the most ubiquitous inclusions in the menagerie of monsters which populate the various folkloric traditions of Canada’s First Nations is the Thunderbird – a monstrous avian predator with preternatural qualities. From the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Arctic, native peoples across the continent have traditional stories about an enormous horned eagle with the ability to create thunder and lightning, which can pluck whales from the ocean and buffalo from the prairie.
One of the oldest comprehensive anthropological investigations into the Thunderbird legend in Canada was conducted by a pioneering British-Canadian anthropologist called Alexander Francis Chamberlain. Drawing from an eclectic variety of sources spanning a vast swath of time and space, Chamberlain painted a verbal portrait of the Thunderbird as it appears in the legends of the Cree and Algonquian nations of the prairies, the Canadian Shield, and the Maritimes. He titled his project ‘The Thunder-Bird Amongst the Algonkins’, and submitted it for publication in the January 1890 issue of the American Anthropologist.
“Belief in the thunder-bird… amongst… the tribes of Algonkian stock… appears to be very wide-spread,” Chamberlain began. “It is found with the Crees of the Canadian Northwest and amongst some of the tribes of Mic-mac lineage dwelling near the coast of the Atlantic, on the shores of Hudson’s Bay, and in the States on the southern banks of Lake Superior. The investigation of this particular belief must therefore cover the whole Algonkian region.”
Chamberlain organized the legends geographically, beginning with stories from the prairies and working his way east.
“The Crees,” he wrote, “believe that certain divine birds cause the lightning by the flashings of their eyes, and with their wings make the noise of thunder. The thunderbolts are the ‘invisible and flaming arrows shot by these birds.’”
Chamberlain then referenced the work of Henry Youle Hind, an English-Canadian geologist and explorer. Back in the 1850s, the government of the Province of Canada – a British colony encompassing what are now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec – had designs to expand west into Rupert’s Land, the vast and wild territory controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. In an effort to determine the feasibility of this venture, two scientific expeditions were commissioned with assessing the agricultural and mineral potential of southwest Rupert’s Land in 1857. The more famous of these was the Palliser Expedition, sponsored by England’s Royal Geographical Society and the British Crown, which conducted a comprehensive survey of what is now southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia from 1857-1860. The Palliser Expedition famously declared a certain triangular portion of southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta too arid to support agriculture. This so-called ‘Palliser Triangle’ now boasts some of the most productive farm and ranchland in the country.
The second surveying expedition of the late 1850s, the ‘Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition,’ was commissioned by the Province of Canada and headed by Henry Youle Hind. In 1857, Hind and company surveyed the old fur routes between Lake Superior and what is now southern Manitoba, and the Red River and Athabasca River valleys beyond. The following year, Hind led a second provincially-sponsored expedition, styled the ‘Canadian Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition,’ west of Red River country, through the valleys of the Assiniboine, Souris, Qu’Appelle, and South Saskatchewan Rivers of what are now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. He later published an account of his adventures in a two-volume 1861 book.
The seventh chapter of the second volume of Hind’s book, which chronicles the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Expedition, is dedicated to the customs and superstitions of the natives the expedition members encountered during their travels.
“In sickness prairie Indians are much depressed,” Hind wrote, “and often seek consolation in the monotonous drum of the medicine man and his heathenish incantations; an infliction which the grossest and most debased superstition alone would tolerate; it is submitted to with confidence and hope, however, by men who are anxious and timid during the roll of thunder, invoking the Great Bird by whose flapping wings they suppose it to be produced, or crouching from the blink of his all-penetrating eye, which they allege is the lightning’s flash.”
