be
thanked, flattered, {127} expostulated with, according to the
emergency. It can be easily seen that in this Indian land of
mysterious agencies, of manitous and spirits, the medicine-man and
conjuror exercised a great power among old and young, chiefs and women.
He had to be consulted in illness, in peace, in war, at every moment of
importance to individual or nation. Even in case of illness and
disease he found more value in secret communications with the
supernatural world, and in working on the credulity of his tribesmen,
than in the use of medicines made from plants. The grossest
superstition dominated every community. All sorts of mystic
ceremonies, some most cruel and repugnant to every sense of decency,
were usual on occasions when supernatural influences had to be called
into action.

Every respect was paid to the dead, who were supposed to have gone on a
journey to a spirit land. Every one had such a separate scaffold or
grave, generally speaking, as Champlain saw among the Ottawas, but it
was the strange custom of the Hurons to collect the bones of their dead
every few years and immure them in great pits or ossuaries with
weirdlike ceremonies very minutely described in the _Relations_. In a
passage previously quoted Champlain gave credit to the Indians for
believing in the immortality of the soul. The world to which the
Indian's imagination accompanied the dead was not the Heaven or Hell of
the Jew or Christian. Among some tribes there was an impression rather
than a belief that a distinction was made in the land of the Ponemah or
Hereafter between the great or {128} useful, and the weak or useless;
but generally it was thought that all alike passed to the Spirit Land,
and carried on their vocations as in life. It was a Land of Shades
where trees, flowers, animals, men, and all things were spirits.

"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews
In vestments for the-chase arrayed
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade."

[1] See Horatio Hale's "Fall of Hochelaga," in _Journal of American
Folklore_, Cambridge, Mass., 1894.

[2] In this necessarily very imperfect description of the organisation
and customs of the Five Nations I depend mainly on those valuable and
now rare books, _The League of the Iroquois_, and _Houses and Home Life
of the Aborigines_, by Lewis H. Morgan. The reader should also consult
Horatio Hale's _Iroquois Book of Rites_.

{12