A FURTHER QUEST FOR IROQUOIS MEDICINES 



By WILLIAM N. FENTON 

 Associate Anthropologist, Bureau of American Ethnology 



During several seasons of ethnological field work among the Seneca 

 Indians of the western part of New York State for Yale University, 

 and while teaching at the Allegany School of Natural History in 

 1938, I collected plants which the Senecas employ in their medicines. 

 This information will fit into a comprehensive work on Iroquois 

 medicines for which the late F. W. Waugh, of the National Museum 

 of Canada, began assembling materials in 1912. This year it seemed 

 advisable to widen our horizon to include other Iroquois reserva- 

 tions in New York and Canada. Waugh had worked some of them, 

 and we hoped that an informant would be alive here and there to 

 review his notes. Before setting out for the field we had completed 

 a paper on suicide, and since we had found cases of lovelorn Iroquois 

 women poisoning themselves with waterhemlock when their husbands 

 deserted them, we were naturally on the alert for new cases. The 

 plant had been mentioned as early as 1632 by Father Sagard among 

 the Hurons, and we wondered whether the modern Mohawks and 

 Hurons could tell us more about the "fatal root" which the Jesuits 

 spelled Andachienrra (fig. 99). 



With these rather melancholy objectives in mind we commenced 

 field work on the Allegany Reservation at Salamanca, N. Y., in 

 early July. Mrs. Fenton and the writer's sister, Miss Frances E. 

 Fenton, a botanist, accompanied the expedition. Finding that 

 Josephine Jimmerson, a herbalist at Shongo, had devoted most of 

 her 77 years to midwifery so that childbirth interested her more than 

 suicide, we commenced recording experiences in another activity 

 borderlining medicinal practice. Childbirth proved a fertile line of 

 inquiry during the summer. 



We next moved down river to Cornplanter Reservation below the 

 Pennsylvania State line. At "Burnt-house," the site of Cornplanter's 

 village about 1800, we worked with two of his descendants, Charles 

 Gordon and Harvey Jacobs, who still occupy the small grant on the 

 west bank of the Alleghany River above Kinzua, "fish-on-spear." 

 Jacobs learned his medicines from his grandmothers, who showed him 

 the plants while going through the bushes berrying. Although his 

 approach to therapeutics is fundamentally Seneca, years of trading 

 herbs and peddling remedies among the whites of surrounding towns 

 has earned him the title of "Indian doctor," which he has endeavored 



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