Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/71

 some one of the splints: his medicine bag was held in his left hand, and a dried buffalo skull was attached to the splint of each lower leg and each lower arm, that its weight might prevent him from struggling." At a signal, the men were drawn up three or four feet above the ground, and turned round with gradually increasing velocity, by a man with a pole, until they fainted. Although they had never groaned before, they uttered a heart-rending cry, a sort of prayer to the Great Spirit, during the turning. Having ceased to cry, they were let down apparently dead. Left entirely to themselves, they in time were able "partly to rise," and no sooner could they do thus much than they moved to another part of the lodge, where the little finger of the left hand was cut off with a hatchet. But their tortures were not over. The rest of them took place in public, and were perhaps more frightful than any. The victims were taken out of the lodge, and, being each placed between two athletic men, were dragged along, the men holding them with thongs and running with them as fast as they could, until all the buffalo skulls and weights hanging to the splints were left behind. These weights must be dragged out through the flesh, the candidates having the option of running in the race described, or of wandering about the prairies without food until suppuration took place, and the weights came off by decay of the flesh. These horrors concluded, the young men were left alone to recover as best they might. Mr. Catlin could only hear of one who had died "in the extreme part of this ceremony," and his fate was considered rather a happy one: "the Great Spirit had so willed it for some especial purpose, and no doubt for the young man's benefit" (O-kee-pa, p. 9-32).

Nor were the Mandans alone on the American continent in marking the entrance upon manhood by distinctive observances. On the contrary, a writer of the highest authority on Red Indian subjects, states that no young man among the native tribes was considered fit to begin the career of life until he had accomplished his great fast. Seven days were considered the maximum time during which a young man could fast, and the success of the devotee was inferred from the length of his abstinence. These fasts, says Mr. Schoolcraft, "are awaited