SUN CHIEF—KIT-KE-HAHK´-I.
“At one time he wanted to show the people that he could stand anything. He and two others were attacked by Sioux. He said, ‘I want to be wounded; let us go to the thickets.’ They did so, and a Sioux shot him through the back, and the other two were wounded, but he healed them all after they had got away from the Sioux.
“Another man in the doctors’ dance had four young men pretend that they were horses. All had manes and tails, and were painted to imitate horses. He had a gun, to which was tied a scalp. He loaded the gun, and while he was doing this the horses ran off, and stood looking back at the man. He cocked the gun and laid it on the ground pointing toward the horses, and placed the scalp near the trigger, and walked some steps away. Then he motioned to the scalp and the gun went off, and one of the horses went down wounded. It seems that the ghost of the scalp obeyed his motion, and shot off the gun. He loaded the gun again, and placed it on the ground as before. The second time he went way off, and as soon as he waved his hand and said, ‘wooh,’ the gun went off and another horse went down. This was repeated until all the horses were down. The people examined them and saw that they were really wounded in the breast. The man went up to them and they seemed to be dying and vomited blood, and the young man slapped them, and the balls came out of their mouths, and as soon as the balls came away from them they were healed.
“There were two people, a brother and sister, children of a man who had been helped by a bear. One time when we were having a doctors’ dance, the sister and brother came forward, each carrying five cedar branches about three feet long. They rolled a big rock into the middle of the lodge, so that all might see what they were going to do. Then they called ten private men who were not doctors, and told them to thrust the ends of the branches into the stone as if they had grown there, and they sang:
“‘See the trees growing in the rock;
The cedar tree grows in the rock.’
“These cedar branches were cut square off at the butt, and were set on the stone. They were not big enough to be even and balance, but still they stood upright, as if grown from the rock. The doctors tried to blow them down with their fans made of eagle feathers, but they could not do it. You could not blow them off nor pull them off. At length the men who put them there were told to take them off. They had hard work to do it, but at last they succeeded.
“The sister (I saw her do it) put her hands up to the sun, and then putting them on the ground and scratching and throwing up dust, she would take up her hands, and have hands like a bear, with hair and long claws.
“She used to understand how to make plums and other fruits grow on trees. She supplied the doctors with choke cherries and plums. The doctors had trees brought in that had no fruit on them. She would make the plums grow, and shaking the tree, they would fall down, and everybody would have a taste of them. This was at a doctors’ dance.”
A PARFLECHE.