Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/163

 begun its lugubrious ditty, and at another time the scouts, as we were about entering the main range of the Sierra Madre, made a great fuss and would not be pacified until one of the whites of our command had released a little owl which he had captured. This same superstition obtained with equal force among the Romans, and, indeed, there are few if any spots in the world, where the owl has not been regarded as the messenger of death or misfortune.

When an Apache starts out on the war-path for the first four times, he will refrain from letting water touch his lips; he will suck it through a small reed or cane which he carries for the purpose. Similarly, he will not scratch his head with the naked fingers, but resorts to a small wooden scratcher carried with the drinking-tube. Traces of these two superstitions can also be found in other parts of the globe. There are all kinds of superstitions upon every conceivable kind of subject, but there are too many of them to be told in extenso in a book treating of military campaigning.

As might be inferred, the "medicine men" wield an amount of influence which cannot be understood by civilized people who have not been brought into intimate relations with the aborigines in a wild state. The study of the religious life and thought of our savage tribes has always been to me of the greatest interest and of supreme importance; nothing has been so neglected by the Americans as an examination into the mental processes by which an Indian arrives at his conclusions, the omens, auguries, hopes and fears by which he is controlled and led to one extreme or the other in all he does, or a study of the leaders who keep him under control from the cradle to the grave. Certainly, if we are in earnest in our protestations of a desire to elevate and enlighten the aborigine—which I for one most sincerely doubt—then we cannot begin too soon to investigate all that pertains to him mentally as well as physically. Looking at the subject in the strictest and most completely practical light, we should save millions of dollars in expenditure, and many valuable lives, and not be making ourselves a holy show and a laughing-stock for the rest of the world by massing troops and munitions of war from the four corners of the country every time an Indian medicine man or spirit doctor announces that he can raise the dead. Until we provide something better, the savage will rely upon his own