They are so entirely habituated to practising the arts of deception, that it would seem they sometimes persuade themselves that what was at first only feigned, is in truth reality, and that their magic absolutely possesses its attributed healing virtue. One of these men, being on a visit to the Pawnee villages, was present at a kind of grand incantation, during which many extraordinary feats were exhibited. He there saw, for the first time, the mountebank trick, of appearing to cut off the tongue, and afterwards replacing the severed portion without a wound. "There," said Katterfelto, "your medicine is not strong enough to enable you to perform this operation." The stranger, jealous of his national honour, and unwilling to be exceeded, unhesitatingly {251} drew forth his knife, and actually cut off nearly the whole of his tongue, and bled to death before their eyes. In the country of the Crow Indians, (Up-sa-ro-ka,)[10] Mr. Dougherty saw a singular arrangement of the magi. The upper portion of a cotton-wood tree was implanted with its base in the earth, and around it was a sweat house, the upper part of the top of the tree arising through the roof. A gray bison skin, extended with oziers on the inside so as to exhibit a natural appearance, was suspended above the house, and on the branches were attached several pairs of children's mockasins and leggings, and from one of the limbs of the tree, a very large fan made of war eagle's feathers was dependent. [10] The Crows, whom the French called _Gens des Corbeaux_, were an important tribe of the Siouan family. Lewis and Clark estimated their numbers at three thousand five hundred; they lived on the Yellowstone River. Nearly two thousand still reside on the Crow reservation in Montana.—ED. The Missouri Indians believe earthquakes to be the effect of supernatural agency, connected, like the thunder, with the immediate operations of the Master of Life. The earthquakes which, in the year 1811, almost destroyed the town of New Madrid of the Mississippi, were very sensibly felt on the upper portion of the Missouri country, and occasioned much superstitious dread amongst the Indians. During that period, a citizen of the United States resided in the village of the Otos, trading for the produce of their hunts. One day he was surprised by a visit of a number of Otos in anger. They said that a Frenchman, who was also trading in the village, had informed them, that the Big-knives had killed a son of the Master of Life; that they had seen him riding on a white horse in a forest country, and being of a sanguinary disposition, they had waylaid and shot him. And it was certainly owing to this act that the earth was now trembling before the anger of the great Wahconda. They believed the story implicitly, and it was with no little difficulty that the trader divested his own nation of the singular crimination.[11]