SORCERY.
§ 357. “They have faith in witchcraft, and think that a sorcerer may injure a person, no matter how far distant, by acts upon an effigy or upon a lock of the victim’s hair.”[270]
DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD.
§ 358. The Hidatsa always lay their dead upon scaffolds. As the Lord of Life is displeased when they quarrel and kill one another, those who do so are buried in the earth, that they may be no longer seen. In this case a buffalo head is laid on the grave, that the herds of buffalo may not keep away, for, if they were to smell the wicked, they might remove and never return. The good are laid upon scaffolds, that they may be seen by the Lord of Life.[271]
The Crows have no fear of death, but they have a horror of being buried in the ground.[272]
HIDATSA BELIEF AS TO FUTURE EXISTENCE.
§ 359. They think that after death they will be restored to the mansions of their ancestors under ground, from which they are intercepted by a large and rapid watercourse. Over this river, which may be compared to the Styx of the ancients, they are obliged to pass on a very narrow footway. Those Indians who have been useful to the nation, such as brave warriors or good hunters, pass over with ease and arrive safely at A-pah-he, or ancient village. But the worthless Indians slip off from the bridge or footway into the stream which * * * hurries them into oblivion.[273]
Their faith concerning a future life is this: When a Hidatsa dies his shade lingers four nights around the camp or village in which he died, and then goes to the lodge of his departed kindred in the Village of the Dead. When he has arrived there, he is rewarded for his valor, self-denial, and ambition on earth by receiving the same regard in the one place as in the other; for there, as here, the brave man is honored and the coward despised. Some say that the ghosts of those who commit suicide occupy a separate part of the village, but that their condition differs in no wise from that of the others. In the next world, human shades hunt and live on the shades of the buffalo and other animals that have here died. There too there are four seasons, but they come in an inverse order to the terrestrial seasons. During the four nights that the ghost is supposed to linger near his former dwelling, those who disliked or feared the deceased, and do not wish a visit from the shade, scorch with red coals a pair of moccasins, which they leave at the door of the lodge. The smell of the burning leather, they claim, keeps the ghost out; but the true friends of the dead man take no such precautions. * * * They believe in the existence and advisability of human and other ghosts, yet they seem to have no terror of graveyards and but little of mortuary remains. You may frighten children after nightfall by shouting noḣidaḣi (ghost), but will not scare the aged.[274]