History of the city of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey, Part 9

Author: Nelson, William, 1847-1914
Publication date: 1901
Publisher: Paterson : Press Printing and Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 466

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The red man, by reason of his adventurous pursuits, was peculiarly subject to wounds and to diseases that follow ex- posure and irregular living. In his treatment of external injuries he was surprisingly successful, having a precise knowledge of the particular roots and herbs most efficacious in each case and how to apply them ; these remedies were- often used internally also.2 Bishop Ettwein says : 3 "There are a few Indians in general who have an actual Knowledge of the Virtues of Roots and Herbs, which they got from their Forefathers, and can cure certain Diseases, but they seldom communicate their Secrets, until they see they must soon die. Their Medicine or Beson is not for a white Man's Stomach, it is allways in grcat Portions. They have for a Bite of each particular Snake a particular Herb. Roberts' Plantain, called Cæsar's Antidote is com- monly used for the Bite of a Rattle Snake, the Herb bruised and some of the Juice taken inwardly and the rest laid on the Wound." But the Indian's favorite remedy for disease and fatigue was the sweat-bath. Whether the warrior suf- fered from exhaustion or rheumatism, loss of appetite or small-pox, fever or consumption, he hied to the Pimoacun- the sweat-housc. This was a sort of oven, usually built on the side of a bank, covered with split bark and earth, lined with clay, a small door being on one side. Here two to six men could huddle together, over some red-hot stones, on which water was then poured, till they ceascd to "sing." In this way clouds of steam were raised. The men at the same time drank hot decoctions, inducing a pro- fuse perspiration, and heightening the effect, after the man- ner of a modern Russian bath. From this oven they plunged

1 Loskiel, 30; Heckewelder, 308. Thomas (as cited, p. 6) says : "They are great Observers of the Weather by the Moon." Tbe name given to the North Star, Lowannewi alank, is evidently a literal transla- tion from the English.

2 Loskiel, 107-14; William Penn, as cited, 95; Thomas, Pennsylva- nia, 18, 19; Ib., West Jersey, 3; Wassenaer, 22. Heckewelder relates some astonishing cures of dangerous wounds, pp. 224-7. He says : " There is a superstitious notion, in which all their physicians participate, which is, that when an emetic is to be administered, tbe water in which the potion is mixed must be drawn up stream, and if for a cathartic downwards."-Ib., 224, 228. And again : " I firmly believe that there is no wound, unless it should be absolutely mortal, or beyond the skill of our own good practitioners, which an Indian surgeon (I mean the best of them) will not succeed in healing."-Ib., 229.

3 The Rev. John Ettwein, born in Germany in 1712, and who came to this country in 1754, to serve as a Moravian missionary among the Dela- ware Indians, and who was a Bishop at Bethlehem, Pa., from 1794 until his death, in 1802, wrote and sent to Gen. Wasbington in 1788 " Some Remarks and Annotations concerning the Traditions, Customs, Lang- uages, &c., of the Indians of North America, from the Memoirs of the Rev. David Leisberger [Zeisberger], and other Missionaries of the United States," which paper was published in the Proceedings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, September, 1845. (These Proceed- ings for 1845 were afterwards bound up in a volume entitled Bulletin of the Hist. Soc. of Pa., Vol. I.) The quotation is from p. 38 of this paper.

HISTORY OF PATERSON.

into the cold river, causing a vigorous reaction. 1 Unfortu- nately, the cold water dip was apt to prove fatal in cases of small-pox and other eruptive fevers.2 Disease in general was attributed to some evil spirit getting into the sick man, 3 and if the malady did not yield to the ordinary remedies, or the sweat-bath, the patient had a choice of one of two or three different " schools " of medicine.

