Suddenly I saw a big snake. I was very much frightened. Then another one came crawling over me. “My God! Where are these snakes coming from?” There at my back there seemed to be something also. So I looked around and saw a snake about ready to swallow me entirely. It had arms and legs and a long tail. The end of its tail was like a spear. “Oh God! I am surely going to die now,” I thought. Then I turned in another direction and I saw a man with horns and long claws and with a spear in his hand. He jumped for me and I threw myself on the ground. He missed me. Then I looked back. This time he started back but it seemed to me that he was directing his spear at me. Again I threw myself on the ground and he missed me. There seemed to be no escape for me. A similar experience of Crashing Thunder (Winnebago) is noted elsewhere; and in a story told of Bear Track (Cheyenne) and his Osage wife on their visit to the Holy Land, the parents seem to have communicated some of their anxiety and fear surrounding mysterious experiences there to their small daughter, who awoke screaming one night at a presence she saw in the room. The peyote meeting of many groups has incorporated in it a powerful mechanism for the liquidation of individual anxieties in the practice of public confession of sins. It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of this feature.[13] On the exhortation of the leader, many members rise and accuse themselves publicly of misdemeanors or offenses, asking pardon of persons who might have been injured by them. How large a part peyote has in the production of such states is an open question (for the pattern of public confession is widespread aboriginally in the New World); but that confession to the father-peyote and his authority, and repentance before the group is of profound significance cannot be doubted. More than ritual tears stream down the confessant’s cheeks as he acknowledges his faults and asks aid to keep his promise to mend his ways. Peyote often figures in matters of personal adjustment. The story of John Rave is too well known to require more than mention here. The somewhat similar history of Jonathan Koshiway (Oto) is likewise interesting in showing how a compromise was struck between the older pagan culture and Christianity, to whose influence this individual had been exposed. The personal solution in Koshiway’s case seems to have been a perfectly satisfactory one: in the Church of the First-born he doctored and “hollered” like the source of his power in good old Indian fashion, and on the other hand baptized, conducted funerals and married couples just as in white churches. The statements of Crashing Thunder’s father[14] indicate a somewhat less happy and inclusive solution, which involved the sacrifice of the old customs: