This legend was something like the story of Noah's ark, but seems in some form or another to have existed in the mind of all the North-American peoples before the arrival of Christian missionaries.

Much the same story was told by the Ojibwes about the Great Hare-God, Nainiboju.
The Siou and the Ojibwe (and other tribes also) believed that after death the soul lay for a time in a trance, and then found itself floating towards a River which must be crossed.

Beyond the River lay the Happy Hunting Grounds, the Elysian fields; but to oppose the weary soul anxious to reach this paradise there ramped on the other side a huge, flaming-red bison bull, if it had been ordained by the Great Spirit that the soul's time was not yet come, this red bison pushed it back, and the soul was obliged to re-enter the body, which then awoke from its trance or swoon and resumed its worldly activities.
Suicide was regarded as the most heinous of crimes.

Any man killing himself deliberately, fell into the river of the ghost world and was never heard of again, while women who hanged themselves "were regarded as the most miserable of all wretches in the other world".
Their belief in spirits--even ancestral spirits--taking up an abode in the bodies of beasts, birds, or reptiles, or even in plants or stones, caused them to view with respect of a superstitious kind many natural objects.

Some one thing--a beast, bird, reptile, fish, plant, or strange stone had been fixed on as the abode of his tutelary spirit by some father of a family.