P. E. Goddard
When John the Jeweler was Sick[4]
Told at St. Michaels, Arizona, by one of the Franciscan Fathers
You may remember having met here a Navaho friend of ours, one of the silver-smiths, whom we familiarly called “John the Jeweler.” Early this year he went over to the Kohonino Cañon and stayed there four days. The day after leaving the Cañon he was taken with ague, and every day for twenty days he had a chill followed by fever and delirium. The strangeness of the disease had an extraordinarily depressing effect on him and during these twenty days he was in a state of utter collapse.
John the Jeweler is a medicine man, a minor priest, of considerable repute, and numbers of his friends came to see him, but none of them knew anything about his disease. The priests and the patient were inclined to attribute it to “a bad smell emanating from the Kohonino,” but as there was also a band of wandering Paiutes there during the time of the patient’s visit, they were not sure but that the bad smell may have originated with the Paiutes.
It was concluded in this emergency to call in the best mediciners of the region. The first to officiate was Ojkai yośna. His rites and song-prayers were directed to the Yè who dwells at the mouth of the pit through which all people came up to this world, and through which the spirits of the dead return to the lower world.
This pit is in the summit of that mountain in the north called Tjoliĭ. Between the patient and the mouth of the pit the priest made a fire with certain woods, and beside this fire he sang prayers to the Yè who sits on “this side” the mouth of the pit. He beseeched the Yè not to call the patient to descend the ladder leading to the regions of the dead. He rubbed the ashes and pulverized charcoal of his medicine-fire all over the body of the patient, first having rubbed him with a mixture obtained by melting the fat of the bison, mountain sheep, elk and deer, with a small portion of the fat of the domestic sheep. This grease was to make stick to the skin the charcoal and ashes of the medicine-fire. After the anointment the songs were sung again beside the patient.
The rites of Ojkai yośna lasted two days and nights and his fee was one horse, say fifty dollars.