THE SO-CALLED CALIFORNIA ''DIGGERSr 211 



Once a year one of these sweat dances was followed by a burn- 

 ing of baskets, at wliich time the baskets that were not needed by 

 the people of the village were heaped together and set on fire, 

 the Indians dancing, laughing, and howling while the flames de- 

 stroyed a good part of their year's work. It was a custom for 

 which I have not been able to find their reason, " Indian have 

 good time then," they say, when you inquire into the reason for 

 this ceremony. 



This tribe had their medicine men, whose treatment consisted 

 in the use of herbs, magnetic motions, and rubbing, the sweat and 

 cold plunge, and the sucking process disagreeable enough, one 

 would say, for the operating healer, when it is explained that he 

 claimed to suck from the diseased part all malignant disease, and 

 would spend consecutive hours in this loathsome practice of his 

 art, spitting out of his mouth the poison drawn from the afflicted 

 part. 



This tribe of Indians were and are still exceedingly supersti- 

 tious. If anything unusual took place in their village, such as a 

 number of deaths closely following each other, every Indian 

 would move camp : or, when one of their number met his death 

 in some unknown way, they believed that the Bad Spirit was the 

 cause and they could not leave the place quickly enough. 



There is a beautiful fresh-water lake in the Sierra Nevada 

 Mountains which years ago was a great fishing place for these 

 Indians. One day a large party had gathered there to camp and 

 to fish. It was near night when two young Indians fell from 

 their canoe and were drowned without the others seeing them. 

 They saw the empty canoe and the disturbed water, and one In- 

 dian saw a face which he declared to be that of the Bad Spirit. 

 They fled from the place that night, not even stopping to search 

 for the bodies of their companions. They have never fished there 

 since, for they believe that if a drop of water from that lake could 

 touch them they would die in the same way. 



I was much interested in what we must call their religious be- 

 lief as shown in their burial customs and the manner of mourning 

 for their dead. Because they were savages shall we call it super- 

 stitious imagination ? It is certain that they believed in a future 

 life. They also believed in a Great Spirit as well as a good and 

 a bad one, and had distinct personal conceptions of their gods. 

 Thus they worshiped the sun because they believed the Great 

 Spirit was making what they called the happy hunting ground 

 there. After an Indian was dead and buried, if you asked his 

 people where he had gone, they would point to the sun. It was 

 their heaven. Before the white man came among these Indians 

 they burned their dead. Whatever a dead man had owned was 

 destroyed with him, that he might have it when he reached the 



