ATO MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
The medicine-men of the Apacne do not assume to live upon food 
different from that used by the laity. There are such things as sacred 
feasts among the tribes of North America—as, for example, the feast 
of stewed puppy at the sun dance of the Sioux—but in these all people 
share. 
In themortuary ceremonies of the medicine-men there is a difference 
of degree, but not of kind. The Mohave, however, believe that the 
iedicine-men go to a heaven of their own. They also believe vaguely 
in four different lives after this one. 
Cabeza de Vaca says that the Floridians buried their ordinary dead, 
but burned their medicine-men, whose incinerated bones they preserved 
and drank in water.' ‘After they [the medicine-men and women of 
the Dakota| have four times run their career in human shape they are 
annihilated.”? Schultze says that the medicine-men of the Sioux and 
the medicine-women also, after death ‘*may be transformed into wild 
beasts.” 
Surgeon Smart shows that among other offices entrusted to the med- 
icine-men of the Apache was the reception of distinguished strangers.* 
Long asserts that the medicine-men of the Otoe, Omaha, and others 
along the Missouri pretended to be able to converse with the fetus in 
utero and predict the sex.! Nothing of that kind has ever come under 
my notice. Adair says that the medicine-men of the Cherokee would 
not allow snakes to be killed.° The Apache will not let snakes be killed 
within the limits of the camp by one of their own people, but they will 
not only allow a stranger to kill them, but request him to do so. They 
made this request of me on three occasions. 
Several of the most influential medicine-men whom I have known 
were blind, among others old Na-ta-do-tash, whose medicine hat fig- 
ures in these pages. Whether this blindness was the result of old 
age or due to the frenzy of dancing until exhausted in all seasons I am 
unable to conjecture. Schultze says of the shamans of Siberia: ‘This 
artificial frenzy has such a serious effect upon the body, and more par- 
ticularly the eyes, that many of the shamans become blind; a cireum- 
stance which enhances the esteem in which they are held.” Some of 
the medicine-men of Peru went blind from overexertion in their dances, 
although Gomara assigns as areason that it was from fear of the demon 
with whom they talked. ‘ Y aun algunos se quiebran los ojos para 
semejante hablar [i. e., talk with the devil]; y creo que lo hacian de 
miedo, porque todos ellos se atapan los ojos cuando hablan con el.” 
Dunbar tells us that the medicine-men of the Pawnee swallowed 
arrows and knives, and had also the trick of apparently killing a man 
! Ternaux-Compans, vol. 7, p. 110. 
2 Schultze, Fetichism, New York, 1885, p. 49. 
3 Smithsonian Report for 1867. 
4 Long's Expedition, Philadelphia, 1823, p. 258. 
5 Hist. of the American Indians, p. 238. 
® Schultze, Fetichism, New York, 1885, p. 52. 
7 Hist. de las Indias, p. 282. 
a, 
