BOURKE. ] MEDICINE SHIRTS AND SASHES. 593 
as was the case. I had obtained from cliff dwellings, sacred caves, and 
other places beads of tale, of chalchihuitl, and of shell, pieces of erys- 
tal and other things, sacred in the eyes of the Apache, and these I was 
compelled to barter for the information here given. 
The medicine shirts of the Apaches, several of which are here repre- 
sented, do not require an extended description. The symbolism is 
different for each one, but may be generalized as typical of the sun, 
moon, stars, rainbow, lightning, snake, clouds, rain, hail, tarantula, 
centipede, snake, and some one or more of the “kan” or gods. 
The medicine sashes follow closely in pattern the medicine shirts, 
being smaller in size only, but with the same symbolic decoration. 
Similar ornamentation will be found upon the amulets (ditzi), made of 
lightning-struck pine or other wood. All of these are warranted, among 
other virtues, to screen the wearer from the arrows. lances, or bullets 
of the enemy. In this they strongly resemble the salves and other 
means by which people in Europe sought to obtain ‘magical impene- 
trability.”. The last writer to give receipts for making such salves, 
ete., that I can recall, was Etmiiller, who wrote in the early years of 
the seventeenth century. 
Fic. 448.—Apache medicine sash. 
Such as the reader can imagine the medicine-man to be from this 
description of his paraphernalia, such he has been since the white man 
first landed in America. Never desirous of winning proselytes to his 
own ideas, he has held on to those ideas with a tenacity never sus- 
pected until purposely investigated. The first of the Spanish writers 
seem to have employed the native terms for the medicine-men, and we 
come across them as cemis or zemis, bohiti, pachuaci, and others; but 
soon they were recognized as the emissaries of Satan and the preachers 
of witchcraft, and henceforth they appear in the documents as ‘“ hechi- 
cheros” and * brujos” almost exclusively. ‘‘Tienan los Apaches pro- 
fetas 6 adivinos que gozan de la mas alta estimacion. Esos adivinos 
pratican la medicina lamas rudimental, laaplicacion de algunas yerbas y 
esto acompanado de ceremonias y cantos supersticiosos.”! Pimentel 
seems to have derived his information from Cordero, a Spanish officer 
who had served against the Apache at various times between 1770 and 
1795, and seemed to understand them well. 
“There was no class of persons who so widely and deeply influenced 
the culture and shaped the destiny of the Indian tribes as their priests. 
In attempting to gain a true conception of the race’s capacities and 
! Pimentel, Lenguas Indigenas de México, vol. 3, pp. 498, 499. 
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