534 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



WAK AND PEACE. • • 



In their preparations for war, and in peace-making, they are strikingly similar. In 

 their treatment of the sick^ barial of the dead and mourning, they are also similar. 



BATHING. 



In their bathing and ablutions, at all seasons of the year, as a part of their religious 

 observances — having separate places for men and women to perform these immersions — 

 they resemble again. And the custom amongst the women of absenting themselves 

 during the lunar influences is exactly consonant to the Mosaic law. This custom of 

 separation is an uniform one amongst the different tribes, as far as I have seen them 

 in their primitive state, and be it Jewish, natural, or conventional, it is an indispensa- 

 ble form with these wild people, who are setting to the civilized world this and 

 many other examples of decency and propriety, only to be laughed at by their wiser 

 neighbors, who, rather than award to the red man any merit for them, have taken 

 exceeding pains to call them but the results of ignorance and superstition. 



So, in nearly every family of a tribe will be found a small lodge, large enough to 

 contain one person, which is erected at a little distance fi-omi the family lodge, and 

 occupied by the wife or the daughter, to whose possession circumstances allot it, where 

 she dwells alone until she is prepared to move back, and in the mean time the touch 

 of her hand or her finger to the chiefs lodge, or his gun, or other article of his house- 

 hold, consigns it to destruction sit once ; and in case of non-conformity to this indis- 

 pensable form, a woman's life may, in some tribes, be answerable for misfortunes that 

 happen to individuals or the tribe in the interim. 



After this season of separation, purification in running water, and anointing, pre- 

 cisely in accordance with tte Jewish command, is requisite before she can enter the 

 family lodge. Such is one of the extraordinary observances amongst these people in 

 their wild state ; but along the frontier, where white people have laughed at them 

 for their forms, they have departed from this, as from nearly everything else that is 

 native and original about them. 



FEASTS AND FASTINGS. 



In their feasts, fastings, and sacrificing, they are exceedingly like those ancient 

 people. Many of them have a feast closely resembling the annual feast of the Jewish 

 passover ; and amongst others, an occasion much like the Israelitish feast of the taber- 

 nacles, which lasted eight days (when history teUs us they carried bundles of willow 

 boughs, and fasted several days and nights), making sacrifices of the first fruits and 

 best of everything, closely resembling the sin-offering and peace-offering of the 

 Hebrews.* 



These and many others of their customs would seem to be decidedly Jewish ; yet 

 it is for the world to decide how many of them, or whether all of them, iiiight be 

 natural to all people, and therefore as well practiced by these people in a state of 

 nature as to have been borrowed from a foreign nation. 



INDIAN CEREMONIALS SIMILAR TO THOSE OF THE JEWS. 



Amongst the list of their customs, however, we meet a number which had their 

 origin, it would seem, in the Jewish ceremonial code, and which are so very peculiar 

 in their forms that it would seem quite improbable, and almost impossible, that two 

 different people should ever have hit upon them alike without some knowledge of 

 each other. These, I consider, go farther than anything else as evidence, and carry, 

 in my mind, conclusive proof that these people are tinctured with Jewish blood, even 

 though the Jewish Sabbath has been lost, and circumcision probably rejected ; and 



* See tlie four days' religious ceremonies of the Mandans, and use of the willow houghs, and saori- 

 flces of fingers, &c., in vol. 1, pp. 159-170; and also the custom of war-chiefs wearing homa on their 

 head-dresses, like the Israelitish chiefs of great renown, vol. 1, p. 104. (Nos. 502 to 507 herein.) 



