518 A STUDY OF SIOUAN CULTS. 



DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD. 



§ 358. The Hidatsa always lay their dead upon scaffolds. As the 

 Lord of Life is displeased when they quarrel and kill one another, those 

 ■who do so are buried in the earth, that they may be no longer seeu. In 

 this case a bufialo head is laid on the grave, that the herds of buffalo 

 may not keep away, for, if they were to smell the wicked, they might 

 remove and never returu. The good are laid upon scaffolds, that they 

 may be seen by the Lord of Life.^ 



Tlie Crows have no fear of death, but they have a horror of being 

 buried in the grouud.- 



HIDATSA BELIEF AS TO FUTUKE EXISTENCE. 



§ 359. They think that after death they will be restored to the man- 

 sions of their ancestors under ground, from which they are intercepted 

 by a large and rapid watercourse. Over this river, which may be com- 

 pared to the Styx of the ancients, they are obliged to pass on a very 

 narrow footway. Those Indians who have been useful to the nation, 

 such as brave warriors or good hunters, pass over with ease and arrive 

 safely at A-pah-he, or ancient village. But the worthless Indians slip 

 off from the bridge or footway into the stream which ♦ * ♦ hurries 

 them into oblivion.' 



Their faith concerning a future life is this : When a Hidatsa dies hio shade lingers 

 four nights around the camp or village in which he died, and then goes to the lodge 

 of his departed kindred in the Village of the Dead. When he has arrived therr, he 

 is rewarded for his valor, self-denial, and ambition on earth by receiving the same 

 regard in the one place as in the other; for there, as here, the brave man is honored 

 jind the coward despised. Some say that the ghosts of those who commit suicide 

 occupy a separate part of the village, hut that their condition differs in no wise from 

 that of the others. In the next world, human shades hunt and live on the shades of 

 the buffalo and other animals that have here died. There too there are four seasons, 

 hut they come in an inverse order to the terrestrial seasons. During the four nights 

 that the ghost is supposed to linger near his former dwelling, those who disliked or 

 feared the deceased, and do not wish a visit from the shade, scorch with red coals a 

 pair of moccasins, which they leave at the door of the lodge. The smell of the hviru- 

 ing leather, they claim, keeps the ghost o>it ; but the true friends of the dead man 

 take no such precautions. » * » They believe in the existence and advisability 

 of human and other ghosts, yet they seem to have no terror of graveyards an<l but 

 little of mortuary remains. You may frighten children after nightfall by shouting 

 nohidahi (ghost), but wiU not scare the aged.' 



SAPONA CULTS. 



§ 359J. The following account of the religion of the Sapona, a tribe 

 related to the Tutelo, was given in 1729 by Col. William Byrd, of West- 

 over, Va.^ While much of it appears to be the white man's amplitica- 



'Masimilian. Travels * * * in North America, pp. 404, 405. 

 •■Iliid.p. 176. 



^Lt'wis and Clarke's Exped., edited by Allen, vol. 1, p. 280. 



<U. S. (ieol. and Geogr. Surv., Haydcn, Miscell. Publ., No. 7. 1877: Ethnog. and Philoi. of Hidatsa 

 Indians, p. 49. 

 ' Byrd. history of the dividing line (1729), vol. i, 106-108. Koprint : 1866. 



