“SKUNK MEETINGS”—DANCES—MARRIAGE. 381 
ers, four of them caper around like clowns in a circus, chasing each other, 
chanting, brandishing rattlesnakes in their hands, twining them about their 
arms, and suffering them to bite their hands. It is supposed that they have 
either plucked their fangs, or have not allowed them to drink any water for 
a number of days beforehand, which is said to render them harmless. But 
the credulous savages believe them invulnerable, and they eagerly press 
forward with their offerings, in return for which the wizards give them com- 
plete immunity from snake-bites for the space of a year. The younger 
Indians, somewhat indoctrinated in American ideas, have become sadly 
skeptical and heretical in regard of these dances, which they contemptuously 
term ‘‘ 
skunk meetings”, to the great scandal of their pious elders. 
Formerly the step danced by the men on most occasions might not 
inappropriately be called the piston-rod dance, as they seemed intent on 
driving their legs alternately into the earth. Of late they have adopted 
from the Mono the grand walk-round, in a single circle, men and women 
together, and with an entirely different and less violent step. 
Although they have a form of war-dance, and the Chukchansi warred 
a great deal with the Pohonichi of old, as a race they are peaceful, and they 
take no scalps. But of late years, under the aggravation of aggressions by 
white men, they have adopted from the warlike Mono the red paint (instead 
of black), which has so terrible a significance in a savage dance, and the 
appearance of which always makes the frontiersmen uneasy. From them, 
also, they have learned to talk of war, to bluster, to threaten darkly, to hold 
secret conclaves far within the depths of the mountains, from which the 
whites were rigidly excluded. But nothing has come of them. These things 
are foreign to the peaceful Yokuts, and the Monos, though they are sup- 
posed to have attempted it many times, have never succeeded in screwing 
their neighbors’ courage up to the sticking-point of joining them in a war 
on the whites. 
Nowadays 520 or $30 in gold is paid for a wife, but this only for a 
virgin. For a widow or a maid suspected of unchastity no man will pay 
anything or make any presents; and it is due to the Yokuts to state that a 
pioneer who has lived among them twenty-one years affirms that before the 
arrival of the Americans they were comparatively virtuous. Dr. E. B. Bate- 
