When the evening of his days was come, when his course was run, and man had sunk from sight, he was supposed to follow the sun and find some spot of repose for his tired soul in the distant west.

There, with general consent, the tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico supposed the happy hunting grounds; there, taught by the same analogy, the ancient Aryans placed the Nerriti, the exodus, the land of the dead.

"The old notion among us," said on one occasion a distinguished chief of the Creek nation, "is that when we die, the spirit goes the way the sun goes, to the west, and there joins its family and friends who went before it."[92-1] In the northern hemisphere the shadows fall to the north, thence blow cold and furious winds, thence come the snow and early thunder.

Perhaps all its primitive inhabitants, of whatever race, thought it the seat of the mighty gods.[92-2] A floe of ice in the Arctic Sea was the home of the guardian spirit of the Algonkins;[92-3] on a mountain near the north star the Dakotas thought Heyoka dwelt who rules the seasons; and the realm of Mictla, the Aztec god of death, lay where the shadows pointed.
From that cheerless abode his sceptre reached over all creatures, even the gods themselves, for sooner or later all must fall before him.

The great spirit of the dead, said the Ottawas, lives in the dark north,[93-1] and there, in the opinion of the Monquis of California, resided their chief god, Gumongo.[93-2] Unfortunately the makers of vocabularies have rarely included the words north, south, east, and west, in their lists, and the methods of expressing these ideas adopted by the Indians can only be partially discovered.