Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/316

Rh to invoke spirits, to avert misfortune, to heal sickness, and obtain the fulfilment of human wishes. These men are highly esteemed among the Indians, and are both their priests and physicians.

You behold at the fall of night fires flaming upon the prairie-hills on the banks of the Mississippi, and a crowd of Indians, men and women, assembled around them, making the most extraordinary gestures. Let us approach nearer. Copper-coloured men and women to the number of about one hundred, are dancing around, or rather hopping, with their feet close together and their arms hanging straight down, to the unmelodious music of a couple of small drums, and some dried gourds which, being filled with small stones, make a rattling noise when they are shaken. The musicians are seated upon the green sward. The dancing men are painted in their grandest but yet most hideous manner, tawdry and horrible; and several women, also, are plentifully covered with silver rings, and with little silver bells hanging to their ears and to their mocassins, and which they shake with all their might as they hop along.

Every one has a little medicine-bag made of skin. These are all medicine-men and women; and around them is a ring of spectators, men, women, and children.

After a couple of old men have seated themselves in the ring and talked for a little while, a march commences, in which the whole circle is included, during which first one and then another individual steps out of the procession, and takes his stand a little apart from the circle. A medicine-man then having blown into his medicine-bag springs forward with a shrill resounding cry, and holds it before the mouth of one of the patients standing in the outer circle, who on that falls down insensible, and lies on the ground for a time with quivering limbs. Thus falls one after another of the assembly. An old Indian stands smiling with a cunning expression, as if he would say,