Elsewhere I have argued that Leland compiled the first story of Algonquin Legends -- "Of Glooscap's Birth, and of his Brother Malsum, the Wolf" -- from four sources, relying most heavily on the version that came, unattributed, from a tourist guidebook. Further, Leland edited his sources with a heavy hand, adding details he felt were authentic. These findings beg the question, why did Leland construct this story?
Part of the answer can be gleaned from Algonquin Legends itself. There, and in related writings, Leland argues that the story corpus he discovered derives from Norse legends. In the first part of this paper I show that some of the very characteristics Leland used to demonstrate the Icelandic heritage of his stories are the ones he most likely added to "Of Glooscap's Birth".
Leland's theory about the Norse roots of Native American stories has been all but discarded. Even if that were not the case, I am prompted to ask another question -- why did Leland want this connection between Norse and Native American story traditions so badly that he massaged so energetically the Passamaquoddy, Micmac, Maliseet and Penobscot stories he gathered? I shall attempt to respond to this question by examining the textual conversation Leland carries on with Henry R. Schoolcraft on one hand, and Henry David Thoreau on the other. By attending to the voices of this conversation now over one hundred years old, I show that some of the ways of thinking Leland follows when he studied Native Americans in the late nineteenth century still influence us today.