FANATIC EXERCISES—THE MOUNTAINEERS. 241 
Spirit of the West”. Among my vocabularies this is the only instance in 
California where the word for the Supreme Being denotes “spirit”; it is 
everywhere else “man”, Thus the Trinity Winttin say Bo-hi’-mi Wi-ta 
(The Great Man). They have nothing that can be considered a religious 
ceremony, unless it is one of their fanatic dances in the assembly chamber, 
wherein they act in an extraordinary manner, running around naked, leaping 
and whooping like demons in the execrable smudge, and heat, and stench, 
until they are reeking with perspiration, when they clamber up the center- 
pole and run and plunge neck and heels into the river. Sometimes they fall 
in a swoon, like the plantation negroes in a revival when they are affected 
with “the power”, and lie unconscious for two or three days. I cannot 
believe this isany religious frenzy, but simply the exhaustion resulting from 
their savage passion for the dance, combined perhaps with asphyxia brought 
on by the hellish stink of the sweat-house. Doubtless, also, they are subject 
to a contagious exaltation from the heat of the atmosphere, something like 
that described by Lady Montague as a sensation of the Turkish bath. 
The Trinity Winttn have a few customs different from those of the 
main body. For instance, the Tien-Tien take no scalps, wherein they 
resemble rather their neighbors, the Hup4é, with whom they intermarried. 
All of them, admonished by the same lesson that nature herself obeys in 
constructing her ancient Gothic, the yellow pine, to resist the weight of the 
snow, build lodges sharply conical, composed of bark and poles. They 
have therefore freer ventilation, and the features of their occupants are not 
so drawn and smoke-burnt in old age as those of the dwellers in the over- 
grown Dutch ovens of the lowlands. Being mountaineers, they are less 
sensual and adulterous than the Sacramento tribes, and are more faithful in 
marriage. A miner of ’49 told me that the Normok of Hay Fork were 
anciently a splendid race, tall and well formed, and that they might almost 
be called a tribe of Anaks, not a few of them weighing 200 and 220 pounds. 
It appears that these mountaineers added the sling to their weapons, 
and that their lusty arms could propel a pebble out of it further and with 
more deadly effect than they could project an arrow. There are miners 
living yet on the Fork who have had painful demonstration of this fact 
made on their own persons. ‘To capture deer they construct long lines of 
16525¢ 
