490 MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
THE SCRATCH STICK. 
When Gen. Crook’s expedition against the Chiricahua Apache 
reached the heart of the Sierra Madre, Mexico, in 1883, it was my good 
fortune to find on the ground in Geronimo’s rancheria two insignificant 
looking articles of personal equipment, to which I learned the Apache 
attached the greatest importance. One of these was a very small piece 
of hard wood, cedar, or pine, about two and a half to three inches long 
and half a finger in thickness, and the other a small section of the cane 
indigenous to the Southwest and of about the same dimensions. The 
first was the scratch stick and the second the drinking reed. 
The rule enjoined among the Apache is that for the first four times 
one of their young men goes out on the warpath he must refrain from 
scratching his head with his fingers or letting water touch his lips. 
How to keep this vow and at the same time avoid unnecessary personal 
discomfort and suffering is the story told by these petty fragments from 
the Apache’s ritual. He does not scratch his head with his fingers; he 
makes use of this scratch stick. He will not let water touch his lips, 
but sucks itinto his throat through this tiny tube. <A long leather cord 
attached both stick and reed to the warrior’s belt and to each other. 
This was all theinformation I was able to obtain of a definite character, 
Whether these things had to be prepared by the medicine-men or by 
the young warrior himself; with what ceremonial, if any, they had to 
be manufactured, and under what circumstances of time and place, I 
was unable to ascertain to my own satisfaction, and therefore will 
not extend my remarks or burden the student’s patience with inco- 
herent statements from sources not absolutely reliable. That the use 
of the scratch stick and the drinking reed was once very general in 
America and elsewhere, and that it was not altogether dissociated from 
ritualistic or ceremonial ideas, may be gathered from the citations 
appended. 
In her chapter entitled ‘‘Preparatory ceremony of the young war- 
rior” Mrs. Emerson says: ‘‘He does not touch his ears or head with 
his hand,” explaining in a foot note, “‘the head was sometimes made a 
sacrificial offering to the sun.”! Tanner relates that the young Ojibwa 
warrior for the “three first times” that he accompanies a war party 
“must never scratch his head or any other part of his body with his 
fingers, but if he is compelled to scratch he must use a small stick.” 
Kohl states that the Ojibwa, while on the warpath, ‘will never sit down 
in the* shade of a tree or scratch their heads; atleast, not with their 
fingers. The warriors, however, are permitted to scratch themselves 
with a piece of wood or a comb.’ Mackenzie states regarding the 
Indians whom he met on the Columbia, in 52° 38/, N. lat., ‘‘instead of a 
' Indian Myths, Boston, 1884, p. 256. 
*Tanner’s Narrative, p. 122. 
* Kitchi-gami, p. 344. 
