But though without religion, in the usual acceptation of the word, the Indians were not, when first the white man knew them, wholly without ritual, or what has been designated a sacred ceremony. The celebration to which we refer occurred every year, was conducted by a definite set of actors, and was attended to with wonderful reverence. A full account of such ceremony is given by G. Catlin, in a work entitled, O Kee Pa (Truebner, London, 1867). In it figures a mystic messenger, who comes to demand the initiation of the young men of the tribe who have attained a fighting age; tents are then prepared, and men and women are duly painted and otherwise disguised to represent buffaloes and bugbears, the bad spirit, etc.; the main intention of the whole being to test the courage, strength, and endurance of the young men by frightful tortures, which are too disgusting for description here. At the end of the trial, however, each votary sacrifices a joint of the little finger of one hand to the bad spirit. At this feast-some doll-like effigies are used to mark the "mystery" tent. Amongst barbarians like these are, it will readily be imagined that such virtues as chastity and charity have no existence,--that successful theft ennobles the robber, and that the slaughter of an enemy, either by treachery or in fair fight, is regarded as a proof of courage, much as it was amongst the Spartan Greeks. Polygamy is simply a matter of wealth and arrangement, and women are purchased and treated like slaves. It is the man's business to hunt and fight, it is the woman's duty to make the best or the most of the spoils of the chase. Yet, with this general absence of all religion, there appears to be, here and there, a reverence for certain strange phenomena of nature--such as hot or bubbling fountains, sulphur springs, steaming geysers, and curious rocks, like the celebrated pipe-stone rock in the Sioux territory. From this all pipes ought to be made, there being as much of orthodoxy in such bowls amongst the Indians as there is in an "Agnus Dei" amongst Christian papists. There is, too, a reverence for the dead occasionally to be met with, but it cannot be said to amount to worship. In some instances, but I do not find that the custom is general, a man is interred with his horse, weapons, and medicine bag, as if it was expected that he would live beyond the tomb, and require in his other state of existence that which he wanted in this. What we have said of the North American aborigines applies with equal, if not with greater, force to those of the South.