Читать книгу Trail of Broken Promises - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 12

WHEN THE SEASONS brought the sickness, old men of the tribes concocted the cures from the mother earth, and the Indians placed their lives in the gnarled, wrinkled hands of those old men.

They had no other choice.

The Choctaws took the leaves of the jimson weed, doused them in cold water, and made a band to hold around the head to break a high fever.

They cut the stalks of cockleburs and boiled them in milk, then applied them as poultice to a snakebite.

They cured headaches with chiggerweed tea and they treated bad kidneys with sassafras tea.

Choctaws chewed the bark of a buttonbush for a toothache, and sometimes they stuck the part of the prickly ash into a cavity to stop the pain.

Rattlesnake grease fought the rigors of rheumatism.

And their medicine men made a salve of honey, butter, and the juice of pole bean leaves to treat skin cancer.

Seminoles used brown glass from a broken bottle to ease pain. The medicine man made four punctures, then took a powdered herb, mixed it with saliva, and rubbed it gently on the four holes.

And sometimes, he simply placed a devil’s shoestring inside a buffalo horn and held that over the wound to draw out the pain.

For earaches, the medicine man chanted a few chosen incantations and blew smoke into the ailing ear.

The Creeks cured asthma by burning a hornet’s nest and inhaling the smoke.

They used broom weed tea as a remedy against pneumonia, mullein tea as a cough syrup, ice weed to treat kidney trouble, and a poultice made from the inner bark of a cottonwood tree to heal a severe skin rash.

And nothing was as effective for diarrhea as blackberry roots or the roots from wild rose bushes.

For a burn, the Creeks would boil a fat hen, then produce a salve by mixing the chicken grease with friend box elder.