This purported guide to Amerindian occultism merely collects 35 quick hit chapters with no real analysis or through-line, making this another big pile of slop from bad, bad Brad Steiger working under his Christopher Dane pseudonym. Popular Library gave us a beautiful cover but slacks on the interior: we have typos here and there including chapter titles, and they even accidentally left Brad's true name on the inside cover!
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| What did readers make of this slip-up back then? |
Steiger kicks things off with the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944. One Robert Segee confessed to arson in the case, and Steiger writes of vengeful Indian spirits compelling him to set the fire that killed 167 people and injured over 700. Segee would later recant his confession, but Steiger is content to finger him as the culprit and not get too involved in details about whether the fire was even really arson at all ...
Segee was supposedly of Native descent, by the way, which merits his inclusion here.
Moving on, there's no real structure as Steiger darts from outdated mystery mongering over sites like the Big Medicine Wheel in Wyoming and the Palenque ruins in Mexico, from peoples as varied as the Incas, Aztecs, Apache, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), with no attempts at delineation across two continents, countless cultures, and thousands of years of history.
Chapter 23, "The Sailors Who Came Before Columbus," discusses the Metcalf Stone of Georgia which purportedly illustrates pre-Columbian contact between Greece and the New World, while chapter 29, "The Moon of Flowers," touches on Ancient Astronaut ideas around the Maya, in line with the Umlands' Mystery of the Ancients. Chapter 23 also mentions those famous Olmec heads and the Piri Reis Map - not by name though! Steiger is strangely subdued with his usual Fortean name checking.
Besides this de rigueur pseudoarchaeological mystery mongering, Steiger pads out his pages with the spectral threat of werewolf cults, vengeful ghosts, visions, killings and so on. These are in the classic Fortean maybe-fiction style of C.B. Colby and Frank Edwards, with nothing in the way of authentication or sourcing but plenty of invented dialogue and cheeseball scene setting:
Chapter 8 deals with the chindi or chʼįį́dii spirit, a malevolent force from Diné (Navajo) culture, of which Brad would later write a whole horror novel.
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| Two covers for this undoubtedly authentic chiller |
Another real life horror is uncovered in chapter 19, "The Manitou Grand Cavern Mummy," as miscreant Tom O'Neel (or "Jackknife Tom") is killed in a fight and then experimentally preserved by one Dr. Isaac A. Davis. Eventually Tom's corpse goes on the road as an "Indian mummy" ... yech!
Various just-so stories of uncertain provenance and bits of garbled history fill out the rest: chapter 9 is an abbreviated account of Running Eagle, a warrior woman of the Blackfeet Tribe, here referred to as Weasel Woman. Steiger's version features dialogue like "Hooo, Ah," from rival Flathead fighters, go figure. Other chapters cover leaders like Wovoka, Handsome Lake, and Wabokieshiek. Sourcing is always thin regardless the subject.
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| Running Eagle, aka Pi'tamaka, aka Brown Weasel Woman |
In style and content this volume straddles the classic "Dead Indian" era of frontier tales that was fading out by C.B Colby's time and the emerging New Age fascination with subjects like Hopi prophecy and general indigenous mysticism. Steiger was no stranger to this, whether here in the Americas, in "the Orient," or with the fraudulent Kahuna magic of Max Freedom Long. Nowadays we just have to seek out one of a thousand online "creepypasta" stories to find Amerindian concepts like skin-walker witches and the wendigo appropriated, sometimes mangled beyond recognition - reinterpreted from distinct cultural forms to generic oogy-boogy monsters.
True to form for Steiger's meatloaf volumes released as "Dane," the chapters are very uneven. Some are wisps that barely merit inclusion, some go on far too long for basic stories, some are obvious piffle and some are interesting enough. Chapter 32, "Many Scalps Has Laughing Wolf," surprises with a very measured history of scalping among Amerindians and settlers, analyzing the spread of the practice through bounties offered by settlers, and the difference between these bounty scalps, tit-for-tat atrocity scalping, and ritualistic scalping as practiced by a small number of tribes. Steiger was capable of decent writing when he put the effort in, and it's disappointing that the rest of this volume doesn't measure up.
Per usual, Popular Library doesn't bother with a table of contents or index.
Table of contents:
1. Spirit Councils in the Forest of Fiery Death (5)
2. Massau's Great Star: The Hopi Book of Genesis (11)
3. A Wheel Older Than Memory (17)
4. The Pyramid at Palenque (23)
5. Where Are the Sheepeaters Now? (29)
6. The Knife of the Arikaras (35)
7. Death to the Apache Witch (41)
8. Run From the Devil (47)
9. Death Comes to the Woman Warrior of Two Medicine Lodge (55)
10. To Walk Among Rattlesnakes (63)
11. Roaring Thunder Returns From the Dead (69)
12. In Quest of the Medicine Arrows (75)
13. The Invincible One (83)
14. The Werewolf of Eagle Creek (91)
15. An Apache Head in Search of a Body (97)
16. Who Will Dance for Wovoka? (103)
17. Lake for Sale: Inquire of the Devil (109)
18. The Sign of Ubabeneli (115)
19. The Manitou Grand Cavern Mummy (121)
20. The Aztec God Demand's a Woman (127)
21. Tell Two Bears I Am Coming (135)
22. The Mysterious Hand of Gray Robe (141)
23. The Sailors Who Came Before Columbus (147)
24. The Rain Gods of Mesa Ecantantada (153)
25. The Secret of the Soul Eaters (159)
26. The Strange Dreams of Prince Viracocha (167)
27. Makers of Great Medicine (175)
28. The Amazing Empire of the Sun (181)
29. The Moon of Flowers (189)
30. The Good Gentle Words of Handsome Lake (195)
31. A Prophet of Another Sort (199)
32. Many Scalps Has Laughing Wolf (205)
33. The Search for Fons Juventutis (209)
34. Wabokieshiek Knows the Future (215)
35. To See the Spirit Home (219)
The American Indian and the Occult is available to read and download at archive dot org.
Popular Library, 1973
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