David Brainerd, the devoted missionary among the Dela- ware Indians in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, gives us a glimpse of the Powaws, who were one class of priests and physicians. He says :

" These are a sort of persons who are supposed to have a power of foretelling future events, or recovering the sick, at least oftentimes, and of charming, inchanting or poisoning persons to death by their magic divinations. Their spirit, in its various operations, seems to be a Satanical imitation of the spirit of prophecy with which the church in early ages was favoured. Some of these diviners are endowed with the spirit in infancy ;- others iu adult age .- It seenis not to de- pend upon their own will, nor to be acquired by any en- deavours of the person who is the subject of it, although it is supposed to be given to children sometimes iu conse- quence of some means which the parents use with them for that purpose ; one of which is to make the child swallow a small living frog, after having performed some supersti- tious rites and ceremonies upon it. They are not under the influence of this spirit always alike, -but it comes upon them at times. Those who are endowed with it, are accounted singularly favored."4 One of these Powaws was converted under the teaching of Brainerd, and gave him a curious account of his pre-natal experiences, and of his subsequent constant direction by a spirit. "There were some times," he told the missionary, "when this spirit came upon him in a special manner, and he was full of what he saw [in his pre- existent state] in the great man. Then, he says, he was all light, and not only light himself, but it was light all around him, so that he could see through men, and knew the

thoughts of their hearts. *

* * My interpreter tells me, that he heard one of them tell a certain Indian the secret thoughts of his heart, which he had never divulged. The case was this, the Indian was bitten witli a snake, and was in extreme pain with the bite. Whereupon the diviner, who was applied to for his recovery, told him, that such a time he had promised, that the next deer he killed, he would sacrifice it to some great power, but had broken his prom- ise. Now, said he, that great power has ordered this snake to bite you for your neglect. The Indian confessed it was

1 Heckewelder, 225; Wolley, 45; Denton, 9; Brinton, Essays of an Americanist, 187; Montanus, 82.

2 Douglass, 174.

3 Denton, 10; Loskiel, III.

4 Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd ; Missionary to the Indians on the Borders of New-York, New-Jersey, and Pennsylvania : chiefly taken from his own diary. By Rev. Jonathan Edwards, of Northampton. In- cluding his journal, now for the first time incorporated with the rest of his diary, in a regular chronological series. By Sereno Edwards Dwight, New Haven, 1822, pp. 178, 237, 348. This is the best edition of Brainerd.

so, but said he had never told anybody of it."1 This instance of the power of the Powaw-doubtless a shrewd guess, perhaps based on some involuntary utterance of the sick man-was well calculated to impress the simple Indian. Nevertheless, though with manifest reluctance, Roger Williams confesses that these powaws "doe most certainly (by the helpe of the Divell) worke great Cures, though most certaine it is that the greatest part of their Priests doe merely abuse them and get their Money, in the times of their sicknesse, and to my knowledge long for sick times."2

The name of this class of physician-priests is evidently allied to the Cree root, pâwamiw, the dream.3 They might be compared with the "healing clairvoyants" of the present day. So far as they were honest in their pretensions-and most of them were impostors-they were self-deluded, throwing themselves into a condition of hypnotism. Not infrequently they were epileptic.4 These conclusions are reasonably inferred from the meagre accounts we have of them.

But the Indian " doctor " or "medicine man " par excel- lence was the Meteus or Medeu. 6 The Cree word is mitew, a sorcerer, medicine man, diviner .? This priest-physician

