i66 Field Columbian Museum — Anthropology, Vol. IX. 



icines. These roots were similar to those used in the Sun Dance cere- 

 mony. 



THE FATE OF THE SUN DANCE LODGE. 



As with the Arapaho, the lodge is not supposed to be molested 

 after the termination of the dance. Everything is left as a sacrifice by 

 the tribe to the great medicine-spirit. (See Fig. 103.) The omission 

 by the Cheyenne of the sacrifice of clothing to the center-pole and the 

 lodge in general is in marked variance with the custom of the 

 Arapaho. While no one is supposed to molest the lodge after the 

 ceremony, the Chief Priest may claim the right to take anything 

 from the lodge, bless it, and give it to any one who is in trouble, the 

 gift being supposed to be efficacious in removing the trouble. 



PART III.— PAINTS WORN BY THE DANCERS. 



As the successive events of the ceremony make for progress toward 

 a certain definite result, so the paints also progress in character 

 toward a definite end. Unlike the paints worn in the Arapaho cere- 

 mony, which showed great variation, and which to a considerable ex- 

 tent may be characterized as "dream-paints," those of the Cheyenne, 

 with one or two exceptions about to be noted, were uniform for all the 

 dancers, including, for the greater part of the time, that worn by the 

 Lodge-maker himself. The paint worn before the erection of the 

 altar, that is by the Lodge-maker and his wife when they left the 

 Lone-tipi, and by the dancers themselves when they entered the 

 lodge on the night of its erection, has already been described. It may 

 be repeated here that the white paint worn by the dancers on enter- 

 ing the lodge is in a certain sense of a purifying nature, it covers 

 all disease, bodily imperfections, etc., which, when the paint is re- 

 moved, are washed away with it. 



There is a prescribed method for painting the dancers on each of 

 the four days during which they are supposed to fast. As a matter 

 of fact, however, in neither the ceremony of 1901 nor of 1903 did the 

 ceremony last four days; as a consequence, in the effort to represent 

 all the regular paints before the ceremony closed, a certain amount of 

 confusion resulted. In the ceremony of 1901, not all the pre- 

 scribed paints were represented. All but one were represented in 

 the ceremony of 1903 ; but the time during which each paint was worn 

 was much curtailed. The theoretical scheme of the paints, the days 

 being numbered in accordance with the Cheyenne system, when 



