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be thanked, flattered, {127} expostulated with, according to the emergency. It can be easily seen that in this Indian land of mysterious agencies, of manitous and spirits, the medicine-man and conjuror exercised a great power among old and young, chiefs and women. He had to be consulted in illness, in peace, in war, at every moment of importance to individual or nation. Even in case of illness and disease he found more value in secret communications with the supernatural world, and in working on the credulity of his tribesmen, than in the use of medicines made from plants. The grossest superstition dominated every community. All sorts of mystic ceremonies, some most cruel and repugnant to every sense of decency, were usual on occasions when supernatural influences had to be called into action. Every respect was paid to the dead, who were supposed to have gone on a journey to a spirit land. Every one had such a separate scaffold or grave, generally speaking, as Champlain saw among the Ottawas, but it was the strange custom of the Hurons to collect the bones of their dead every few years and immure them in great pits or ossuaries with weirdlike ceremonies very minutely described in the _Relations_. In a passage previously quoted Champlain gave credit to the Indians for believing in the immortality of the soul. The world to which the Indian's imagination accompanied the dead was not the Heaven or Hell of the Jew or Christian. Among some tribes there was an impression rather than a belief that a distinction was made in the land of the Ponemah or Hereafter between the great or {128} useful, and the weak or useless; but generally it was thought that all alike passed to the Spirit Land, and carried on their vocations as in life. It was a Land of Shades where trees, flowers, animals, men, and all things were spirits. "By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews In vestments for the-chase arrayed The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer a shade." [1] See Horatio Hale's "Fall of Hochelaga," in _Journal of American Folklore_, Cambridge, Mass., 1894. [2] In this necessarily very imperfect description of the organisation and customs of the Five Nations I depend mainly on those valuable and now rare books, _The League of the Iroquois_, and _Houses and Home Life of the Aborigines_, by Lewis H. Morgan. The reader should also consult Horatio Hale's _Iroquois Book of Rites_. {12
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