Another ethnographer to comment on the Thunderbird in Cree legend was Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, an American medical doctor and geologist who conducted his own surveys into the American Rockies throughout the 1860s and ‘70s. In a sub-chapter on the Cree, in an 1863 article for the American Philosophical Society, Hayden wrote, “These Indians do not seem to fear any natural phenomena except thunder, which is supposed to be the screaming and flapping of the wings of a large bird, which they represent on their lodges as a great eagle. Wind is supposed to be produced by its flying, and flashes of lightning are caused by the light of the sun reflected from its white and golden plumage, and when strokes of lightning are felt, they are thunder-stones cast down by this bird. All storms, tornadoes, &c., are caused by its wrath, and fair winds, calm and fine weather, are regarded as tokens of its good humor.”
In his paragraph on the Thunderbird in Plains Indian tradition, Chamberlain also invoked the writings of John Maclean, a Scottish-Canadian Methodist pastor who preached the Gospel to various native communities throughout Ontario, Manitoba, and the Pacific Northwest. In his 1889 book The Indians: Their Manners and Customs, Maclean wrote, “Some Indian nationalities ascribe to inanimate things the thoughts and feelings of intelligent beings. The Blackfoot nation posesses ideas akin to these. Winds are said to result from the flapping of the wings of a great bird in the mountains…”
Later on in his book, Maclean included an old story about a Thunderbird nest purportedly discovered by a party of Indians in the Rocky Mountains, not far from Blackfoot territory. Within the nest were two baby Thunderbirds. “Some of the Indians touched their eyes with the points of their arrows,” Maclean wrote, “and these were shivered in their hands as if they had been struck by lightning.”
Although Chamberlain failed to mention this fact in his article, belief in the Thunderbird was also prevalent among the Kootenay Indians, who lived in the Rocky Mountains just west of Blackfoot territory. In his own paper on these people, published in the Eighth Report of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he described the Kootenay belief that “The thunder… is caused by a great bird that lives far up in the sky. The lighting… is made by the shooting of its arrows.”
In a smooth transition to the easterly Canadian Shield, Chamberlain quoted another paragraph from Maclean’s book, taken from a sub-chapter on the various native traditions across the continent. The Potawatomi to which the paragraph refers are an Anishinaabe people native to the western Great Lakes.
“The Pottowattamies,” Maclean wrote, “speak of one of the highest mountain peaks at Thunder Bay as the dwelling-place of the thunder, and that at one time there was seen the thunder’s nest containing the young thunders.”
William Jones, an American anthropologist of Fox Indian heritage, elaborated on this story in his 1916 article “Ojibwa Tales from the North Shore of Lake Superior.” He identified the Thunderbird’s home as the peak of Mount McKay, the highest mountain in the Nor’Wester Range, which overlooks the Fort William First Nation reserve just south of Thunder Bay, Ontario, at the western end of Lake Superior. Another Thunderbird nest was said to sit atop the Sleeping Giant, a lone mountain which stands at the southern tip of the Sibley Peninsula just east of Mount McKay, at a place known as Thunder Cape.
In his article, Jones included a story about two Ojibwa youths from Thunder Bay who resolved to determine the cause of the thunder that so frequently flashed over easterly Thunder Cape. After fasting for eight days, the youths blackened their faces, travelled to the Sibley Peninsula, and began to climb the Sleeping Giant, its crown enshrouded by a corona of evil-looking clouds. As they ascended the mountain, lightning flashed in the sky, succeeded immediately by booming claps of thunder.
“The rumbling became louder the higher they went,” Jones wrote, “and when the enveloping cloud opened, they beheld two big birds with their young brood of two. Flashes of light, as of fire, were seen when the birds opened and closed their eyes. One youth was content with what he had seen; but the other was curious to see more, and in an attempt to satisfy his desire he was killed by lightning. Thereupon the Thunder-Birds went away from the place. One was seen for the last time upon Thunder Mountain (McKay Mountain).”
Another anthropologist to write about the Ojibwa conception of the Thunderbird was Reverend Peter Jones, a Methodist missionary of Missisauga Ojibwa heritage (no known relation to William Jones). Jones’ Ojibwa name, incidentally, means “Sacred Waving Feathers,” denoting the tail feathers of an eagle or Thunderbird. At a special feast held when he was still a boy, he was given a war club adorned with eagle feathers, which represented the might and swiftness of the Thunderbird.
