Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  The next day the sick man’s friends went to see the old widow. Her neighbors were already gathered outside her house. They had found her dead with the bone in her chest. Those who knew the situation felt sorry about it, but not for its victim. “She had no business witching people,” said one of the sick man’s friends.

  The Witch’s Daughter

  (Seneca, Late Nineteenth Century)

  When the Salamanca woman died, her husband and daughter went through her belongings and saw that she’d been a witch. The Christian father wanted to burn the bundles and potions, but his girl told him it might be dangerous even to touch them. But maybe she had something on her mind. Her heart was set on a handsome young Seneca who visited her father on business. One night, she dosed the lad’s drink with a love potion, snuck out as he left, and waited for him by the path. Things turned amorous. When the frolic was over, she asked, “Why don’t we get married?”

  “No need in it now,” the lad said, heading home. “We’ve had our fun.”

  Weeks later he was near again on business. He meant to avoid the house that had gotten him in trouble, but something pulled him to it. This time the witch’s daughter double dosed his cider and headed to the same wood. Things went as before, but this time he left singing love songs. The girl came home announcing marriage. “That’s interesting,” said her father. He knew that the lad had just married a girl from Cold Spring.

  The new wife gave the lad a good long talking. He promised he’d learned his lesson, and in a few days things had cooled. He also got sick. He lost weight. He had sharp pains every night and couldn’t sleep. Soon he couldn’t work. It seemed clear that he’d been witched.

  A witch doctor had a feeling about the swamp nearby and sent the sufferer to a certain spot to see for himself what was happening. Something swinging in the moonlight across a creek caught the lad’s attention; it was a bark doll dangling from a tree, and soon someone he knew came to it.

  Calling the doll by his name, the witch’s daughter caressed it like a newborn, then scraped it with a knife. “When the string rots, you’ll fall and die. Till then I’ll scrape away.” The lad felt every stroke, once even crying out from his hiding place. He huddled in terror, but there was no need. The girl laughed aloud, thinking it more of her own long-range magic. “Ha! I can even hear you from here.”

  The next day from his bed at home, he heard her voice. She had come to his house, bringing soup and asking about his health. “Go away,” he yelled from his bedroom. “And leave me alone. I’m sending for a crow.”

  “What good’s that going to do you?” she said, leaving in a huff. She should have read the whole witchcraft manual.

  “So she’s been here,” said the witch doctor on his afternoon visit. “Just as I thought. Now we can do it.” He had with him the body of a crow. The young Seneca cut the heart from the bird, held it up, and called it the name of the witch’s daughter. They hung the heart from the kettle frame and ran a splinter through it. They lighted another splinter and passed it under the heart a couple times, singeing it and giving it a gentle toasting. Then they set it aside and waited.

  The next day the witch’s daughter came over crying, showing a burn mark on her breast that had blistered. “Now quit witching me,” said her victim, “or I’ll burn the heart out of you.”

  No one knows what happened to the doll, but the young husband recovered, so she must have taken care of it the right way. She never witched anybody again, either, and in time became a good friend to the young family she’d offended. She even looked after their children when the couple traveled.

  Sassafras Charley

  Autumns are moody in Iroquois country. The one of 1929 brooded trouble on the Cattaraugus Reservation.

  Recently widowed Nancy Bowen was a spry sixty-six-year-old tribal healer. Svelte, thirty-six-year-old Lila Jimerson worked at the reservation school and was known as a seer. The Cattaraugus power pair started using a Ouija board to reach Bowen’s late husband, a part-Cayuga medicine man whom many white Buffalonians knew as Chief Sassafras or Sassafras Charley.

  Sassafras Charley Bowen sold trinkets, herbs, wood carvings, and sassafras, the dried bark and leaves of a tree used in many a cure. He was also into the otkon, and had had many adventures related to it. Once some Christian Senecas found red witch powder in the snow outside their cabin and figured Sassafras Charley was to blame. The discovery got him kicked off the reservation for a couple of weeks.

  Charley Bowen’s recent death had been outwardly natural. To his widow and her friend, though, the voice of the Ouija said otherwise. The moving planchette spelled out the news that Sassafras Charley had been murdered and would wander in a spiritual netherworld until his killer was punished. Soon the messages named her: Clothilde Marchand, the slight, pretty white wife of an illustrator at the Buffalo Museum of Science. Her husband Henri Marchand had done some painting at the Cattaraugus Reservation, even using Lila Jimerson as a model. Her long-range maleficence, the board’s messages said, was behind other Cattaraugus deaths as well.

  The Ouija—“the devil board,” as some call it—is not native to the reservation. Still, it is not strange that it would be found there and in use. The Iroquois are no supernatural snobs. They adopt any tools and techniques they fancy. What was strange was the coherence of the messages that came through on this one, naming and describing Mrs. Marchand and even giving her Buffalo address: 576 Riley Street, near the museum.

  By the winter of 1930, an odd series of untraceable letters had been delivered to Sassafras Charley’s widow, all supporting the same conclusion. For weeks Jimerson and Bowen had been aiming traditional magic at Clothilde Marchand. Its failure must have convinced them of her power. On March 6, they took the next step.