1 Ih., 350.

2 Key, 158.

3 Lacombe, 545.

4 Cf. Spiritualism and allied causes and conditions of Nervous Derangement, by William A. Hammond, M. D., New York, 1876, Chapters III, v, x, XIII, xv; The Magic of the Middle Ages, hy Viktor Rydberg, New York, 1879; La Sorcière : the Witch of the Middle Ages, by J. Michelet, London, 1863; Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, Counseller to Charles the Fifth, Emperor of Germany : and Judge of the Prerogative Court. Translated out of the Latin into the English Tongue, by J. F., London, 1651, Book 1, Chap. Lx ; Henrici Cornelii Agrippae ab Hettes- heym De incertitudine & vanitate scientiarum declamatio invectiva, etc., M. D. XXXI, " De divinationihus in genere," Caput XXXII; Henrie Cornelius Agrippa, of the Vanitie and vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, Englished by Ja. San. Gent., Imprinted at London, etc., Anno 1569, f. 50 ; Some Higher Aspects of Mesmerism, hy Edmund Gurney and Frederic W. H. Myers, in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, De- cember, 1885, London, 1885, pp. 401 et seqq. Since the ahove was written, the author has met with an article in the Popular Science Monthly, for September, 1886, on "Indian Medicine," by G. Archie Stockwell, M. D., in which the writer expresses his contempt for the Indian treatment of diseases as heing the merest fetichism. But he says : " All medicine-men of the first rank are clairvoyants and psychologists (mesmerists, if you like) of no mean pretensions, as a rule capable of affording instruction to the most able of their white confrères; and to be a medicine-man at all demands that the individual be not only a shrewd student of human nature capable of drawing deductions from matters seemingly the most trifling, but also an expert conjurer and wizard. I have repeatedly known events in the far future to be predicted with scrupulous fidelity to details, exactly as they sub- sequently occurred ; the movements of persons and individuals to be descrihed in minutiæ who had never been seen, and were hundreds of miles away, without a single error as to time, place, or act."

5 " The word is derived from meteohet, to drum on a hollow body ; a turkey cock is sometimes called meteu, from the drumming sound of his wings. The ancient medicine men used drums." -- Lenape-English Dictionary, 83. Dr. Brinton thinks the word is derived from m' 'teh, heart, as the centre of life and emotions .- The Lenâpé, etc., 71.

6 Heckewelder, 230.

7 Dictionnaire et Grammaire de la Langue des Cris, as cited, 463.

INDIAN MEDICINE AND SURGERY.

would prepare his roots and herbs with great ceremony, all the while chanting prayers and incantations. The quantity and quality of the medicines, as well as of the incantations, and their efficacy, likewise, depended on the size of the present given the meteu on his appearance. 1 Having prepared the medicine, the physician would breathe on his patient, apply the decoction externally as well as internally, and then "howle and roar, and hollow over them, . . and begin the song to the rest of the people about them, who all joyne (like a Quire) in Prayer to their Gods for them."2 Sometimes the doctor would array himself in a bearskin, with a rattle in his hand, a gourd full of stones or beans, which he would shake violently as he came to the patient's hut, making hideous noises, and playing all sorts of juggling tricks. With a great assumption of gravity he would describe the disease and its location, prescribe a diet suited to the malady, and foretell the result. If he succeeded, well; if he failed, he would give some plausible explanation of his want of success. 3 As his object was to drive out the sick spirit, he resorted to every ex- pedient to that end. Often he succeeded, but in many cases the patient's spirit was frightened out of him at the same time by the fantastic and disgusting tricks, the alarm- ing feats of legerdemain, 4 and the diabolical clamor that were inseparable features of the medicine man's treatment. "Sometimes the physician creeps into the oven, where he sweats, howls and roars, and now and then grins horribly at his patient, who is laid before the opening, frequently feeling his pulse."5 Crude petroleum was a favorite medi-

