the part is bitten to prevent the free circulation of the blood through
these parts.
In other things they are equally as good. In child-birth they prepare
a woman for giving birth to her child and at the birth of the child
they have an old woman to take care of the mother and child. After the
birth of the child the cord is cut and tied, then they take the black
part of a large snail, which has an oily substance, and place it over
the navel. They put a bandage around the child which is kept there for
some time. I have never known an Indian of the old tribe to be ruptured
and yet they do not know anything about surgery. If anything of a
serious nature happens to a woman during child-birth they are at a loss
to know what to do to save her. If the woman gives birth to twins and
they are a boy and girl, they try to raise them both, but if it be two
boys or girls they pick one of them and raise it while the other one is
neglected and starved to death, and when it died they went through all
the forms of sorrow by crying and mourning over the loss of the child
just the same as if they tried to raise it. If anything happens to the
mother that causes her death at child-birth or after and the child is
yet an infant, they take sugar-pine nuts or hazel nuts and pound them
into fine flower and mix this in warm water, making a milky substance
out of it. They can raise a child on this preparation as well as if it
was nursed at the mother’s breast. Every family in the olden times was
very careful to keep a good supply of pine and hazel nuts on hand.
The Indians were preservers of the sugar-pine timber which grew on the
high ranges of mountains on the north side of the river and there was a
very heavy fine and also death to the Indian that willfully destroyed
any of this timber. The sugar from these trees was also used by them
as a medicine in different cases of sickness. The salt water mussels
that they gather which cling to the rocks close to the sea-shore, is an
article of food for them and they gather and eat them while fresh by
boiling them. They also dry them and take them up the river to their
homes for winter use. In the month of August and a part of September
these mussels become poisoned, in some years worse than in others, with
phosphorus. Sometimes whole families would get poisoned by eating them
out of season and in this case they use the sugar which is taken from
the sugar-pine tree and which is a sure cure if taken in time. This
made the Indian prize the sugar-pine tree very highly and putting to
death even a member of their own tribe who harmed a tree in any way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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