Containers found here and in another site held nothing but a few seeds of the poisonous wild “bean,” which may have ceremonial significance. This inference is not implausible when we recall the Mexican mode of keeping peyote.[5] The use of peyote in racing and in ball games is noted for the Tarahumari and Tamaulipecan groups, and in this connection it is interesting to learn that the Wichita used to eat mescal beans before they ran a race. A Cheyenne informant said that his tribe used the “red-berry” as an eye-wash long before they knew of peyote, though he never heard of their eating it; “it’s poison,” he said. The Comanche used to get mescal beans from near Fort Stanton, apparently for ornamental purposes only.[6] Like most of the Plains tribes, the Kickapoo used mescal beans chiefly as beads, but in common with the Cheyenne they used them medicinally: for earache they boiled, mashed and strained the beans through a cloth. The Kiowa use the ḱɔnḱoλ or mescal beans typically, as beads in peyote meetings, much as they formerly wore bandoliers of them on the war-path. One Kiowa is said to have chewed the inside of a mescal bean before breaking a bad wild horse bareback. A Kiowa peyote chief had several of the beans on his moccasin heel-fringe, to protect from the dangers of inadvertently stepping on menstrual blood, and another Kiowa “peyote boy” had a mescal bean attached to the thong of his gourd rattle. Mescal beans are clearly thought to possess great medicine-power. The Iowa had leggings which Skinner thought might have been of a modified Kiowa-Comanche type, with a perforated scarlet mescal bean (Iowa, maka shutze, “red medicine”) knotted on each thong of the fringe. The Omaha used as beads and good luck charms bright red beans which Gilmore thought were _Erythrina_, and which they called makaⁿ zhide or “red medicine” likewise. In adopting the use of chinaberries (_Melia azerdache_ L.) as beads, they likened them to mescal beans and called them, curiously, makaⁿ-zhide sabe, “black red-medicine.”[7] Pawnee informants said that long ago they used bat or mescal beans for medicine “to strengthen the body,” but now use them only for decoration. The Oto used to eat “liar(?) berries” or mescal beans in one of their lodges; they had the interesting superstition that they breed (recalling the sex attributed to peyote): Tie two or three in a bundle, leave it a year or so, and when you open it again you’ll have a dozen. The inference that the Pawnee and Oto used the mescal bean ritually is borne out by the Iowa, who had a full-fledged ceremony called the “Red Bean Dance:”[8]