108 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 190 



party at which all the girls should appear adorned and painted (C 

 154^155; S 202). 



In some other ceremonies, masked dancers appeared in order to 

 drive away the disease (e.g., JR 13 : 175).^ The medicine man might 

 order this. Those taking part disguised themselves, went and sang 

 near the bed of the sick person, and then paraded through the village 

 while the feast was being prepared for them. They returned to 

 empty the kettle of its migan (C 155; S 202). In one such dance 

 held for the recovery of a patient, the dancers appeared disguised as 

 hunchbacks, wearing wooden masks and carrying sticks. The patient 

 had dreamed about it 2 days before, the intervening time having been 

 spent in preparations. At the end of the dance the medicine man 

 said that all the masks should be hung on the ends of poles and placed 

 over every house and straw men placed at the doors to frighten away 

 the disease and the spirits who brought it (JR 13: 263). Five days 

 before this, on the 5th of February, the medicine man had had pub- 

 lished through the village the necessary prescriptions for shortening 

 the end of the epidemic [see above] (JR 13: 259-261). On the 8th, 

 the chief went through the houses again to publish a new order and 

 to say that the medicine man would not return until the next day. He 

 was sweating and feasting in order to invoke the assistance of the 

 spirits and to make his remedies more efficacious. His prescription, 

 in this case, consisted in taking the bark of ash, spruce, hemlock, and 

 wild cherry, boiling them well in a great kettle and washing the whole 

 body with this concoction. In using this remedy, care had to be taken 

 not to go out of the house barefoot in the evening. This prescription 

 was not for menstruating women. On the 9th, before going to sleep, 

 at least one ma-n [the host] threw some tobacco on his fire and prayed 

 that his house be taken care of. On the 10th, the medicine man re- 

 turned and demanded eight cakes of tobacco and three iish of different 

 species : an atsihiendo, a fish they decoy from the edge of the water, 

 and an eel. Four of the cakes of tobacco he used to make a sacrifice 

 to the spirits, as he had done 2 days before. On the 11th, the chief 

 made a round of all the houses and in a loud voice exhorted the women 

 to take courage and not to allow themselves to be cast down with 

 sorrow over the deaths of their relatives. "Wlien the young men should 

 come bringing some hemp to spin, he said, it was their intention to 

 make weapons to wage war in the spring against the Iroquois, to make 



iBeauchamp (1905: 184-185) aud Fenton (1937: 218-220; 1940 b: 412-416) suggest 

 that masks may have been Introduced to the Iroquois late in the 17th century because they 

 are not mentioned earlier, but not all (Parker 1909 : 181) have agreed. The issue Is 

 wliether the lack of mention in the early 17th-century accounts of the Iroquois means that 

 they had no masks or whetlier it simply means that no one happened to mention them 

 because the trait was already a familiar one to the European observers of Iroquoian cul- 

 tures (see especially Fenton 1937; 1940 b; 1940 c; Keppler 1941; Skinner 1925 a; Speck 

 1949 : 68-109 for descriptions of the False Faces ; for a description of a Wyandot False 

 Face curing ceremony, see Finley 1840 : 58). 



