Rock Jones, Leading Medicine Man of Havasupais.
Sinyela, with Esuwa, going for Water.
In one case with which I was familiar, the medicine-man declared that the heart of one sick man had gone away to the topmost peak of one of the canyon walls. It would cost several dollars to charm it back, but he could do it. Yielding to the pleadings of the man without the heart, he began to exercise his charms and incantations, and the next day he came in and declared he had seen it return during the early morning hours, and his patient would recover. His prognostication was correct; the man was soon well and strong, and paid his six-dollar fee for having his heart returned to him, with due gratitude and thankfulness.
Another man who had been on the trail of some runaway horses had become overheated and was attacked severely with cholera morbus. He was brought into the village nearly dead, his pains increased by a terrible soreness in his back, caused by severe vomitings. The medicine-man gave him a large dose of red pepper, and, after sucking the flesh of his stomach, bowels, and back, rubbed the body of the sick man with red pepper, and then began his incantations. Soon he declared that a Wallapai doctor who hated the Havasupais had left a long white rope on the trail over which the sick man passed, and that it was this charmed rope which had entered his body and caused the sickness. On the promise of a fee of several dollars, he expressed confidence that the rope could be successfully taken from the invalid, and that its removal would be followed by immediate recovery. After a little time had elapsed, the crafty charlatan produced a long white rope, which he said his skill had extracted. Needless to add, the patient recovered, and to this day extols the wonderful skill and power of his physician.
Of late years a large number of Havasupais have been carried off with a bilious fever, with marked malarial symptoms. The usual indifference in the earlier stages of the disease gives way later on to frantic sweatings and appeals to the medicine-man, who comes and sings and seeks by his incantations to remove the evil something within the patient that causes the disease. If the sick person is daring enough to apply to the agency teacher for medicine, he knows that he no longer need expect any help from the medicine-man, whose curses will follow him to the world of doom. As in the world of civilization there is jealousy, sharp and keen, between the schools of medicine, so do the Havasupai medicine-men resent any innovations upon their time-honored customs.
Here, as elsewhere, one man's skill and reputation is oftentimes maintained by pulling down that of another. Dr. Tommy used to be a fairly successful medicine-man, but once, during a fearful epidemic of grippe, several children died under his ministrations. It was soon noticed that those parents whose children had been treated by another medicine-man were active in spreading the report that "they believed Dr. Tommy had killed the children by giving them coyote medicine." And this "tommy-rot" killed him as a medicine-man, for, though he was never brought to any trial on account of this charge, he was shunned and ostracized, and in very rare cases is ever called upon to exercise his medical powers.