medicine-man is his mganga, angekok, sorcerer, prophet, physician, exerciser, priest, and rain-doctor; only, as he is rarely a cultivator of the soil, instead of heavy showers and copious crops, he is promised scalps, salmon trout, and buffalo beef in plenty. He has the true Fetichist's belief—invariably found in tribes who live dependent upon the powers of Nature—in the younger brothers of the human family, the bestial creation: he holds to a metamorphosis like that of Abyssinia, and to speaking animals. Every warrior chooses a totem, some quadruped, bird, or fish, to which he prays, and which he will on no account kill or eat. Dr. Livingstone shows (chap, i.) that the same custom prevails in its entirety among the Kaffir Bakwaina, and opines that it shows traces of addiction to animal worship, like the ancient Egyptians; in the prophecies of Israel the tribes are compared with animals, a true totemic practice. The word totem also signifies a sub-clan or sub-tribe; and some nations, like the African Somal, will not allow marriage in the same totem. The medicine-men give away young children as an atonement when calamities impend: they go clothed, not in sackcloth and ashes, but in coats of mire, and their macerations and self-inflicted tortures rival those of the Hindoos: a fanatic has been known to drag about a buffalo skull with a string cut from his own skin till it is torn away. In spring-time, the braves, and even the boys, repairing to lonely places and hill-tops, their faces and bodies being masked, as if in mourning, with mud, fast and pray, and sing rude chants to propitiate the ghosts for days consecutively. The Fetichist is ever grossly superstitious; and the Indians, as might be expected, abound in local rites. Some tribes, as the Cheyennes, will not go to war without a medicine-man, others without sacred war-gourds[1] containing the tooth of the drum-head fish. Children born with teeth are looked upon as portents, and when gray at birth the phenomenon is attributed to evil ghosts.
I can not but think that the two main articles of belief which have been set down to the credit of the Indian, namely, the Great Spirit or Creator, and the Happy Hunting-grounds in a future world, are the results of missionary teaching, the work of Fathers Hennepin, Marquette, and their noble army of martyred Jesuit followers. In later days they served chiefly to inspire the Anglo-American muse, e.g.:
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues—
- ↑ This gourd or calabash is the produce of the Cucurbita lagenaria, or calabash vine. In Spanish, Central, and Southern America, Cuba and the West Indies, they use the large round fruit of the Crescentia cujete.
Regions of Central Africa," chap. xix. The modes of belief, and the manners and customs of savage and barbarous races are so similar, that a knowledge of the African is an excellent introduction to that of the American.
