Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

114 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99
his cure to him, Jo.'s reaction is primarily, if not wholly, one of
fiendish glee at the fact that he has humiliated a competing medicine
man; the humane satisfaction of having rid a sulTerer of his pain,
which is never absent with any of the other medicine men, has no
part in Jo.'s feelings.
Is it necessary to say which one, of all Cherokee practitioners, is
most cordially hated by Jo.? And who most fiercely returns the
compliment? W., of course. Both of them councillors and ardent
with political ambition and passion, neither of them honest as a
practitioner nor as a man; both of them too well educated to be good
Cherokee, and neither of them educated enough to know what to
take and what to leave of white culture, they often meet on the road
to the same objective, and always as competitors. I personally
know that drama has come near to bringing a tragic solution to their
jealousy.
But all in that motley body of Cherokee medicine men is not
dramatic; besides its sinister and gloomy personages, it has its
Rabelais: Meet Jud. (married, no children, 63 years old, pi. 10, a),
a most captivating and anuising personality.
To begin with, and to be quite honest, Jud. is no medicine man
at all; he merely longs, languishes, dies to be one; I am sure that if
only he could obtain that ardently craved honor by paying for it
with 10 years of his life—if he has so nuich to his credit, poor old
friend—he would gladly do so. If Jud. only knew, even if his corn-
peel's make sport and fun of his efforts to capture the first principles
of practical therapeutics at the age of 60, that I, his adopted son,
discuss him this day along with the past masters of the science,
how proud he would be, and what a tremendous joke he would con-
sider it to be.
Although I am satisfied I can show why Jud. can never be a good
medicine man, I must admit my utter inability to explain why he
wants to be one. He himself does not know, and considered it a very
stupid question when I asked him. *'\Miy, aren't there many
people who are medicine men? And look at the old people; aren't
they nearly all medicine men? Why shouldn't I become one?'*
And then, bethmldng himself, "he was suft'ering so much from
Di^ngle^'ski (rheumatism); he needed treatment practically every
day; could he aff'ord the time and the money®- to have a medicine
man come to his house every morning to scratch him with a briar
and to mumble a formula which he could learn to recite just as well?"
And, finally, with a roguish twinkle in his eye that suddenly and com-
pletely seemed to metamorphize him into a lad of 18: "Moreover, if
I want love medicine, do you expect me to go and ask one of those
guys for it?"
^ Jud. is very well off, as local standards go.