“Had these gallstones and them white doctors operated and they got a lotta little stones but pretty soon it was back. So I decided to pray. You know whenever an Indian wants to pray the first thing he turns to is water and tobacco. So every night when I went to the john [toilet] I’d roll a cigarette and pray to that Peyote. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to be sick so you got to help them white doctors. You got to get all those little stones together in one place.’ That Peyote is a good medicine. I used to go to meetings and it helped me before. So every night I prayed to the Peyote to get them stones in one place. Then I went to the hospital and they operated and got out the biggest gallstone they ever saw. It would hardly go in a fruit jar. I told that Peyote that the job was too big for it all alone that it should just help them white doctors and get all them stones in one place.” Another informant, mentioned earlier as a peyote chief with special curing power, recounts the events leading up to the death of his former wife of cancer of the kidneys. “Yeah I had a couple of meetings for Onie. I helped her too. Except she would not do the things I told her to do. I made that cancer move around from her back where it hurt a lot. I got it around in front where it didn’t hurt her so much. But she wouldn’t keep doing the things I told her to do.” These two incidents reveal traditional attitudes transferred into a new framework of curing. In the first place, illness is a corporeal object which can be manipulated—moved and (if one’s power is sufficient) removed. Secondly, peyote is viewed as a manifestation of a spiritual power. The informant with gallstones did not attend meetings to have his ailment cured; rather, he used water and tobacco, traditional adjuncts to shamanistic curing. Moreover he did not take peyote for his illness; he simply prayed to Peyote in a manner very similar to praying to a spirit guardian for assistance. Other shadows of the shamanistic past seem to lie heavily on the minds of modern Washo peyotists. In his discussion of peyotism, d’Azevedo (1957, pp. 624-626) describes in some detail the attitudes about the assistance or interference that one peyote singer or drummer may receive from another. The statements of his informants, although couched in different terms, are reminiscent of many I heard dealing with competitions between shamans. For several years peyotists were a powerful factor in the tribal council, and they were not loath to play upon the connection between peyote and poison parsnips in the minds of their cotribalists. The peyote button is considered to be a powerful agent and as such potentially dangerous. Therefore a man who could deal with this agent, just like a shaman who could eat the poison parsnip with impunity, was a man to be listened to and followed.