We have already told the Cree’s legend of their long migration from far beyond the Bering Strait to their final location on the prairies. Until a certain incident the name for the wanderers was simply the "the people."

When the long lost, abducted Berry Woman returned to the people, with her seven sons, the Place of Tents was somewhere on the Asiatic side of the Bering Strait. There, after a long time, a vision came to the Berry Woman directing her, her five younger sons and their families to go north and east across the salt waters and then south on the west side of the Shining Mountains. (The Coast Range?) As she was dying, she directed her youngest son, a shaman, to carry a sealed bowl of water containing one of her hairs, by which a sign would be given when to cross the mountains on the right hand (The Rockies?) through a pass that would appear after great cataclysms of fire and earthquake and from the pass continue out onto the great prairies, the Garden of the Manitou.

The youngest son, the shaman-guide, was called Kristinow. After his death, his followers called themselves the "Sons of Kristinow." When the white men encountered them, they identified themselves by that name, which by the changes in pronunciation, from French to English became Kristeneaux, eventually shortened to "Cree."

It is a beautiful story, well told by R. D. Symons, who got it from Kissikowasis - "Morning Child," the old, old blind medicine man of the prairies. To read it in the language with the cadence of the Cree tongue that Symons mastered, refer to North by West by that author.