216 DAKOTA GRAMMAR, TEXTS, AND ETHNOGRAPHY. 
Christianity brought to them by the missionaries, he himself would be true 
to his ancestral faith. © Under all ordinary providences, Artemas thinks he 
should have so lived and died. 
But when the trouble came in 1862, he found himself at the ferry, 
without gun or war-club, when Captain Marsh’s men were fired upon and 
nearly half of them killed, and because he too was wounded there, he was 
imprisoned. ‘This change of circumstances produced a change of life. 
With the younger men he learned to read and write, became a Christian, 
and was elected elder or leader of the Red Wing class, while in prison at 
Davenport, lowa. This place he filled with great credit to himself and 
profit to others. 
It was during the last winter of their imprisonment that the question 
of conjuring came before them in its moral and religious aspects. Will 
Christianity grapple successfully with the customs of the fathers? Will it 
modify or abolish this system of Dakota conjuring ? 
Among all the nations of men disease and death are common. Heathens 
die as fast as Christians, perhaps faster. And when sickness comes into a 
family it would be inhuman not to make some efforts to alleviate and cure. 
This feeling belongs to our humanity. It is greatly influenced and shaped, 
but not created, by the Christian religion. 
Among the Dakotas, and probably all Indian tribes, the method of 
treating the sick is that known to us as powwowing or conjuring. Disease, 
they say, comes from the spirit world. The gods are offended by acts of 
omission or commission, and the result is that some spirit of animal, bird, 
or reptile is sent, by way of punishment, and the man is taken sick. The 
process of recovering must accord with the theory of disease. It will not 
be met by roots and herbs, but by incantations. Hence the Indian doctor 
must be a wakay man; that is, he must be inhabited by spiritual power 
which will enable him to deliver others from the power of spirits. The 
process includes chants and prayers and the rattling of the sacred gourd 
shell. 
From the commencement of the Dakota mission we had never taken 
any fancy to powwowing. It seemed to us that such terrible screeching, 
groaning, singing, rattling, and sucking would make a well man sick rather 
than a sick man well. This was education. An Indian did not think so. 
But, soberly, we thought it was not a civilized and Christian way of ap- 
proaching a sick person. 
at, —mg 