  The two women walked five miles to the trolley line and took the ride to Buffalo. The younger met Henri Marchand at the museum and got him to drive her around the city in his car. The widow went to his Buffalo home and met Mrs. Marchand at the door.

  “Are you a white witch?” she asked

  “Maybe I am,” said the artist’s wife, making a joke and turning to let her guest in. With a hammer bought that morning, the widow gave Mrs. Marchand a tap or two on the temple. Chloroformed cotton tamped down her throat made sure her life was done. Her twelve-year-old son found her body after school.

  By the same time the next day, the two Cattaraugus women had been caught and charged. They readily admitted to the killing. Why not? She was a witch.

  At first the motive seemed ludicrous. Most Buffalonians thought well of the suave French-born artist. They presumed Jimerson had a mad crush on him and had his wife killed to clear the way. The case was not simple to the government, which sent a high-powered team to defend the women.

  Experts like Seneca scholar Parker have attested to the power of witchcraft in the Iroquois soul. One Iroquois would kill another, he said, if convinced that this would end a hex.

  A Seneca crone led investigators to the graves of three mighty Seneca warriors. Jimerson and Bowen had planted whiskey and vittles among their bones. Found with those tributes were little white wood-and-cloth dolls, doubtless portraying the wife of the artist. One was even dressed with paper from one of those mysterious letters sent to the widow.

  When a Buffalo newspaper printed some of the letters Henri Marchand had sent to Lila Jimerson, it was clear that artist and model had been more than friends. In fact, Marchand had had more affairs than he could reliably estimate. The scandal made headlines.

  Sex and sorcery made for lurid newspaper reports, but Native American sovereignty and religion were the subjects of the trial—which became a lightning rod. Shouts of racism and conspiracy from the women’s defenders would be familiar today. The Jimerson-Bowen trial woke people up to supernaturalism on the Cattaraugus Reservation. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand why the two women were virtually acquitted, let off with little more punishment than the ordeal of the trial. The all-white, all-male jury clearly despised Marchand’s esc
apades and may have decided it was no mystery that something finally blew up. They may even have suspected that Marchand had a hand in the murder. (There were those anonymous letters in handwriting a bit like that of Henri Marchand.) The artist-widower did nothing to help his image, taking an eighteen-year-old girlfriend by the time of the trial.

  Then again, the jury may have come to believe that a dead Cayuga witch had driven two women to murder.

  The Last Act

  (Tuscarora, Early Twentieth Century)

  Nobody ever said much about Davey Roy’s background. He’d been adopted as a boy by Lulu Gansworth, a Christian, and raised with her brood in the farmhouse on Indian Hill on the Tuscarora Reservation. He grew into a shy, dark, good-natured young man whom Tuscarora author Ted Williams remembers as not the world’s alpha male. He had a girly throw with a baseball, for instance. He also had an Asian cast to his eyes that reminded Ted of the First Nations people he had seen from Georgian Bay. Davey Roy was a helpful, hard-working lad—maybe a bit too helpful.

  One of Davey Roy’s adopted brothers was nicknamed Heavy-Dough, and these two used to trade off the chore of bringing the cows in and milking them every night. One early evening Heavy-Dough took his turn, setting off on the dirt road that curves around Indian Hill and leads to the back pasture. It was well out of sight of the Gansworth farmhouse, and a gigantic dead tree once stood beside it.

  The stark form of that tree had fascinated Ted as a boy. He had spent many a moment staring at it, scrying it against the sky from various angles and weighing the impressions it gave him. That day, though, Heavy-Dough was in no mood for admiring. In fact, he came running back without a single cow. When he got to Davey Roy, he was almost too rattled to get his story out.

  He was within sight of the herd when he noticed something bright and eye-catching in the sublime tree. Perched on a branch fifty feet over the road was a gleaming being that the son of Lulu could only process as “an angel.” It was a man-bird, and it was making motions to him to come closer.

  Who is ever sure what any apparition really is? Many a routine ghost may have been mistaken as the Virgin Mary by a Christian witness. Something about this “angel” scared Heavy-Dough out of going anywhere near it. Davey Roy set off down the path to finish bringing the cows home. In the morning, Davey Roy was found, pounded to death, on the side of the road that goes up Indian Hill.

  Nobody knew of any enemies that Davey Roy had, and none had a clue who might have killed him, evidently helped by the conjuring of supernatural apparitions. Late in his life, though, Ted Williams found a possible connection.

  For some time, Ted had been keeping records of the lives of reservation folk so that they might be remembered when they passed away. In the 1960s, he was looking over his decades-old notes and spotted a reference to Davey Roy’s grandmother Emily Gossey. His recollection of her contained the cryptic comment that she had been engaged in a bitter, lifelong feud with a dreaded witch with the Tuscarora name of Kreegi(t)uh. Grandma Gossey must have been a power person herself, one who kept her brood safe while she was in the world. Was Davey Roy’s death the last act of the feud?

