Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

110 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99
not cure, and there are some against which an Indian doctor is helpless.
But as a rule, a white man's medicine can not help an Indian, just as
Indian medicine is of no use to a white man. He (W.) personally
experienced this."
Although he expresses himself in such a mild way with regard to
white doctors and their medicine, I know that ho secretly holds the
aboriginal medicine men with their paraphernalia and simples as far
more successful and skilled masters, and whenever any siclaiess pre-
vails in his cabin, W. will only call on the Government physician after
weeks of treatment by his own and other medicine men's arts have
brought no results.
Again, although he is fully convinced of the fact that a medicine
man should never impose on the laymen or brag about his superior
knowledge, I know that W. is very conceited, and since the death of
his half brother, Climbing Bear, he considers himself second to none.
He is feared by many, despised by a few, loved by none. .Yet,
because of his accomplishments and his keen intclligeiico, he has been
elected a member of the Cherokee Council so often that he has been in
office for upward of a score of years. Few, if any, on the whole
reserve have had a better "white education"; hardly one of his people
has lived in white communities as long as W. has; yet he is the most
ardent and most conscious of traditionalists.
He is fully aware of his own worth and accomplishments, and there-
fore extremely sensitive to mockery and slight. Unflinciiingly believing
in every bit of Cherokee traditional and ritual lore as he does, I am
sure that many tunes he has by occult means tried to remove from his
path and from this world, those tha t were his avowed or secret enemies.
In his practice he never consciously departs from ritual or tradition,
and most literally and punctiliously follows and observes injunctions
and prescriptions appended to the formulas.
As to his professional honesty, I found several proofs of this being
scant indeed; yet I do not think that his motives were wholly or even
mostly selfish. At times one woidd be inclined to look upon him as
one who believes himself the prophet of a losing cause, and firmly convinced
that all means are allowable to keep the people at large in the
respect and in the awe of the beliefs and the institutions of the past.
His pronounced erotic nature, which is to be discussed later in con-
nection with the experience mentioned above, is imdoubtcdly responsi-
ble for many traits in his behavior; his natural disposition for conceit,
e. g., is considerably enhanced by it.
An activity and a providence, which the more surprise us as they are
totally unknown to his shiftless and happy-go-lucky fellows, he owes,
I feel quite sure, to his training as an adolescent in the Government
boarding school, and to his subsequent stay with white families as a
servant and coachman.