Creation Myths of Primitive America Part 76

There are three causes of sickness. The first is when a good yapaitu spirit is angry with a man and strikes him with his spirit point; second, when a bad spirit puts his missile in a man and makes him sick (the spirit in this case does it at his own instance); third, when an evil spirit sends his missile into a man at the request or prayer of a doctor.

When the dokos or missile that has been sent into a man is drawn out by the spirit which a.s.sists the curing doctor, the doctor forces the dokos to tell what yapaitu sent it, and at the prayer of what doctor.

But the dokos does not tell the truth in every case, and sometimes accuses the wrong person. It is very difficult, therefore, to know surely what doctor is guilty of making a man sick. A doctor, if the spirit is in him when he comes to see a sick man, is able to look right through the body of the patient and see where the dokos lies.

Sometimes he is not able to draw it out; he can see where the dokos is, that is all; but if his spirit were stronger than the one who put it there, he could draw it out and cure the patient.

There is danger, however, in drawing out a very powerful dokos by sucking, for when it is coming out of the sick man's body it may be sent down through the mouth of the doctor into his body by the spirit who owns it, and the doctor is killed in this way.

A doctor may have twenty or thirty spirits, but he rarely calls on more than two or three, and it is seldom that any great number are fitted to work together in a given case.

The office of doctor is very dangerous, especially if the doctor is powerful. If he has many spirits to help him, each has to be pleased in its own special way; each has its own food, prefers certain kinds, and dislikes others. The doctor must not eat food hateful to his spirits: if he does, he is liable to be killed. A man who has twenty or thirty spirits is greatly limited, therefore, in his manner of living.

Some spirits do not like venison, others do not eat fish; the doctor who commands these spirits must eat neither venison nor fish, and so with other kinds of food in the case of other spirits.

The man who seeks to be a doctor cannot choose his spirits; they come to him; he cannot refuse to receive them, and must live in a way to please them.

Every dokos can be extracted from a sick man's body by the aid of a spirit stronger than the one who put it in.

Among other spirits, doctors have the spirit of the sun, the spirits of stars and the clouds to help them. These are good spirits. Sedit's spirit cannot help doctors much. They call it sometimes, but it doesn't do much; it has not the power. Suku (dog) is very powerful and bad. If Suku wants to kill a man, he does it quickly. A doctor who has the Suku spirit in his service is great. If a man has been made sick by Suku, he will vomit blood, or bleed from his nostrils all the time.

The Suku spirit is a good one to send to kill people. Chir (the sucker fish) is an evil spirit too. When Chir wants to kill a man, it makes him giddy and crazy right away. He becomes senseless and dies, unless some doctor cures him, and generally doctors can do nothing against Chir. The Chir sickness is the worst that spirits bring. It is called chiruntowi, sickness from the sucker. The man who has it dies; he cannot tell where he is troubled; he grows dizzy and senseless. No one can cure him unless by great luck. Something tried by some doctor may save him--just by chance, just because it happens so. Kele is also an evil spirit. He has a song, the same which his two daughters sang on the mountain top (see the tale "Kele and Sedit"), and which Sedit heard far away in the west. This is a poison song, and draws people after it. Kele is here now, suppose, in Cottonwood or in Tehama, and sees a man up at Yreka. Kele sings, and the song goes as straight as a string to the man. It draws him and draws him; he is drawn as water is when people pump it. The man must follow the song; he has got to do so, he cannot help himself, he is sick; his sickness is called lubeluntowi (sickness from lubelis). The man will keep going and going and going; he will not know what makes him go. Suppose I am listening to Kele's song. I go, and it is the song that draws me. I hear it; but n.o.body else does. The spirits of the Kele girls drew Sedit to them; he couldn't help himself, he couldn't stop; he had to go, and he never went home again; he had to stay up at Kele's. The spirits of Chir and Kele always make people crazy.

Many Wintu women lose their minds, and are killed by Kele's sons. Many Wintu men have been lost through Kele's daughters. Suppose I am out here in the wood, I see a woman coming, a nice woman. She stops and talks; I talk to her. If I have sense in me, I look at her toes to see if she is one of those Kele women. If she is, she has a bunch of hair on the tip of her foot, and if I see it, I say right there, "You are a Kele!" At these words she will leave me and run. When ten feet away, she will turn to a mountain wolf, and I shall see that Kele running away very fast.

Suppose some woman is out in the woods. She is thinking of some man that she likes, and right away she sees the very man she is thinking of. He is coming to meet her. He comes up and asks, "Where are you going?" The woman is glad to see him. She tells. He carries her to the mountain, and never again will that woman be seen by her friends or by others. It was one of Kele's sons who took the form of the man she was thinking of, so as to entice her away and destroy her. If the woman has sense she will look down at the foot of the stranger, see the tuft of hair, and say, "You are Kele; go off." He turns to a wolf on the spot, and runs away to the mountain. All Wintus went barefoot in old times, and this tuft could be seen, if a person had sense enough left to look for it. As every one wears shoes or moccasins now, it might not be easy to find it. But to this day the Keles lead people astray.

All the Wintus know them, and are afraid.

They live on Wenempuidal, a high mountain near the left bank of the Little Sacramento. Dekipuiwakut, a small creek, comes down from Kele's Mountain and falls into the Sacramento. White men call it Hazel Creek.

The Keles live at the head of this creek. The whole mountain is their sweat-house. They are up there now, and almost any night you may hear them howling on the mountain when the evil brothers are going home.

