or discarded glass, metal and bead ornaments, shreds of skins, bits of painted leather, bright ribbons, strips of gay calicoes, feathers, pieces of tobacco, and bundles of human and animal hair.
The true "medicine-man" (for there are charlatans and pretenders[1] in savage as well as civilized circles) is one of a fraternity most mysterious and despotic in its ways and workings, membership therein being limited to those who exhibit more than ordinary fitness therefor, backed by powerful family and tribal influence. In one sense "medicine" is an autocracy; and it is also the nobility of the savage, no way limited by tribal power, and is forbidden to women except for very extraordinary and specific reasons. Its apprenticeship, too, is long and arduous, beset throughout by trials and stumbling-blocks, calculated to tax to the utmost the patience, faith, endurance, and fortitude of the candidate, and to betray the inner consciousness and latent foibles of the individual. Having passed the prescribed ordeals, he is admitted into full fellowship amid ceremonies calculated to be most solemn, impressive, and binding. One of the labors prescribed, and frequently performed in public on the evening of the annual "goose-feast," is as hideous as it is sickening. It consists in devouring a live dog, and is a proceeding that especially obtains among the Chippewyans, Crees, and Ojibways; and a more horrible or fiendish scene, as viewed by the flickering fire-light amid sounding drums and rattles, the shrieks of the victim, and the frenzied howls of the assemblage, can not be imagined.
Disease, from a savage standpoint, is not a mere morbid phenomenon, but the specific manifestation of some demon or spirit of evil, who through a kind of occult intelligence or agency has obtained control of the person; and, naturally, relief is deemed possible only through agencies that have their inception in the miraculous and supernatural. Under such circumstances the most absurd ideas obtain both among laity and fraternity, and remedial measures are irrelevant, crude, and not infrequently most barbarous. Think, for instance, of the fauces, including the soft palate and muscular tissues of the throat, being forcibly wrenched out by a pair of bullet-molds in the hands of an "Indian doctor" or medicine-man, and for the relief of a tickling cough due to an elongated uvula! Such is a veritable occurrence; and yet the operation was not due to an appreciation of the difficulty, but was intended to dislodge a spirit that had taken possession of the part! It is perhaps needless to remark that it was successful, in that it not only dislodged the spirit of the disorder, but that of the sufferer as well.
All medicine-men of first rank are clairvoyants and psychologists (mesmerists, if you like) of no mean pretensions, as a rule capable of
- ↑ Many an individual, renowned as a warrior and respected at the council-fire, becomes the jeer of his tribe because of his pretensions to "medicine," which have not been legitimately acquired, or of which he is not possessed.
