BoniKK.] 



Til 1C MEDICINE HAT. 



581 



Nan-ta-do-tash explained tbat the characters on the medicine liat 

 meant: A, cknuls; B, rainbow; C, hail; E, morning star; F, the God of 

 Wind, with his lungs; (!, the black &quot; kaii&quot;; II, great stars or suns. 



&quot;Kan&quot; is the name given to their principal gods. The appearance 

 of the kan himself and of the tail of the hat suggest the centipede, an 

 important animal god of the Apache. The old man said that the figures 

 represented the powers to which he appealed for aid in his &quot;medicine 

 and the kan upon whom he called for help. There were other doctors 

 with other medicines, but he used none but those of which he was going 

 to speak to me. 



Flo. 440. Apaclio war hminot. 



When an Apache or other medicine-man is in full regalia he ceasesVj 

 to be a man, but becomes, or tries to make his followers believe that he I 

 has become, the power he represents. I once heard this asserted in a 

 very striking way while I was with a party of Apache young men who 

 had led me to one of the sacred caves of their people, in which we, came 

 across a great quantity of ritualistic paraphernalia of all sorts. 



&quot;We used to stand down here,&quot; they said, u and look up to the top 

 of the mountain and see the kan come down.&quot; This is precisely what 

 the people living farther to the south told the early Spanish missiona 

 ries. 



