Several Northern Californian tribes have secret societies which meet in a lodge set apart, or in a sweat-house, and engage in mummeries of various kinds, all to frighten their women. The men pretend to converse with the devil, and make their meeting-place shake and ring again with yells and whoops. In some instances, one of their number, disguised as the master fiend himself, issues from the haunted lodge, and rushes like a madman through the village, doing his best to frighten contumacious women and children out of their senses. This, it would seem, has been going on from time immemorial and the poor women are still gulled by it, and even frightened into more or less prolonged fits of wifely propriety and less easy virtue.
The coast tribes of Del Norte County, California, live in constant terror of a malignant spirit that takes the form of certain animals, the form of a bat, of a hawk, of a tarantula, and so on--but especially delights in and affects that of a screech-owl. The belief of the Russian-River tribes and others is practically identical with this.
The Cahrocs have, as we already know, some conception of a great deity, called Chareya, the Old Man Above; he is wont to appear upon earth at times to some of the most favored sorcerers; he is described as wearing a close tunic, with a medicine-bag, and as having long white hair that falls venerably about his shoulders. Practically, however, the Cahrocs, like the majority of Californian tribes, venerate chiefly the coyote. Great dread is also had of certain forest-demons of nocturnal habits; these, say the Eurocs, take the form of bears and shoot arrows at benighted wayfarers.[V-19]
Between the foregoing outlines of Californian belief and those connected with the remaining tribes, passing south, we can detect no salient difference till we reach the Olchones, a coast tribe between San Francisco and Monterey; the sun here begins to be connected, or identified by name, with that great spirit, or rather, that Big Man, who made the earth and who rules in the sky.[V-20] So we find it again both around Monterey and around San Luis Obispo; the first fruits of the earth were offered in these neighborhoods to the great light, and his rising was greeted with cries of joy.[V-21]