IROQUIOS HERBALISM — FENTON 507 



herbalists employ the hemlock as an ingredient in formulae for boils 

 and venereal disease. This is an interesting fact historically, 

 whether or not the plant is a specific for the disease. Seventeenth- 

 century travelers were unable to rediscover the famous tree, because 

 the Laurentians had abandoned their Quebec towns in the intervening 

 decades and the succeeding Algonquians did not employ it as an anti- 

 scorbutic. 



The seventeenth-century Huron and Iroquois distinguished among 

 them shamans who cast and removed spells, clairvoyants who diag- 

 nosed disease or foretold weather and future events or recovered lost 

 objects, and herbalists or apothecaries who administered remedies. 

 Frequently, several roles were combined in a single individual. Here 

 principally the herbalist interests us, although he seldom adminis- 

 tered his simples without a modicum of ritual to impress the ex- 

 pectant patient.® 



Against such competition the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries to 

 New France labored with all their wits and the skills of European 

 civilization. Such medicines as they had brought or they were able 

 to import from their brothers in Europe and the lancet were potent 

 weapons in the conversion of the Indians who took readily to being 

 bled. During the summer and fall of 1636 and throughout the winter 

 of 1637 when a great contagious epidemic leveled the villagers of 

 Huronia, Father Joseph LeMercier wrote : 



Everything was given by count, two or three prunes, or five or six raisins to 

 one patient ; * • * 



Our medicines produced effects which dazzled the whole country, and yet I 

 leave you to imagine what sort of medicines they were ! A little bag of senna 

 served over 50 persons ; and they asked us for it on every side ; * * * 7 



Undismayed, the Huron shamans combated this success with dreams 

 of visits to an inhospitable French heaven, with tales that the French 

 are sorcerers, and that the faithful before the epidemic had believed 

 only to get tobacco; and the missionaries had no sooner gotten the 

 Indians to acquiesce to forsaking their dream feasts to avert the wrath 

 of God in the pestilence than an unusually adept shaman ordered the 

 False-faces to purge the cabins of disease. LeMercier continues : 



Towards evening [8th February, 1637; at Ossosan^, great town of the Bear 

 band of Huron], the Captain AndaMach went through the cabins to publish a new 

 order of the sorcerer Tsondacouann^. This personage was at Onnentisati, and 

 was not to return until the next day. He was carrying on his preparations, 

 that is to say, certain sweatings and feasts, in order to invoke the assistance of 



"For a compendium of the principal sources on shamans and medical practice among 

 the Huron at this period, consult Kinletz, W. Vernon, The Indians of the Western Great 

 Lakes, 1650-1760, Occas. Contrib. Mus. Anthrop., Univ. Michigan, No. 10, pp. 131-160, 

 1940. 



'' Le Jeune's Relation, 1637, in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Reuben Gold 

 Thwaites, ed., vol. 13, pp. 113, 115, Cleveland, 1898. 



