608 KEPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1890. 



The next operation on each suspended candidate is thus described; 



Surrounded by imps and demons as they appear, a dozen or more, who seem devis- 

 ing means for his exquisite agony, gather around him when one of the number ad- 

 vances toward him in a sneering manner and commences turning him round with a 

 pole. This done gently at first is gradually increased, when the brave fellow whose 

 proud spirit can control its agony no longer, bursts out in the most lamentable aud 

 heart rending cries that the human voice is caxnxble of producing, crying forth a 

 prayer to the Great Spirit to support and protect him in this great trial. In this con- 

 dition he is turned faster and faster until, by fainting, his voice falters and he hangs 

 apparently a lifeless corpse. * When brought to this alarming and frightful condition, 

 when his tongue is distended from his mouth, and his medicine bag, which he has 

 affectionately and superstitiously clung to with his left hand, has dropped to the 

 ground, the signal is given to the men on top of the lodge, when they carefully lower 

 him to the ground. 



In this helpless condition he lies like a loathsome corpse to look at. One of the 

 bystanders advances and pulls out the pins from the breasts or shoulders, thereby 

 disengaging him from the cords by which he has been hung up, but leaving all the 

 others with their weights hanging to his flesh. 



In this condition lie lies for six or eight minutes, until he gets strength to rise, for 

 no one is allowed to assist him. 



As soon as he is able to drag his body around the lodge he crawls, with the weights 

 still hanging to his body, to where an Indian, hatchet in hand, sits behind a dried 

 buffalo skull, and here, in the most earnest aud humble manner, by holding up 

 the little finger of the left hand to the Great Spirit, he expresses to him in a brief 

 speech his willingness to sacrifice it ; then he lays it on the buffalo skull, and the 

 other chops it off near the hand with a blow of the hatchet. 



Sometimes more than one linger is sacrificed, and no treatment of the wound is 

 permitted. 



As I have intimated before, I have witnessed something of these 

 ceremonies. I had been some years on the upper Missouri before I 

 became aware of the existence of such rites, and my first knowledge of 

 them was secured through the perusal of Gatlin's works. When I read 

 of them I asked some white men who had lived many years in the 

 country and in the same village with the Maudans, but they declared 

 they knew nothing of them, and they even doubted the trustworthiness 

 of the pictures. Had I been one of the doubting know-alls, how easily 

 could I have cast another stone at the prostrate Catlin. Such is the 

 value of negative evidence. But in time I found some old Mandans to 

 consult. These put their astonished hands over their open mouths and 

 groaned in wonder when they beheld the etchings. I was promised a 

 vision of the ceremonies on the following summer if I were still in the 

 country. Some time next year, the summer of I860, 1 was duly notified 

 that the ceremonies had begun, but no one could have told in advance 

 when they were to begin, for none knew but the medicine men, and they 

 were not supposed to know when Numalc-machani, the Mandan Adam, 

 would visit the village and open the rites. I lived then some sixteen 

 miles from the Mandan village, and was so hampered with my duties 

 when the news arrived that I was unable to set out until after midnight 

 on the third night of the ceremonies, and I was able to witness only a 

 part of the fourth day's performance. Among other things, I saw the 