1 Heckewelder, 232 ; Loskiel, 110.

2 Roger Williams, 159.

3 Loskiel, III.

4 " I would not like to hazard the assertion, in this enlightened age, that there is such a thing as magic or supernatural agency among tbe Indians, but I must confess myself unable, as all have done wbo bave witnessed these exhibitions, to account for [them] satisfactorily ; one of those Indians who pretends to bave an intercourse with spirits, will permit himself to be bound hands and feet, then wrapped closely in a blanket or deer's hide, bound around his whole body with cords and thongs, as long and as tightly as the incredulity of any one present may see fit to continue the operation, after which he is thrown into a small lodge. He begins a low, unintelligible incantation to the gods and increases in rapidity and loudness until be works himself up into a great pitch of seeming or real frenzy, at which time, usu- ally three or four minutes after being put in, be opens the lodge and throws out the thongs and hides with which he was bound without a single knot being untied or fold displaced, himself sitting calm and free on the ground."-The Ojibway Conquest, a tale of the North- west, by Kah-ge-ga-gab-bowh, or G. Copway, Chief of the Ojibway Nation, New York, 1850, p. 86. In the article on " Indian Medicine," already cited, the writer describes an instance of this kind, where be personally bound a famous Ojibway " medicine man" with power- ful strips of green moose-hide, drawing them so tightly about his naked form tbat tbe blood threatened to burst from the imprisoned flesb, employing knots and turns innumerable, such as bad been suggested by naval experience ; tben he was lifted into a small tent erected for the purpose in the midst of an open prairie. Instantly a vast variety of noises was heard to the accompaniment of the prisoner's low chant, and presently he appeared at the door of the tent, unbound. The thongs could not be found, but he pointed to a tree a mile away, and on going thither, there were tbe bonds, apparently intact !

5 Loskiel, III.

cine, especially for external complaints, but it was also taken internally.1

Another class of medicine-men in the vicinity of New York is described by Wassenaer, in 1624. These men were called Kitzinacka,2 evidently Kitschii, great, achgook, snake.3 Their practice was not unlike that of the meteu. "When one among them is sick," says our old Dutch chronicler, "he visits him, sits by him and bawls, roars and cries like one possessed." We have no other details of the "practice " of the Big-Snake Doctor. No doubt it was con- nected with the awe in which the serpent was held by the American tribes in general.4 The serpent figured in their materia medica, and on the principle similia similibus curan- tur, when a man was wounded by a snake, the fat of the serpent itself, rubbed into the wound, was thought to be efficacious. The flesh of the rattlesnake, stewed into a kind of broth, was another remedy, and the skin, shed annually by that snake, was dried and pounded fine, and used inter- nally for many purposes. 5

Indian surgery was of the crudest description, but very successful. "They are perfect masters in the treatment of fractures and dislocations," says Loskiel. " If an Indian has dislocated his foot or knee, when hunting alone, he creeps to the next tree, and tying one end of his strap to it, fastens the other to the dislocated limb, and lying on his back, continues to pull till it is reduced."6 Even to this day the Lenâpé resort to an operation similar to trephining for severe headaches. A crucial incision is made in the scalp on or near the vertix, and the bone is scraped.7

To the simple savage, living always in close contact with nature, so thoroughly in touch with her fresh and life-giving qualities, health was the normal condition of man. When the form that had once been so vigorous and animated lay still and cold, it was a mystery he could not fathom. Dr. Brinton says that "in all primitive American tribes, there is no notion of natural death. No man 'dies,' he is always 'killed.' Death as a necessary incident in the course of nature is entirely unknown to them. When a person dies by disease, they suppose he has been killed by some sorcery, or some unknown venomous creature."8 Hecke- welder says he has often heard the lamentable cry, Matta wingi angeln, "I do not want to die."9 It was different when they met death at the hands of an enemy, either in battle, or even by dreadful torture. There they encoun- tered their fate face to face. There was none of that mystery about it which was so dreadful to the untutored mind. They could hurl defiance against their visible foes, and utter never a groan.

1 Ib., 118.

2 Wassenaer, as cited, 20.

3 Lenâpé-English Dictionary, sub voces.

+ Dorman, as cited, 263-266.

5 Loskiel, 112.

6 Loskiel, 114.

7 Essays of an Americanist, 188.

8 Essays of an Americanist, 143.

9 Brinton's Lenâpé, 70.

HISTORY OF PATERSON.

