[Dan De Quille, Piute Astronomy, Salt Lake Tribune, October 18, 1885]

 

PIUTE ASTRONOMY.

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The "Desert Father," After Smoking, Tells All About It.

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The Sun Is Father, the Moon Mother, the Stars Children.

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The Sun Eats the Stars, the Moon Mourns—More Born.

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Correspondence Tribune.]

Virginia, Nev., Oct. 15, 1885.

            Meeting Captain Sam of the Piute tribe a few days ago we asked him what he thought of the new star in the nebulae of Andromeda.  The Captain said he knew very little about stars, either new or old, but would presently bring us a wise man of his tribe who had the whole dome of heaven by heart, and knew what was meant by every wink and blink of any stars that ever peeped through the curtains of the sky.

            Two days later Captain Sam made his appearance, with the Piute Copernicus following in his wake.  The sage reader of the stars was old, wrinkled, and blear-eyed.  Judging from his raiment, he was a philosopher of the Diogenes order.

            With a wave of his hand toward the shock-headed sage, Captain Sam said : "This is Tooroop Eenah (Desert Father,) "the man who talks of the stars."

            The aboriginal Kepler nodded his head several times after the fashion of the renown Punch, and grinned approvingly, as much as to say "In me you see one who holds the stars in the hollow of his hand."

            Old Tooroop, however, was in no hurry about launching forth into the mysteries of his science.  Instead of at once [nearing?] to the realms of the stars, the wise man of the wilderness opened the business of the session by asking for tobacco with which to fabricate a cigarette.

            This coolness and lack of haste gave us a good opinion of the profundity of the venerable star gazer.  It was of a piece with that calmness and coolness which we frequently see displayed by learned and skillful physicians when called in cases where life hangs by a single thread.

            Having rolled and lighted his cigarette, the great reader of stelliferous space blew a cloud of smoke through his nose, threw himself back in his seat in an attitude of ease, and looked at us so much as to say : "Well, I am now at your service, and am ready to set your mind at ease in regard to anything, from the diameter of the inter-Mercurial planet to the number of hairs in the tail of Ursa Major."

            Before us we probably beheld an astronomer such as was to be found among the Chaldean shepherds, the Arabs and others who studied the heavens before the days of Galileo's telescope and Napier's logarithms.  Captain Sam looked at this keeper of the records of the heavens approvingly, and with as much reverence as though he had been a second Ptolemy with his Almagest under his arm, and in a tone to which there was some trace of awe said "Big Medicine!"

            As we were about to open the session with a request for Tooroop's opinion of the alleged new star in the nebulae to be seen with the naked eye in the constellation of Andromeda, Captain Sam proffered his services as interpreter, but having observed that the aboriginal Proctor had at command a pretty fair smattering of English, we preferred to have the pending astronomical mysteries poured fresh from the fountain head, therefore declined the Captain's interference as middle man.

            Finally, in some trepidation after so much ceremony and preparation we ventured to ask the venerable savant if he knew anything about the coming star.

            He did—he knew all about it.  It was, he said, "a star just hatching out."  Said he : "It will soon be out fresh and bright."

            Not a little astonished at so much positiveness, we asked for an explanation, whereupon the man of science "in the raw" settled himself to the task of dissipating our ignorance.  He threw away the stump of his cigarette, blew a last puff of smoke through his ample nostrils and without further ceremony or preamble proceeded to lay before us the whole economy of the celestial realms according to the Piute and Tooroopian system.

            Divested of the "Desert Father's" peculiar pronunciation, it was as follows : "The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife, and the stars are their children. The Sun eats his children whenever he can catch them. They flee before him and are all the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of sight—go away back into the blue of the above—and they do not wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed.

            "Down deep under the ground—deep, deep under all the ground—is a great hole. At night when he has passed over the world, looked down on everything and finished his work, he the sun goes into this hole and he crawls and creeps along until he comes to his bed in the middle part of the earth. So then he, the sun, sleeps there in his bed all the night.

            "This hole is so little and he, the sun, is so big that he cannot turn round in it and so he must, when he has had all his sleep, pass on through, and in the morning we see him come out in the East.  When he, the sun, has so come out he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, his children ; for if he does not so catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape of him is like a snake or a lizard. It is not his head that we can see, but his belly, filled up with the stars that times and times he has swallowed.

            "The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the wife of the sun. She, the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But always she has the great fear of the sun her husband and when he comes through the hole to the nobee (tent), deep in the ground, to sleep she gets out and comes away if he be cross.

            "She, the moon, has great love for her children, the stars, and is happy to travel among them in the above ; and they, her children, feel safe and sing and dance as she passes along.  But the mother she cannot help that some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month. It is ordered that way by the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the place of all.

            "Every month that father, the sun, does swallow some of the stars, his children, and then that mother, the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn. So she must put the black on her face, for to mourn the dead. You see the Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon—a little and a little every day, and after a time again we see all bright the face of her. But soon more of her children are gone and again she must put on her face the pitch and the black."

            "But how about the new star?" asked we, beginning to think that the Tooroopian system of astronomy almost equal to the Ptolomaic.

            "Well," said the sage, "when so many children are devoured more must be born.  Up there same like down here, some die, more born.  So go on all time."

            Here the Desert Father broke off, and suggested that much talking made man hungry.  He hinted that he was not too proud to accept a fee of four bits.

            However, Captain Sam, who had been listening very attentively to the astronomical doctrines of the wise man of his tribe, and who evidently wished to hear more of his talk, proceeded to say that when the white man first came to the country and began to sink deep shafts, many of his people thought that they intended to dig down to the subterranean passage way of the sun and moon, catch them both, carry them away and turn the whole country in darkness.

            To this the old philosopher made answer that such a thing was impossible, owing to the great heat above and about the sun's po (road).  He said all the white men could do was to get out some of the rocks far above the underground road of the two orbs.  Those rocks having absorbed the light of the luminaries as they lay asleep in their nobee, produced in the case of the moon white metal (silver) and in the case of the sun yellow metal—gold.

            Captain Sam then said that, as they were about to take their leave, they would be glad to carry with them a small piece of the white metal that had been mentioned by the wise man of his tribe.

DAN DE QUILLE.