r tribes also) believed that after
death the soul lay for a time in a trance, and then found itself
floating towards a River which must be crossed. Beyond the River lay
the Happy Hunting Grounds, the Elysian fields; but to oppose the weary
soul anxious to reach this paradise there ramped on the other side a
huge, flaming-red bison bull, if it had been ordained by the Great
Spirit that the soul's time was not yet come, this red bison pushed it
back, and the soul was obliged to re-enter the body, which then awoke
from its trance or swoon and resumed its worldly activities.

Suicide was regarded as the most heinous of crimes. Any man killing
himself deliberately, fell into the river of the ghost world and was
never heard of again, while women who hanged themselves "were regarded
as the most miserable of all wretches in the other world".

Their belief in spirits--even ancestral spirits--taking up an abode in
the bodies of beasts, birds, or reptiles, or even in plants or stones,
caused them to view with respect of a superstitious kind many natural
objects. Some one thing--a beast, bird, reptile, fish, plant, or
strange stone had been fixed on as the abode of his tutelary spirit by
some father of a family. The family grew into a clan, and the clan to
a tribe, and the object sacred in the eyes of its father and founder
became its "totem", crest, or symbol. As a rule, whatever thing was
the _totem_ of the individual or the clan was held sacred in their
eyes, and, if it was an animal, was not killed, or, if killed, not
eaten. Many of the northern Indians would refrain from killing the
wolf or the glutton, or if they did so, or did it by accident, they
would refuse to skin the animal. The elder people amongst the
Athapaskan Indians, in Hearne's day, would reprove the young folk for
"speaking disrespectfully" of different beasts and birds.

Their ideas of medicine and surgery were much mixed up with a belief
in magic and in the mysterious powers of their "medicine men". This
person, who might be of either sex, certainly knew a few simple
medicines to be made from herbs or decoctions of bark, but for the
most part he attempted to cure the sick or injured by blowing lustily
on the part affected or, more wisely, by massage. A universal cure,
however, for all fevers and mild ailments was sweating. Sweating huts
were built in nearly every settlement. They were covered over in a way
to exclude air as much as possible. The inside was h