When a person died a natural death, the relatives were loud in their cries of grief, which they kept up for some days, until the time of burial. The body was attired in the best garments of the deceased, the face painted red, and the corpse interred in a grave some distance from the village or huts of the survivors. In the vicinity of New York, at least, and probably among the New Jersey Indians gener- ally, the body was placed in a sitting position, the face toward the east ;1 the pipe, tobacco, bow and arrows, knife, kettle, wampum, a small bag of corn, and other personal property of the deceased that might be useful to him on his long journey to the spirit land, were placed in the grave with him.2 At the head of the grave a tall post was erected, indicating who was buried there. If it was a Chief, the post was elaborately carved with rude figures telling some- thing of the dead; and if he was a war Chief or a great warrior, his valiant deeds were set forth with care upon a post painted red. In the case of a medicine man, his tortoise shell rattle or calabash was hung on the post.3 The grave was enclosed with a fence and covered over, to keep it secure from intrusion, the grass was neatly trimmed, and the friends looked after it for years. Even when far removed from their old homes, they would repair at least once a year to the graves of their dead, to see that they were preserved. 4 It is a shocking fact that the valuable furs in which the Indian hunter was often buried, some- times tempted the whites to plunder the grave and rob the dead, occasioning an indignant protest upon the part of his tribe.5 When a prominent Indian died far from home, they would carry his bones back to his former abode, after a considerable lapse of time, and bury them beside his kindred. 6

Their dread of the mystery of death led them to speak of it by circumlocution or some euphemism, as "You are about to see your grandfathers,"7 or, as among the whites, "If anything should happen." Probably because they had a vague belief that the spirits of the dead haunted their former home, Roger Williams says that in case of a death the Indians would remove their wigwam to a new spot.8 It is a thought that appeals strongly to the imagination-that of the Indian warrior returning in spirit to hover over his form- er home, to linger about his grave, a thought so beautifully expressed by our own Jersey poet, Freneau :

By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, In vestments for the chace array'd, Tbe hunter still the deer pursues, The bunter and the deer, a shade !

1 Denton, as cited, 9; Wolley, 50 ; Vanderdonck, 202 ; Wassenaer, 20, 21.

2 Denton, Wolley, Vanderdonck and Wassenaer, as just cited ; Thomas, West-New-Jersey, 2, 3 ; William Penn, in Blome's Present State, 100-101; Loskiel, 119; Heckewelder, 268-276 ; The Life and Times of David Zeisberger the Western pioneer and apostle of the Indians, by Edmund de Schweinitz, Philadelphia, 1871, pp. 196-8.

3 Loskiel, 119.

4 Denton, 9; Vanderdonck, 202; Thomas, 3 ; William Penn, 101.

5 N. Y. Col. Docs., XII., 524.

6 Tbomas, 3.

7 Schweinitz, Life of Zeisberger, as cited, 475.

8 Key, 56.

And long sball timorous fancy see

The painted chief, and pointed spear, And reason's self sball bow the knee To shadows and delusions here.1

The friends of a deceased person blackened their faces, in token of their grief ;2 but the active mourning, so to- speak, was left to the female relatives, who would repair daily to the grave, for a time, at morn and eve, to utter their cries of lamentation. A widow mourned a whole year, dressing without ornaments and seldom washing herself. 3 The men did not alter their dress nor manner of living, nor did they mourn for any set period, 4 but before marrying again they were expected to make an offering to the kindred of the deceased wife, "for Atonement, Liberty, and Mar- riage."5

It is impossible to tell how many languages were spoken in America when the whites first came hither. At the present time, there are in America north of Mexico, fifty- eight distinct linguistic families, as described in the admir- able report of Major J. W. Powell, the Director of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, and depicted with vivid clearness on the map accompanying his paper in the Seventh Annual Report of that Bureau. Of these, curi- ously enough, there are no less than forty families in the narrow strip between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast-a fact which militates strongly against any theory that the Indians are of Tatar or Mongolian origin. Of these fifty-eight distinct families, the Algonkin, as already remarked, occupied a very large territory ; to be precise-almost the whole of the Dominion of Canada south of Lat. 60 degs. N., and east of Long. 115 degs. W .; and most of the United States as far South as Lat. 35 degs. N., east of the Mississippi. The territory lying around Lakes Erie and Ontario, on both sides of the St. Lawrence as far down as Quebec, and in Central Pennsylvania, was oc- cupied by the Iroquois, who were thus intruded within the vast domain of the Algonkins. According to Major Powell's classification, there are thirty-six6 well defined

