 | O-kee-pa, a religious ceremony, and other customs of the Mandans |  |
PREFACE.
All men have, or ought to have, some peculiar ambition towards
the attainment of which the principal energies of their lives are
directed: mine, which developed itself some thirty years since, has
been that of perpetuating the looks and customs of a numerous race
of human beings fast passing to extinction. In this pursuit I
have passed fourteen years of my life amongst the various tribes of
Indians in North, South, and Central America, and of the numerous
customs which I have recorded, there is nothing else so peculiar
and surprising as the O-kee-pa of the Mandans, the subject of this
book,—an annual ceremony, which I described in a former publication,
but which description, forming but an item in a large work,
was necessarily too brief to give all the connecting links of a custom
which derives its interest from being understood in all its phases.
This publication, therefore, which is made for all classes of
readers, as well as for gentlemen of science who study, not the
proprieties of man, but Man, and which has not before appeared in
all its parts, is made from a sense of duty, to perpetuate entire a
human custom of extraordinary interest, peculiar to a single tribe
in America, and which tribe, as will be seen, is now extinct; leaving
in my hands alone chiefly, what has been preserved of their personal
looks and peculiar modes.
| O-kee-pa, a religious ceremony, and other customs of the Mandans | |