Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/148

128 of new virtues in everything, there may doubtless be revealed specifics, panaceas perhaps, in now neglected roots and herbs.

But the aim and lure of quacks — white persons or colored — who announce a practice after the manner and skill of the Indians, are to induce a belief in some occult knowledge or methods about the treatment of disease by simples acquired from the natives. Of course it is well understood that such pretensions are of the very essence of charlatanry, and are successful only with the ignorant and the credulous. But behind these pretences, and as furnishing whatever ground there may be for them, is a very interesting matter of inquiry; about which, however, it is not easy to reach a satisfactory conclusion, because our authorities are quite at variance in their statements and opinions. The Indian doctors, conjurers, or medicine-men were called by the French jongleurs, by the English powwows. Hakluyt describes them as “great majicians, great soothsayers, callers of divils, priests who serve instead of phisitions and chyrurgions.” These native practitioners appear through all our Indian history and in every tribe, including those with which we have most recently been brought into intercourse, under the twofold character of conjuring priests and dispensers of medical agencies. Under either aspect, if they did not assume, they had ascribed to them, the quality of a supernatural agency. More or less of trickery and of real sanitary skill may have manifested themselves in individuals according to the make-up of each one's own mental or moral composition, or the intelligence and shrewdness of his constituency of patients. Some of these patients in the hands of real conjurers passed through a herculean treatment worse than any known disease. In the mean time the jongleur himself had to submit to the severest drafts upon his own vitality, — his strength of nerve, his powers of self-contortion, his feats of skill, and the strain upon his vocal organs in hideous yellings. It