Still By The Springs One
Finds The Cunning Brush Shelters From Which The Shoshones Shot
Arrows At Them When The Doves Came To Drink.
Now as to these same Shoshones there are some who claim that
they have no right to the name, which belongs to a more northerly
tribe; but that is the word they will be called by, and there is no
greater offense than to call an Indian out of his name.
According
to their traditions and all proper evidence, they were a great
people occupying far north and east of their present bounds, driven
thence by the Paiutes. Between the two tribes is the residuum of
old hostilities.
Winnenap', whose memory ran to the time when the boundary of
the Paiute country was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me once how
himself and another lad, in an unforgotten spring, discovered a
nesting place of buzzards a bit of a way beyond the borders. And
they two burned to rob those nests. Oh, for no purpose at all
except as boys rob nests immemorially, for the fun of it, to have
and handle and show to other lads as an exceeding treasure, and
afterwards discard. So, not quite meaning to, but breathless with
daring, they crept up a gully, across a sage brush flat and
through a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines where their sharp
eyes had made out the buzzards settling.
The medicine-man told me, always with a quaking relish at this
point, that while they, grown bold by success, were still in the
tree, they sighted a Paiute hunting party crossing between them and
their own land. That was mid-morning, and all day on into the dark
the boys crept and crawled and slid, from boulder to bush, and bush
to boulder, in cactus scrub and on naked sand, always in a sweat of
fear, until the dust caked in the nostrils and the breath sobbed in
the body, around and away many a mile until they came to their own
land again. And all the time Winnenap' carried those buzzard's
eggs in the slack of his single buckskin garment! Young Shoshones
are like young quail, knowing without teaching about feeding and
hiding, and learning what civilized children never learn, to be
still and to keep on being still, at the first hint of danger or
strangeness.
As for food, that appears to be chiefly a matter of being
willing. Desert Indians all eat chuckwallas, big black and white
lizards that have delicate white flesh savored like chicken. Both
the Shoshones and the coyotes are fond of the flesh of Gopherus
agassizii, the turtle that by feeding on buds, going without
drink, and burrowing in the sand through the winter, contrives to
live a known period of twenty-five years. It seems that
most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most berries edible,
and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them. The
mesquite bean, whether the screw or straight pod, pounded to a
meal, boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in cakes, sulphur-colored
and needing an axe to cut it, is an excellent food for long
journeys. Fermented in water with wild honey and the honeycomb, it
makes a pleasant, mildly intoxicating drink.
Next to spring, the best time to visit Shoshone Land is when
the deer-star hangs low and white like a torch over the morning
hills. Go up past Winnedumah and down Saline and up again to the
rim of Mesquite Valley. Take no tent, but if you will, have an
Indian build you a wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over
to an arch, and bound cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and
chinks to count the stars through. But there was never any but
Winnenap' who could tell and make it worth telling about Shoshone
Land.
And Winnenap' will not any more. He died, as do most
medicine-men of the Paiutes.
Where the lot falls when the campoodie chooses a medicine-man
there it rests. It is an honor a man seldom seeks but must wear,
an honor with a condition. When three patients die under his
ministrations, the medicine-man must yield his life and his office.
Wounds do not count; broken bones and bullet holes the Indian can
understand, but measles, pneumonia, and smallpox are
witchcraft. Winnenap' was medicine-man for fifteen years. Besides
considerable skill in healing herbs, he used his prerogatives
cunningly. It is permitted the medicine-man to decline the case
when the patient has had treatment from any other, say the white
doctor, whom many of the younger generation consult. Or, if before
having seen the patient, he can definitely refer his disorder to
some supernatural cause wholly out of the medicine-man's
jurisdiction, say to the spite of an evil spirit going about in the
form of a coyote, and states the case convincingly, he may avoid
the penalty. But this must not be pushed too far. All else
failing, he can hide. Winnenap' did this the time of the measles
epidemic. Returning from his yearly herb gathering, he heard of it
at Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not to be found, nor did
he return to his own place until the disease had spent itself, and
half the children of the campoodie were in their shallow graves
with beads sprinkled over them.
It is possible the tale of Winnenap''s patients had not been
strictly kept. There had not been a medicine-man killed in the
valley for twelve years, and for that the perpetrators had been
severely punished by the whites. The winter of the Big Snow an
epidemic of pneumonia carried off the Indians with scarcely a
warning; from the lake northward to the lava flats they died in the
sweathouses, and under the hands of the medicine-men. Even
the drugs of the white physician had no power.
After two weeks of this plague the Paiutes drew to council to
consider the remissness of their medicine-men.
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