Trouble started in Rochester. The men who’d arranged one meeting for the Georges had charged admission fees at the door. The Georges may not even have known about it nor gotten a cent from it, but these no longer free healings fell under a different kind of scrutiny.
Others were looking for trouble. Batavia neighbors complained about the traffic at the Georges’ home. The Batavia children’s court accused Mitchell George of being a poor guardian by keeping his son out of school. Medical organizations protested Abram’s “quackery.” His own lawyers broke it to the father that the state could indeed keep the son from working. The family went back to Hogansburg, where they had lived prior to Batavia.
The move dodged some short-range trouble, but it was unfortunate for the prosperity of the George family. Batavia was halfway between population centers in Buffalo and Rochester. It was also in the core of the Burned-over District, where people had been used to prophets, healers, and would-be Christs for over a century.
In 1929, the Georges came back to Batavia, proclaiming that Abram was now sixteen and could do as he chose. (How he had aged four years in the two they’d spent away was hard to explain.) His second stay was short and frustrating, and his career was derailed.
In 2002, Batavia reporter Scot Desmit did some digging about Abram the healer. He tracked leads on the St. Regis/Akwesasne Reservation and found a woman of eighty-two who remembered Abram as a boy. He had asked her sister on a date.
They still talked about him on the reservation, curing lameness and eye trouble. For waking someone out of a coma, a New York City family gave him the Cadillac he drove around Hogansburg. He was a shy fellow, they recalled, and he still worked with touch. They remembered him traveling often for healings. If someone on the St. Regis got hurt or sick, he came over and did his thing. He got into drinking, said the St. Regis woman, and died young, possibly in the 1940s. He was a great healer, though, whatever quirks he had, and he had respect on the reservation. It was natural for him to have gifts, the old gal said, even if they brought complications. He was, after all, a seventh son.
MEDICINE BAGS
We’ve seen witches use their rites, materials, and objects. Sometimes they put collections of things together to make power bundles called witches’ bags. For every medicine, there’s a countermedicine, and those who would battle malicious witchcraft make caches of their own. Around 1900, Seneca Edward Cornplanter (father of the aforementioned Jesse) itemized the contents of a typical charm holder’s bundle:
The scales of the great horned serpent or a vial of its blood
A round white stone given by the Little People
Claws from the death panther or the fire beast
Feathers of the dewatyowais, the exploding bird
Castor (a natural scent) of the white beaver
An otnäyont, a sharp bone or blood bone
A corn bug
A small mummified hand
Hair from a ferocious Great Flying Head
Bones from the niagwahe, or the demon bear
A small flute or whistle made from an eagle wing bone
Anti-witch powder
A bag of sacred tobacco
Claws or teeth from various wild animals
A small mortar and pestle
A small war club
A small bow and arrow
Miniature wooden bowls and spoons
A small wooden doll
Clairvoyant eye oil (a potion giving the second sight)
This is just a generic list; master wizards would have had their own tricks and ingredients. No bundle was broken in, anyway, unless it was “sung for” in the charm holder’s ceremony. Great power, though, could be the reward. The holder of a charm bag could overcome a sorcerer’s blight or determine which offended spirits were behind a problem. The magic bundle could heal, work a blessing, or turn a curse.
Even in magic, the downhill path is easier. The main test in assembling the witch’s bag is one of the stomach. Just acquiring the ingredients of the charm holder’s bundle would be a quest, sometimes outright life-threatening. No Great Horned Snake would seem eager to part with blood or hide. Others, such as Great Flying Head hair, sound chimerical, like the kennings (girl beards, cat footfalls, fish breath) that leashed the Scandinavian demon-wolf Fenrir. There may be some truth, though, to the exploding bird. One of these was caught on film in a baseball stadium in March 2001, colliding with a heater from former pitcher Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson.
Twentieth-century shaman Mad Bear Anderson had his own medicine bundles, used for healing, divination, medicine, and, yes, personal defense. We never get a look at what might have been in any of these bags, but he seems to have had three kinds of them.
One was a middle-sized medicine case that he took on important trips. This was a leather satchel he used for quick-developing problems. It probably held herbs, powders, and implements that he used to work cures and blunt curses. A thing of fascination to many supporters, it would have been coveted by some fans and all opponents. It and most people had to be kept away from each other. Once it was stolen.
The Fifth Spiritual Summit in New York City was a 1975 conference of world religious traditions sponsored by the United Nations. During one of Mad Bear’s appearances, the fabled case disappeared from his hotel room. The young Native American appointed to watch it got suddenly sick. He had no idea what had become of the case and displayed all the signs of being magically bamboozled—“overshadowed,” as Mad Bear put it. Mad Bear gave him a bit of doctoring and went to find the culprit somewhere in the vast city.
The next time anyone saw Mad Bear, he had his bag back. “I had to use some medicine to find it,” was all he would say.
The bag thief was a white man who had been around the conference all week and had drawn attention by his appearance. He had the Johnny Cash
