The Native Races (Complete 5 Part Edition). Hubert Howe Bancroft

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_fc982c18-e9b0-55db-b6ce-be8b74513fb5">413 All are excessively fond of dancing and singing; but their songs and dances, practiced on all possible occasions, have not been, if indeed they can be, described. They seem merely a succession of sounds and motions without any fixed system. Pounding on rude drums of hide accompanies the songs, which are sung without words, and in which some listeners have detected a certain savage melody. Scalp-dances are performed by women hideously painted, who execute their diabolical antics in the centre of a circle formed by the rest of the tribe who furnish music to the dancers.414 All are habitual smokers, always inhaling the smoke instead of puffing it out after the manner of more civilized devotees of the weed. To obtain tobacco the native will part with almost any other property, but no mention is made of any substitute used in this region before the white man came. Besides his constant use of the pipe as an amusement or habit, the inland native employs it regularly to clear his brain for the transaction of important business. Without the pipe no war is declared, no peace officially ratified; in all promises and contracts it serves as the native pledge of honor; with ceremonial whiffs to the cardinal points the wise men open and close the deliberations of their councils; a commercial smoke clinches a bargain, as it also opens negotiations of trade.415

      TREATMENT OF HORSES.

The use of the horse has doubtless been a most powerful agent in molding inland customs; and yet the introduction of the horse must have been of comparatively recent date. What were the customs and character of these people, even when America was first discovered by the Spaniards, must ever be unknown. It is by no means certain that the possession of the horse has materially bettered their condition. Indeed, by facilitating the capture of buffalo, previously taken perhaps by stratagem, by introducing a medium with which at least the wealthy may always purchase supplies, as well as by rendering practicable long migrations for food and trade, the horse may have contributed somewhat to their present spirit of improvidence. The horses feed in large droves, each marked with some sign of ownership, generally by clipping the ears, and when required for use are taken by the lariat, in the use of which all the natives have some skill, though far inferior to the Mexican vaqueros. The method of breaking and training horses is a quick and an effectual one. It consists of catching and tying the animal; then buffalo-skins and other objects are thrown at and upon the trembling beast, until all its fear is frightened out of it. When willing to be handled, horses are treated with great kindness, but when refractory, the harshest measures are adopted. They are well trained to the saddle, and accustomed to be mounted from either side. They are never shod and never taught to trot. The natives are skillful riders, so far as the ability to keep their seat at great speed over a rough country is concerned, but they never ride gracefully, and rarely if ever perform the wonderful feats of horsemanship so often attributed to the western Indians. A loose girth is used under which to insert the knees when riding a wild horse. They are hard riders, and horses in use always have sore backs and mouths. Women ride astride, and quite as well as the men; children also learn to ride about as early as to walk.416 Each nation has its superstitions; by each individual is recognized the influence of unseen powers, exercised usually through the medium of his medicine animal chosen early in life. The peculiar customs arising from this belief in the supernatural are not very numerous or complicated, and belong rather to the religion of these people treated elsewhere. The Pend d'Oreille, on approaching manhood, was sent by his father to a high mountain and obliged to remain until he dreamed of some animal, bird, or fish, thereafter to be his medicine, whose claw, tooth, or feather was worn as a charm. The howling of the medicine-wolf and some other beasts forebodes calamity, but by the Okanagans the white-wolf skin is held as an emblem of royalty, and its possession protects the horses of the tribe from evil-minded wolves. A ram's horns left in the trunk of a tree where they were fixed by the misdirected zeal of their owner in attacking a native, were much venerated by the Flatheads, and gave them power over all animals so long as they made frequent offerings at the foot of the tree. The Nez Percés had a peculiar custom of overcoming the mawish or spirit of fatigue, and thereby acquiring remarkable powers of endurance. The ceremony is performed annually from the age of eighteen to forty, lasts each time from three to seven days, and consists of thrusting willow sticks down the throat into the stomach, a succession of hot and cold baths, and abstinence from food. Medicine-men acquire or renew their wonderful powers by retiring to the mountains to confer with the wolf. They are then invulnerable; a bullet fired at them flattens on their breast. To allowing their portraits to be taken, or to the operations of strange apparatus they have the same aversion that has been noted on the coast.417 Steam baths are universally used, not for motives of cleanliness, but sometimes for medical purposes, and chiefly in their superstitious ceremonies of purification. The bath-house is a hole dug in the ground from three to eight feet deep, and sometimes fifteen feet in diameter, in some locality where wood and water are at hand, often in the river bank. It is also built above ground of willow branches covered with grass and earth. Only a small hole is left for entrance, and this is closed up after the bather enters. Stones are heated by a fire in the bath itself, or are thrown in after being heated outside. In this oven, heated to a suffocating temperature, the naked native revels for a long time in the steam and mud, meanwhile singing, howling, praying, and finally rushes out dripping with perspiration, to plunge into the nearest stream.418 Every lodge is surrounded by a pack of worthless coyote-looking curs. These are sometimes made to carry small burdens on their backs when the tribe is moving; otherwise no use is made of them, as they are never eaten, and, with perhaps the exception of a breed owned by the Okanagans, are never trained to hunt. I give in a note a few miscellaneous customs noticed by travelers.419

      MEDICAL PRACTICE.

These natives of the interior are a healthy but not a very long-lived race. Ophthalmia, of which the sand, smoke of the lodges, and reflection of the sun's rays on the lakes are suggested as the causes, is more or less prevalent throughout the territory; scrofulous complaints and skin-eruptions are of frequent occurrence, especially in the Sahaptin family. Other diseases are comparatively rare, excepting of course epidemic disorders like small-pox and measles contracted from the whites, which have caused great havoc in nearly all the tribes. Hot and cold baths are the favorite native remedy for all their ills, but other simple specifics, barks, herbs, and gums are employed as well. Indeed, so efficacious is their treatment, or rather, perhaps, so powerful with them is nature in resisting disease, that when the locality or cause of irregularity is manifest, as in the case of wounds, fractures, or snake-bites, remarkable cures are ascribed to these people. But here as elsewhere, the sickness becoming at all serious or mysterious, medical treatment proper is altogether abandoned, and the patient committed to the magic powers of the medicine-man. In his power either to cause or cure disease at will implicit confidence is felt, and failure to heal indicates no lack of skill; consequently the doctor is responsible for his patient's recovery, and in case of death is liable to, and often does, answer with his life, so that a natural death among the medical fraternity is extremely rare. His only chance of escape is to persuade relatives of the dead that his ill success is attributable to the evil influence of a rival physician, who is the one to die; or in some cases a heavy ransom soothes the grief of mourning friends and avengers. One motive of the Cayuses in the massacre of the Whitman family is supposed to have been the missionary's failure to cure the measles in the tribe. He had done his best to relieve the sick, and his power to effect in all cases a complete cure was unquestioned by the natives. The methods by which the medicine-man practices his art are very uniform in all the nations. The patient is stretched on his back in the centre of a large lodge, and his friends few or many sit about him in a circle, each provided with sticks wherewith to drum. The sorcerer, often grotesquely painted, enters the ring, chants a song, and proceeds to force the evil spirit from the sick man by pressing both clenched fists with all his might in the pit of his stomach, kneading and pounding also other parts of the body, blowing occasionally through his own fingers, and sucking blood from the part supposed to be affected. СКАЧАТЬ