are crude; in
making them the Apache always attempt to picture the objects literally
rather than to represent them conventionally or symbolically.

On the infrequent occasions when the dry-paintings are employed, the
medicine-man in charge of the ceremony directs his assistants, at
daylight, to begin the painting. When it is finished he takes his station
close to the easternmost figure of the painting, on its northern side. At
the right of the medicine-man sit twelve chosen singers with a drum. The
four masked _gaun_, or gods, at the same time take their places at the
cardinal points. The patient then enters from the east and sits down on
the head of the large figure in the centre of the dry-painting. As he does
so the medicine-man commences to sing, and is joined by the chorus at
once. They may sing the song four times, or sing four different songs, or
any multiple of four, at the pleasure of the medicine-man. When the songs
are finished the four masked personages scrape the colored earths into a
heap about the patient and rub them in handfuls over his body. If this
ceremony proves to be ineffectual, it is believed to be the will of the
gods that the patient be not cured.

[Illustration: _Dan Lan_ - Apache]

_Dan Lan_ - Apache

_From Copyright Photograph 1907 by E.S. Curtis_

THE MESSIAH CRAZE

Among the Apache, in the spring of 1906, the excessive use of a combined
cross and crescent symbol was noted. Men, women, and children had this
anchor-like design cut into wood, tin, and metal talismans, and also
tattooed on their faces and branded on their horses. It was used also as a
decorative device in much of the new basketry and worked in beads on their
moccasins, and new shirts and waists seldom failed to display a cross in
narrow yellow and black ribbon in front.

Four years before this time a forceful old medicine-man living on the
Cibicu, in a remote corner of the Apache reservation, either through the
influence of a vision or other hallucination, or by a desire to become the
ruling spirit in the tribe, proclaimed the gospel of a messiah who, he
claimed, had appeared to him in the hills and would later return to the
deliverance of his tribespeople.

In childhood this future prophet was given the name Das Lan, Hanging Up,
by which designation he is commonly known in familiar discourse among his
tribesmen; but on the census rolls of the White M