The following four spirit songs are from my Wintu collection. Two I give in the original, with literal translation; the other two, in translation only. The lightning song, by referring to the connection between lightning and the sucker, which has one of the most formidable spirits, enables us to suspect why the sucker is so much feared by Wintus. In the Olelbis song, the great one above is the cloud-compeller, as in cla.s.sic mythology. The tanning is described in "Olelbis." In the Hau song, the celestial Hau is described as travelling along the Milky Way. This is the Wintu comment on the text.

Many readers will agree, I think, that the Polar Star song, the fourth, is composed on a scale truly immense. The lightning song sounds wonderfully like an extract from the Sanscrit, "Rig Veda."

SONGS OF SPIRITS

1. Walokin tsawi, Lightning's Song.

Minom toror weril chirchak.u.m saia Dune werem winwar dun bohemum.

I bear the sucker-torch to the western tree-ridge.

Look at me first born (and) greatest.

2. Olelben tsawi, the Song of Olelbis.

Olel bohema ni tsululi kahum sika ni.

I am great above. I tan the black cloud (there).

3. Song of Hau (red fox).

"On the stone ridge east I go.

On the white road I, Hau, crouching go.

I, Hau, whistle on the road of stars."

4. Song of Waida Werris (the Polar Star).

"The circuit of earth which you see, The scattering of stars in the sky which you see, All that is the place for my hair."[5]

[5] Hair in Indian mythology, as in other mythologies, is the equivalent of rays of light when connected with the sun and with planet luminaries.

THE YANAS

As a preface to the few myths of the Yanas which have survived, I beg to offer the following words touching this ill-fated people:

Previous to August, 1864, the Yanas numbered about three thousand, as I have been informed on the sound authority of reliable white men.

Taking the names and population of villages given me by surviving Indians, I should say that this estimate is not too large.

During the second half of August, 1864, the Yanas were ma.s.sacred, with the exception of a small remnant.

The Indians of California, and especially those of Sacramento Valley, were among the most harmless of human beings. Instead of being dangerous to settlers, they worked for them in return for fair wages.

The Yanas were distinguished beyond others for readiness to earn money. White men occupied in tilling land knew their value, and employed them every season in haymaking and harvesting.

At the present day the Wintus, and the few Yanas that are left, go down the valley and labor during the season in hop-fields and vineyards.

Why were the Yanas killed?

The answer is as follows: Certain Indians lived, or rather lurked, around Mill Creek, in wild places somewhat east of Tehama and north of Chico. These Mill Creek Indians were fugitives; outlaws from various tribes, among others from the Yanas. To injure the latter, they went to the Yana country about the middle of August, 1864, and killed two white women, Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Jones. Four children also were left for dead by them, but the children recovered. After the murders the Mill Creeks returned home unnoticed, carrying various plundered articles with them.

Two parties of white men were formed at once to avenge the women and four children. Without trying in any way to learn who the guilty were, they fell upon the Yanas immediately, sparing neither s.e.x nor age.

They had resolved to exterminate the whole nation. The following few details will show the character of their work:--

At Millville, twelve miles east of Redding, white men seized two Yana girls and a man. These they shot about fifty yards from the village hotel. At another place they came to the house of a white woman who had a Yana girl, seven or eight years of age. They seized this child, in spite of the woman, and shot her through the head. "We must kill them, big and little," said the leader; "nits will be lice."

A few miles north of Millville lived a Yana girl named Eliza, industrious and much liked by those who knew her. She was working for a farmer at the time. The party stopped before this house, and three of the men entered it. "Eliza, come out," said one of them; "we are going to kill you." She begged for her life. To the spokesman, who had worked for her employer some time before, she said: "Don't kill me; when you were here I cooked for you, I washed for you, I was kind to you; I never asked pay of you; don't kill me now."

Her prayers were vain. They took Eliza, with her aunt and uncle, a short distance from the house and shot the three. My informant counted eleven bullets in Eliza's breast.

After this murder the party took a drink and started; but the leader, in killing Eliza, said, "I don't think that little squaw is dead yet."

So he turned back and smashed in her skull with his musket. The man who counted the bullet holes in her bosom, himself a white man, saw her after the skull was broken. He knew the girl well, and gave me these details.

Another party went to a farm on Little Cow Creek where they found three Yana men threshing hayseed in a barn. The farmer was not at home. They killed the three Indians, and went to the house. The three wives of the men killed in the barn were there and began to scream.

The farmer's wife hurried out with a quilt, threw it around the three women, and stood in front of them, holding the ends of the quilt. "If you kill them you will kill me," said she, facing the party. The woman was undaunted, and, as it happened, was big with child. To kill, or attempt to kill, under those conditions, would be a deed too ghastly for even such heroes; so they went away, swearing that they would kill the "squaws" later. These three Indian women were saved and taken beyond the reach of danger by two white men.

And so the "avengers" of Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Jones continued. At one place they killed an Indian woman and her infant, at another three women. In the town of Cottonwood they killed twenty Yanas of both s.e.xes. The most terrible slaughter in any place was near the head of Oak Run, where three hundred Yanas had met at a religious dance. These were attacked in force, and not a soul escaped. The slaughter went on day after day till the entire land of the Yanas was cleared. The few who escaped were those who happened to be away from home, outside their country, and about twelve who were saved by Mr. Oliver and Mr.

Disselhorst, both of Redding. The whole number of surviving Yanas of pure and mixed blood was not far from fifty.

Some time after the b.l.o.o.d.y work was done it was discovered that the Mill Creek outlaws had killed Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Jones, and that the Yanas were innocent. The Mill Creeks were left unpunished.

My inquiries as to how civilized men could commit such atrocities found the following answers:--