Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/130

112 He has many superstitions about the practice. It is a sacred instrument, and its red color typifies the smoker's flesh. The Western travelers mention offerings of tobacco to, and smoking of pipes in honor of, the Great Spirit. Some men will vow never to use the pipe in public, others to abstain on particular days. Some will not smoke with their moccasins on, others with steel about their persons; some are pledged to abstain inside, others outside the wigwam, and many scatter buffalo chip over their tobacco. When beginning to smoke there are certain observances; some, exempli gratiâ, direct, after the fashion of Gitche Manitou, the first puff upward or heavenward, the second earthward, and the third and fourth over the right and left shoulders, probably in propitiation of the ghosts, who are being smoked for in proxy; others, before the process of inhaling, touch the ground with the heel of the pipe-bowl, and turn the stem upward and averted.

According to those who, like Pennant, derive the North American from the Scythians, scalping is a practice that originated in High and Northeastern Asia. The words of the Father of History are as follows: "Of the first enemy a Scythian sends down, he quaffs the blood; he carries the heads of all that he has slain in battle to the king; for when he has brought a head, he is entitled to a share of the booty that may be taken—not otherwise; to skin the head, he makes a circular incision from ear to ear, and then, laying hold of the crown, shakes out the skull; after scraping off the flesh with an ox's rib, he rumples it between his hands, and having thus softened the skin, makes use of it as a napkin; he appends it to the bridle of the horse he rides, and prides himself on this, for the Scythian that has most of these skin napkins is adjudged the best man, etc., etc. They also use the entire skins as horse-cloths, also the skulls for drinking-cups."—("Melpomene," iv., 64, Laurent's trans.) The underlying idea is doubtless the natural wish to preserve a memorial of a foeman done to death, and at the same time to dishonor his hateful corpse by mutilation. Fashion and tradition regulate the portions of the human frame preferred.

Scalping is generally, but falsely, supposed to be a peculiarly American practice. The Abbé Em. Domenech ("Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts of North America," chap, xxxix.) quotes the decalvare of the ancient Germans, the capillos et cutem detrahere of the code of the Visigoths, and the annals of Flude, which prove that the "Anglo-Saxons" and the Franks still scalped about A.D. 879. And as the modern American practice is traceable to Europe and Asia, so it may be found in Africa, where aught of ferocity is rarely wanting. "In a short time after our