Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/225

Rh Once a year one of these sweat dances was followed by a burning of baskets, at which time the baskets that were not needed by the people of the village were heaped together and set on fire, the Indians dancing, laughing, and howling while the flames destroyed a good part of their year's work. It was a custom for which I have not been able to find their reason. "Indian have good time then," they say, when you inquire into the reason for this ceremony.

This tribe had their medicine men, whose treatment consisted in the use of herbs, magnetic motions, and rubbing, the sweat and cold plunge, and the sucking process—disagreeable enough, one would say, for the operating healer, when it is explained that he claimed to suck from the diseased part all malignant disease, and would spend consecutive hours in this loathsome practice of his art, spitting out of his mouth the poison drawn from the afflicted part.

This tribe of Indians were and are still exceedingly superstitious. If anything unusual took place in their village, such as a number of deaths closely following each other, every Indian would move camp: or, when one of their number met his death in some unknown way, they believed that the Bad Spirit was the cause and they could not leave the place quickly enough.

There is a beautiful fresh-water lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains which years ago was a great fishing place for these Indians. One day a large party had gathered there to camp and to fish. It was near night when two young Indians fell from their canoe and were drowned without the others seeing them. They saw the empty canoe and the disturbed water, and one Indian saw a face which he declared to be that of the Bad Spirit. They fled from the place that night, not even stopping to search for the bodies of their companions. They have never fished there since, for they believe that if a drop of water from that lake could touch them they would die in the same way.

I was much interested in what we must call their religious belief as shown in their burial customs and the manner of mourning for their dead. Because they were savages shall we call it superstitious imagination? It is certain that they believed in a future life. They also believed in a Great Spirit as well as a good and a bad one, and had distinct personal conceptions of their gods. Thus they worshiped the sun because they believed the Great Spirit was making what they called the happy hunting ground there. After an Indian was dead and buried, if you asked his people where he had gone, they would point to the sun. It was their heaven. Before the white man came among these Indians they burned their dead. Whatever a dead man had owned was destroyed with him, that he might have it when he reached the