When a man is killed in battle the thunder is supposed to take him up, they do not know whither. In going to battle each warrior traces an imaginary figure of the thunder on the soil; he who represents it incorrectly is killed by the thunder. A person saw this thunder one day on the ground, with a beautiful moccasin on each side of it. Having need of a pair, he took them and went his way; but on his return to the same spot the thunder took him off, and he has not since been heard of.
They seem to have vague notions about the future state. They think that a brave man or a good hunter will walk in a good path; but a bad man and a coward will find a bad path. Thinking that the deceased has far to travel, they bury with his body moccasins, some articles of food, etc., to support him on the journey. Many persons, they believe, who have revived have been, during their apparent death, to strange villages, where they were not treated well by the people, so they returned to life.
The author, when among the Kansa, in the winter of 1882-’83, learned the following, which differs from anything he has ever obtained elsewhere: “The Kansa believe that when there is a death the ghost returns to the spirit village nearest the present habitat of the living. That is to say, all Indians do not go to one spirit village or ‘happy hunting ground,’ but to different ones, as there is a series of spirit villages for the Kansa, beginning with the one at Council Grove, where the tribe dwelt before they removed to their present reservation in Indian Territory, and extending along both sides of the Kansas River to its mouth, thence up the Missouri River, as far as the tribe wandered before meeting the Cheyennes (near the State line), thence down the river to the mouth of Osage River, and so on, down to the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers,” etc.
CHAPTER IV. ┴[C]IWERE AND WINNEBAGO CULTS.
§ 72. The Rev. William Hamilton, who was a missionary to the Iowa and Sac Indians of Nebraska, from 1837 to 1853, is the authority for most of the Iowa material in this chapter. About the year 1848, he published a series of letters about the Iowa Indians in a Presbyterian weekly newspaper, and with his permission the present writer transcribed these letters in 1879, for his own future use.
Other information about the three ┴ɔiwere tribes (Iowa, Oto and Missouri) was obtained by the author from Ke-ʞre[ç]e, an Oto; Ckaʇɔinye, a Missouri; and the delegation of Iowa chiefs that visited Washington in 1882.
The principal Winnebago authority was James Alexander, a full-blood and a member of the Wolf gens.
TERM “GREAT SPIRIT” NEVER HEARD AMONG THE IOWA.
Mr. Hamilton wrote thus in one of his letters:
It is often said that the Indians are not idolaters, and that they believe in one Supreme Being, whom they call the Great Spirit. I do not now recollect that I ever heard the Iowas use the term Great Spirit since I have been among them. They speak of God (Wakanta), and sometimes of the Great God or Bad God. But of the true character of God they are entirely ignorant. Many of them speak of God as the creator of all things, and use a term that signifies “Creator of the earth.” Sometimes they call him “Grandfather” (hiⁿtuka). But they imagine him to be possessed of like passions with themselves, and pleased with their war parties, scalp dances, thefts, and such like sin. * * * They sometimes speak of the sun as a god, because it gives light and heat. The moon they sometimes speak of as a god, because it seems to be to the night what the sun is to the day. I asked an Indian the other day how many gods the Iowas had, and he promptly replied, ‘Seven.’