Mrs. Eastman describes the “Dog Dance” of the Sioux, in which the dogs represented Chippewas, and had their hearts eaten raw by the Sioux.
XI.
POISONOUS MUSHROOMS USED IN UR-ORGIES.
The Indians in and around Cape Flattery, on the Pacific coast of British North America, retain the urine dance in an unusually repulsive form. As was learned from Mr. Kennard, U.S. Coast Survey, whom the writer had the pleasure of meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1886, the medicine men distil, from potatoes and other ingredients, a vile liquor, which has an irritating and exciting effect upon the kidneys and bladder. Each one who has partaken of this dish immediately urinates and passes the result to his next neighbor, who drinks. The effect is as above, and likewise a temporary insanity or delirium, during which all sorts of mad capers are carried on. The last man who quaffs the poison, distilled through the persons of five or six comrades, is so completely overcome that he falls in a dead stupor.
Precisely the same use of a poisonous fungus has been described among the natives of the Pacific coast of Siberia, according to the learned Dr. J. W. Kingsley (of Brome Hall, Scole, England). Such a rite is outlined by Schultze. “The Shamans of Siberia drink a decoction of toad-stools or the urine of those who have become narcotized by that plant.”—(Schultze, “Fetichism,” New York, 1885, p. 52.)
The Ur-Orgy of the natives of Siberia should be found fully described by explorers in the employ of the Russian Government. Application was accordingly made by the author to the Hon. Lambert Tree, the American Minister at the Court of St. Petersburgh, who evinced a warm interest in the work of unearthing from the Imperial archives all that bore upon the use of the mushroom as a urino-intoxicant. Unfortunately, the official term of Mr. Tree having expired, no information was obtained from him in time for incorporation in these pages.
Acknowledgment is due in this connection to Mr. Wurtz, the American Chargé d’Affaires at St. Petersburgh, as well as to his Excellency the Russian Minister of Public Instruction, for courteous interest manifested in the investigations made necessary by the amplification of the original pamphlet.
Conferences were also had with his Excellency the Chinese Minister and with Dr. H. T. Allen, Secretary of the Corean Legation, in Washington, but beyond developing the fact that in the minor medicine of those countries resort was still had to excrementitious curatives, the information deduced was meagre and unimportant.
Dependence was therefore necessarily placed upon the accounts of American or English explorers of undisputed authority.
George Kennan describes a wedding which he saw in one of the villages of Kamtchatka: “After the conclusion of the ceremony we removed to an adjacent tent, and were surprised as we came out into the open air to see three or four Koraks shouting and reeling in an advanced stage of intoxication,—celebrating, I suppose, the happy wedding which had just transpired. I knew that there was not a drop of alcoholic liquor in all Northern Kamtchatka, nor, so far as I knew, anything from which it could be made, and it was a mystery to me how they had succeeded in becoming so suddenly, thoroughly, hopelessly, undeniably drunk. Even Ross Browne’s beloved Washoe, with its ‘howling wilderness’ saloons, could not have turned out more creditable specimens of intoxicated humanity than those before us.