1 First puhlisbed (in book form) in " Tbe Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau ; containing his Essays, and additional poems," Pbila- delphia, M DCC LXXXVIII, p. 189. There was a slight change in punctuation and use of italics in the lines as repuhlisbed in "Poems Written between the Years 1768 & 1794, by Pbilip Freneau, of New Jersey," Printed at the Press of the Author, at Mount-Pleasant, near Middletown-Point, M, DCC, XCV, p. 89. They are cited here from the third collected edition of Freneau's Poems, " Poems written and pub- lished during the American Revolutionary War, and now republished from the original manuscripts; interspersed with translations from the ancients, and other pieces not heretofore in print," by Philip Freneau, Philaladelphia, 1809, I., 141. Thomas Campbell, in his poem, " O'Con- nor's Cbild ; or, The Flower of Love lies bleeding," uses these lines :

" Now o'er the hill in chase he flits- The hunter and the deer a shade."

2 Thomas, West Jersey, 6.

3 Loskiel, 121 ; Ettwein, 38.

4 Ib.

5 William Penn, as cited, 99.

6 Dr. Brinton makes but twenty-nine, in his work on " The Ameri- can Race," New York, 1891, p. 80. Among the best-known were tbe Ahnakis, Nova Scotia and south bank of the St. Lawrence river ; Arapaboes, head waters of Kansas river; Blackfeet, bead waters

LANGUAGES OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS.

tribes of the Algonkin stock, numbering about 95,600 per- sons, of whom about 60,000 are in Canada and the re- mainder in this country. Included in these tribes are the Delawares and Munsees, about 1,750 persons, 1 descendants of the former native inhabitants of New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania. All the languages spoken by the Algonkin tribes have marked resemblances, indicating a common origin, and in a general way it may be said that the tribes ·. of that stock nearest to the Crees speak languages or dialects most closely resembling the tongue of that people, which has certain unmistakable signs of greater purity and antiquity than the others. It may be said to bear the same relation to the other Algonkin languages that the Sanscrit was formerly supposed to hold to the Aryan. The stu- dent of any of the Algonkin tongues finds it a great help to have at his side Howse's Cree grammar, a work held in very high esteem by scholars for its scientific precision ; Lacombe's Dictionnaire de la Langue des Cris (his gram- mar, attached to the dictionary, does not stand so high as Howse's), and Cuoq's Lexique de la Langue Algonquine. The study of the comparative grammar of allied languages, and of the etymology of words as traced through different families of the same linguistic stock, is of obvious ad- vantage in tracing the various shades of meaning of a word, and its original significance, whereby light is often gained on obscure points in history, and the primitive manners and customs, myths and religious beliefs of a people. The ear- lier travelers and writers who attempted to describe the American race-or races-did not recognize fully this sep- aration of the Indians into distinct families, speaking lang- uages totally different, and many later writers have also ig- nored this important fact. In reading the narratives of explorers it is important to note carefully what region they traversed, and hence what particular linguistic stock or family they are describing. Colden's famous and invalua- ble History of the Five Nations is of very slight use in the study of the Lenape of New Jersey. Adair's ac- count of the Muskoheegan Indians of the Southern States is equally valueless for the same purpose. These various stocks spoke languages radically different. There is no more resemblance between the Cree and Tinné-spoken by two peoples geographically contiguous-than there is be- tween the French and the Chinese.2 Still, there are cer- tain features, certain modes of thought, of expression, com-

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History of the city of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey, Part 9

Author: Nelson, William, 1847-1914 Publication date: 1901 Publisher: Paterson : Press Printing and Publishing Co. Number of Pages: 466

Author: Nelson, William, 1847-1914
Publication date: 1901
Publisher: Paterson : Press Printing and Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 466