Burton, ii. 35.
It must be remembered that at Dahome, royalty as there represented has absorbed and monopolized the most important parts of the ceremonial: it is natural, therefore, to expect that the conspicuous figures in the original (or in the Mandan), which conflicted or would not consort with royalty, would be thrown into the background. Accordingly I am only able to get a glimpse of the conspicuous figures opposite in the following passage:—“The jesters were followed by a dozen pursuivants armed with gong-gongs, who advanced bending towards the throne, and shouted the ‘strong names’ or titles. Conspicuous amongst them was an oldster in a crimson sleeveless tunic and yellow shorts: his head was red with dust, he carried a large bill-hook,[218] and he went about attended by four drums and one cymbal.”
It will be remembered (if my readers have read Mr Catlin, p. 11, 12) that the first thing “the aged white man” does on entering the mystery lodge is to call on the chiefs “to furnish him with four men,” and the next is to “receive at the door of every Mandan’s wigwam some edged tool to be given to the water as a sacrifice, as it was with such tools that the “big canoe” was built.[219]
Catlin, p. 10.
The opening scene in the Mandan customs, effectively described by Mr Catlin, begins with “a solitary human figure descending the prairie hills and approaching the village,” “in appearance a very aged man,” “a centenarian white man,” dressed in a robe of four white wolves’ skins.” He was met by the head chief and the council of chiefs, and addressed by them as “Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah” (the first and only man.) “He then harangued them for a few minutes, reminding them that every human being on the surface of the earth had been destroyed by the water excepting himself, who had landed on a high mountain in the west in his canoe, where he still resided, and from whence he had come to open the medicine (mystery) lodge, that the Mandans might celebrate the subsiding of the waters, and make the proper sacrifices to the water, lest the same calamity should again happen to them.”
Burton, ii. 38.
“The ministers ... they were conducted by a ‘Lali’ or half-head, with right side of his pericranium clean shaven, and the left in a casing of silver that looked like a cast or a half melon.”
Catlin, p. 30.
Compare with the two athletic young men (vide Plate XIII.) assigned to each of the young men who underwent the torture—“their bodies painted one half red and the other blue, and carrying a bunch of willow-boughs in one hand.”