A Young and Pretty Mother
A Brave Gazing
A Highland Chieftain
On the Watch
I own that I am a bit superstitious about Indians and fancy I am liked and protected by them, after several unusual experiences which I take this opportunity to refer to the Society for Psychical Research. In California, years ago, just after I had put up my wigwam at home, I was barking as for the last twenty years with a chronic bronchial irritation and was urged to visit a remarkable healer who had “suddenly been controlled by the spirit of a cultivated woman, a medical missionary, who had been most successful in India but who had died after a few years of brilliant practice.” Making an engagement two weeks in advance, which was necessary, owing to the great rush to be cured, I took a massage treatment and greatly enjoyed the talk of the returned missionary, which was all at once broken up by her place in the rubber’s mind being usurped by a powerful American Indian who, through the medium, kept up a vigorous yet not rough rubbing, slapping and putting hot hands all about my throat; talking too as he worked, so enthusiastically. I think he was a pretty knowing individual for this is what he said. “Ugh! Ugh! Wah! Wah! This Squaw, she talkem heapum, she now quite bad off, but Ugh Wah! we patch her up! Will make her pokagee! Yes, Pokagee!” Then he left as quickly as he came and I noticed that poor Mrs. Seldon was breathing hard and was in a profuse perspiration. When she opened her eyes, she sighed and inquired in her own quiet, gentle way, “Have you had a good rub?” That evening, I went to a Reception for some of the Professors of Stanford University with the promise of being “Pokagee” still in my head and as one of the gentlemen was a teacher of the Indian languages and dialects, I ventured in a timid, hesitating manner to inquire “May I ask if there is such a word as Pokagee in any Indian dialect?”
And the learned man replied at once, “Certainly.”
“Please tell me what it means.”
“It is used to express cured, or in perfect health.”
“O, thank you,” I said, “and just one more question—what tribe has that word?”
“The Pottawatamie.”
And strange to relate my Astral Masseur had belonged to that particular tribe. I forgot to say that he spoke of his pleasure over the Tepee I had built on my grounds and said the Indians long ago loved to walk and hunt in my woods. And he added, “They like to go to Tepee now; seems like their own place.”
Again a friend took me to one of the best known and most valued medical women in New York for a shampoo and a treatment of my face which certainly did need to be steamed and electrified. Imagine the general astonishment when another Indian spirit kindly “controlled” the masseuse, (something which she affirmed had never happened before) and he wished to encourage me about my heart as several doctors still in the flesh had been criminally or at least brutally frank about its condition and I was naturally alarmed. And he said “No need worry about heart; you no got bad heart, only what I call nervous heart. You got scared but you stay out doors and let books alone. When you go home go to the Tepee and stand by it, and some of us will go walk with you. We are often there.”