Myths and Legends of the Great Plains is a compendium of myths and legends from the Great Plains region of the US. It includes many short stories, and also quite a few songs and poems. Each tale is tagged with what culture it is from -

"...The preparation of a volume of the quainter, purer myths, suitable for general reading, authentic, and with illustrations of the country portrayed, but with no pretensions to being a purely scientific piece of work.... This volume is intended for popular use." As with most mythologies or religions, these stories tell how the world came to be, how places and peoples got their names, how social customs and mores developed, adventures of the ancestors or gods, and much, much more.

Editor Katharine Berry Judson collates and presents a narrative history of Alaskan Myths. Originally gathered and recorded by government ethnologists, she paints an overall picture of Alaskan history as told by its many tribes. From the Eskimo to the Tlingit, from the Tsetsaut to the Haida, the origin of the still-wild state begins with the great Bird (often called "Raven") and branches out, through its legends, in wonderful and amazing directions.

Twenty-three stories of the history of early Oregon plus an appendix: A Brief Summary Of The History Of The Old Oregon Country From Original Sources. OLD OREGON was a mighty sweep of country, and a most romantic one. From the northern border of Mexican California to near Sitka in Russian America it stretched, nearly eight hundred miles. Eastward it stretched over a country of mighty mountain … until the limits of the Oregon country, at the crest of the main range of the Rockies…. The romance ever lingers…...

The basis on which these myths were selected necessarily excluded those which showed traces of the white man's religion or of the red man's coarseness. Relatively speaking, only a few myths could be selected. These were the creation myths, the origin of the races, the theft of fire, the salmon, and especially those connected with the physical features of the country, such as those of Takhoma, Shasta, the Columbia River, and the group of mountains of the bridge of the gods…. No claim is made...

[The Native American] story tellers of the camp related, with dramatic gestures, stories of the Days of the Grandfathers, in the beginning of the Newness of Things. Nothing was too large or too small to come within the bounds of their beliefs, or within the play of their fancy. Only authentic myths and legends have been used in the compilation of this volume. The leading authorities are the publications of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as the ethnological publications of the Canadian Bureau of Mines...

It is a loss to American literature that so much of the legendary history of these Indian tribes has gone, beyond hope of recovery. Exquisite in color, poetical in feeling, these legends of sun, moon, and stars, of snow, ice, lightning, thunders, the winds, the life of the forest birds and animals about them, and the longing to understand the why and the how of life—all which we have only in fragments…. As in all the other volumes of this series, no effort has been made to ornament or amplify these legends in the effort to make them “literary,” or give them “literary charm...

The myths in this 1911 volume are authentic. The original collections were made by government ethnologists. Only the quaintest and purest of the myths have been selected. The leading myth of the North the Raven Myth, is given with a fair degree of completeness. . These tribes are included: Eskimo , Tlingit , Tsetsaut, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Athapascan , Eskimo , Eskimo , Koyukun, and Koryak . - Summary by Author's Preface and david wales

Here, amidst the vast sweep of the plains which stretch away to the horizon on every side, boundless, limitless, endless, lived the plains Indians. Standing in the midst of this vast green plain on a soft May morning, after the Thunder Gods have passed, when the sun is shining in the soft blue above, and the sweet, rain-swept air is blown about by the Four Winds which are always near to man, day and night,—standing far out on the plains with no hint of the white man or his work—one sees the earth...