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Each lodge held a gens, or family connection, whose beds of raw buffalo hide, stretched on poles, were ranged around the circumference of the building, while by each stood a post on which hung shields, lances, bows, quivers, medicine-bags, and masks formed of the skin of a buffalo's head, with the horns attached, to be used in the magic buffalo dance.
Behind came the elders, with medicine-bags of rattlesnake skin streaming from their shoulders and long strings of bears' claws hanging from neck and wrist. They were dressed in buckskin, garnished with porcupine quills, and wore moccasins of buffalo hide, with the hair dangling from the heel. In the belt of each was a skull-cracker a sort of sling stone with a long handle and a war-hatchet.
This was unanswerable, and no one spoke, the Indians going off to bury their dead companions, which they did simply by finding a suitable crevice in the depths of the ravine near which they had been slain, laying them in side by side, with their medicine-bags hung from their necks, their weapons ready to their hands, and their buffalo robes about them, all ready for their use in the happy hunting-grounds.
He at once hunted until he found one, and obtained its skin for a bag. Rudolph and Kitty looked with awe upon many of the rare medicine-bags of the tribe, though they were never on any account allowed to touch them. Indeed, Kitty had managed to make a rough little one for Rudolph, dotted with clumps of beads, and he wore it next his heart with secret pride.
The mode of killing a man with one of these medicine-bags is to thrust it at him; he falls like dead, but a second thrust of the bag restores him to life. A ceremony witnessed by the castaway John R. Jewitt during his captivity among the Indians of Nootka Sound doubtless belongs to this class of customs.
But in time these new impressions were obliterated; medicine-bags, flints and steels, the use of which had been forbidden, were brought into use; dogs were reared, women and children beaten as before; and the Shawanoe Prophet was despised."
He remained till midwinter, catechizing and baptizing, and waging war so successfully against the Indian sorcerers, that medicine-bags were thrown away, and charms and incantations were supplanted by prayers.
For a curious account of medicine-bags and fetich-worship among the Algonquins of Gaspe, see Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspesie, Chap. Indian belief recognizes also another and very different class of beings. Besides the giants and monsters of legendary lore, other conceptions may be discerned, more or less distinct, and of a character partly mythical.
CHEV. RAMSAY, Philos. Princ. of Nat. and Rev. Relig., vol ii. p. 8. "In this form, not only the common objects above enumerated, but gems, metals, stones that fell from heaven, images, carved bits of wood, stuffed skins of beasts, like the medicine-bags of the North American Indians, are reckoned as divinities, and so become objects of adoration.
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