OCR Text |
Show 404 THE MANITARIES----THEIR FRIENDS AND ENEMIES. When he clears his pipe and shakes the ashes into the fire, it blazes up, doubtless because he puts some gunpowder, or similar combustible, into the pipe. When any person has a painful or a diseased place, the same man puts his pipe upon it and smokes. On these occasions he does not swallow the smoke, as is the Indian custom, but affirms that he can extract the disorder by his smoking, which he pretends to seize with his hand, and to throw into the fire. The division of the year into months is not very dissimilar from that of the Mandans, though I have never been able to obtain two accounts which precisely correspond. But little is to be said of the hunting and war of the Manitaries which has not been already related of the Mandans. They are reported as being very skilful in making the cabri parks, which, in the month of April, they can do in half a day, though they have not made any such for some time past. The skin of the cabri is used for shoes. The Manitaries are at present friendly towards the Whites in the vicinity of the Missouri; but, if a white man happens to encounter one of their war parties in the prairie, he is generally plundered. In the north, on the Red River, they often act in a hostile manner to the Whites and Half-breeds residing there. Their enemies properly so called are the Blackfeet, the Assi-niboins, the Sioux, the Pawnees, the Arikkaras, the Shiennes or Chayennes, the Crees, and the Arrapahos; their allies are the Mandans and the Crows. All these Indians treat the bodies of their slain enemies in the most barbarous manner. Charbonneau remembers that the Manitaries, for several months, kept the body of an Assiniboin, who was killed in the winter, which they daily used as a mark to shoot at. Mutilation is very common among them. Want of feeling towards their prisoners is common to all uncivilized people; the nations of hunters especially do not regard the tortures of living creatures; and the Brazilian savage does not in this respect differ from the North American, and the Gaucho in the south of this continent, or, indeed, from man in a state of nature in every part of the habitable globe. The Manitaries appear to have but a very slight acquaintance with medicine; they mostly have recourse to the drum, the schischikue, and the singing of the medicine men, for the cure of diseases. As a remedy for wounds they burn scented grass {Anthoxanthum odoratum), hold their hands in the smoke, and then, at some distance, over the wound, after which they lay tallow upon it. The cure of some men who recovered after being scalped, and many large scars on the bodies of these Indians, are proofs of the natural vigour of their constitutions. The medicine men have a particular song, without words, which is employed as the last resource to recover a person at the point of death. The magician alone then sings, accompanied by his schischikue. The Manitaries always lay their dead upon stages or scaffolds. As the lord of life is displeased when they quarrel and kill each other, those who do so are buried in the earth, that they |