“Everything that strikes the dark untutored mind of the Indian with awe and astonishment,” Jones wrote in an 1861 book, “becomes to him an object of dread and adoration. No wonder, then, that thunder, being far beyond his comprehension, is regarded as a most powerful deity, and has given rise to many absurd stories. They consider the thunder to be a god in the shape of a large eagle, that feeds on serpents, which it takes from under the earth and the trunks of hollow trees. When a thunderbolt strikes a tree or the ground, they fancy that the thunder has shot his fiery arrow at a serpent and caught it away in the twinkling of an eye. Some Indians affirm that they have seen the serpent taken up by the thunder into the clouds. They believe that the thunder has its abode on the top of a high mountain in the west, where it lays its eggs and hatches its young, like an eagle, and whence it takes its flight into different parts of the earth in search of serpents.”
Jones went on to relate the story of an alleged Thunderbird sighting made by a native whom he knew personally. The informant claimed that, after fasting and making an offering to the Thunderbird, he began to climb a mountain on which that awesome bird was said to have made its nest. “I with much difficulty ascended the mountain,” the informant told Jones, “the top of which reached into the clouds. To my great astonishment, as I looked I saw the thunder’s nest, where a brood of young thunders had been hatched and reared. I saw all sorts of curious bones of serpents, on the flesh of which the old thunders had been feeding their young; and the bark of the young cedar trees [peeled] and stripped, on which the young thunders had been trying their skill in shooting their arrows before going abroad to hunt serpents.”
Before delving into the Thunderbird legends of New England, which we will not cover here, Chamberlain referenced a passage from the 1637 issue of the Jesuit Relations, the Relations being reports written by French Jesuit missionaries to their superiors describing their attempts to convert the natives of New France and the Great Lakes to Christianity. In the 1637 Relation, Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune included a piece of information acquired by his fellow missionary, Father Jacques Buteux, regarding a belief held by the Algonquian tribes native to the forests north of the St. Lawrence River. “When the Father asked… whence came that great clap of Thunder,” Le Jeune wrote, “‘It is,’ he said, ‘the Manitou who wishes to vomit up a great serpent he has swallowed; and at every effort of his stomach he makes this great uproar that we hear.’ In fact, they have often told me that flashes of lightning were nothing but serpents falling upon the ground, which they discover from the trees struck by lightning. ‘For,’ say they, ‘here is seen the shape of those creatures, stamped, as it were, in sinuous and crooked lines around the tree. Large serpents have even been found under these trees,’ they say.”
The strange antagonistic relationship between Thunderbirds and serpents, particularly serpents of the giant and preternatural variety, is another mysterious mainstay of First Nations tradition common to tribes across the continent, but that’s a story for another time.
“The Thunder-Bird Amongst the Algonkins,” by A.F. Chamberlain in the January 1890 (Volume 3, Number 1) issue of the American Anthropologist
“Hind, Henry Youle,” by Richard A. Jarrell in Volume 13 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1994)
Narrative of the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition of 1858 (1861), by Henry Youle Hind
“Ojibwa Tales from the North Shore of Lake Superior,” by William Jones, in the July-September 1916 issue of the Journal of American Folklore
“Report on the Kootenay Indians of Southeastern British Columbia,” by Alexander Francis Chamberlain in the Eighth Report of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1886-1889, reprinted in Volume 8, Number ½ (Fall/Spring 1974) of the Northwest Anthropological Research Notes
History of the Ojebway Indians, With Especial reference to their Conversion to Christianity (1861), by Peter Jones
“On the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley,” by F.V. Hayden, M.D., in Volume 12 of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1863)
The Jesuit Relations (1637), by Paul Le Jeune