  Big I’sic’s Desire

  (Tuscarora, Early Twentieth Century)

  Big I’sic was a large man, and he did justice to his meals. By his thirties, he was the biggest Tuscarora anyone had ever seen. He also had a secret crush on a woman on the reservation.

  One day, Big I’sic spotted Asa Williams talking kindly to the object of his desire. There was nothing unusual about this gesture: Asa Williams was a shy homebody who talked kindly to everyone. But the sight of this filled Big I’sic with an impulsive rage. He quickly contrived a situation in which he and Asa worked with axes in the same wood. Asa and his head were separated before the third tree was felled. Big I’sic covered the body with trunks and branches, then went home as if nothing had happened—minus one imagined rival. But his victim had a brother, and Dan Williams was no gentle soul.

  Like the Seneca John Jemison, Dan Williams was well-known as a healer. His expertise was prized in Native American circles, and he traveled widely dispensing it. But both he and the girlfriend who shared the family farmhouse had, like Jemison, another reputation. As was said of them both in direct translation of the Tuscarora phrase, “They know poison” (they were witches). This was a factor that Big I’sic had left out of his calculations, if any were made at all. They say love—if you can call it that—does that to many of us.

  When it was clear that Asa Williams had disappeared, brother Dan got out the medicine and made a single potion. He poured the steaming mixture into a bowl, loomed over it, draped a shawl over his head, and rocked and chanted for a long time. At last he gained one vision he was sure of: his brother’s head and body covered by branches. He found the body, arranged the funeral, and got the honoring and grieving done. The next step was finding the killer.

  Big I’sic had seen enough of the medicine that could find a body that fast. Before the funeral was over, he took off for the Six Nations Reserve in Canada where at least one long arm—white American law—couldn’t get him. But Uncle Sam isn’t the only one with a reach.

  Before long, Dan Williams had the killer’s name. Everyone knew payback was coming, one that was going to be greater than the crime. Dan Williams confessed years later to his cousin Ted that he had his victim on a leash, and he gave it plenty of snaps.

  Big I’sic developed a psychotic addiction to food. The more he ate, the more he craved. Maybe his supernatural attacker had sent him the spirit of Sagodadahkwus, “He Who Eats Inwards,” the Seneca personification of gluttony. He died a ghastly death of self-indulgence and one with a distinction: He was the only Tuscarora Ted ever knew so big that he was buried in a piano crate. He never revealed the name of his secret love, even when he had nothing else to lose.

  A Wayward Youth

  (Tuscarora, Early Twentieth Century)

  From his boyhood, Ted Williams remembers an older woman everyone called Cassandra. Who could forget her? She had her own style: high-top shoes, broad-brimmed sunhats, and flowery dresses that flapped in the wind. She lived with her daughter’s family on an old farm.

  Her grandson was a lad nicknamed Less, and he was the man of the house after the early death of his father. Cassandra hoped that he would become something in life—a lawyer or doctor, perhaps. He had been taught well at the reservation school, but it could all change for the worse in his teens. There were obstacles and so many distractions for reservation youth.

  The pivotal moment came when Less neared the legal age for dropping out. One day he announced that he was tired of school and didn’t see why he should keep going. His grandmother sent him with a note asking his teacher, Miss Felsy, not to let him flunk any more courses.

  A few afterschool conferences took place, and something changed. Young Less started to like school and often stayed late to work on his grades. This was encouraging on the home front, but he was slacking on his chores, and one day the cows got loose because he’d forgotten to mend a fence. Gramma Cassandra hitched up a horse and buggy for the first time in years and took off for the school for a word with her grandson.

  Ted Williams was on the scene as the grandmother drew up to the building and looked down into a window. Whatever she saw almost made her fall out of her seat. She turned the carriage around and tore off on a track that led into the woods. The only thing at the end of the track was the log cabin of a woman with the nickname of Old Shrinkable—a known witch.

  Ted wondered what could have given Less’s grandmother such a start. He looked in the same window in time to see Miss Felsy stand up, straighten her clothing, and button her dress. Equally disheveled, young Less tore out of the school and after his grandmother. He had an expression, a flushed face, that Ted would not understand until he was older.

  Less wasn’t back in school the next day. Miss Felsy left the school shortly thereafter. One day she just didn’t show up. Once Ted got to know the male teacher who replaced her, he as
ked about Miss Felsy. “She grew three funny warts on her face,” the man said. “She didn’t want anyone to see her. When they got out to about half an inch long, she had them taken off. Three more got growing in different parts of her face. The doctors couldn’t figure anything out about these. Now, how about that?”

  Ted told the story to his father, Eleazar Williams (1880–1968), a celebrated medicine man. Eleazar sat him down. “Ted, Gramma Cassandra was worried that her grandson was going to run off with his teacher, and the farm and all her dreams for him were going to fall apart. She went to Old Shrinkable the witch and got her to fix the teacher. That’s one thing Shrink can do—put warts on you. But Old Shrink doesn’t work for free, and Cassandra and her daughter will be paying her off the rest of the way. I may have to put a stop to the cycle. It’s too bad we didn’t know about those potato eyes before this,” he concluded. “We might have done something to keep them from growing.”