”Hydropathic Highway to Health”: women and water-cure in antebellum America

The book tells how Bourke was converted from the commonplace opinion that the "only good Indian was a dead Indian" (p. 59) to a more rounded view and finally to an intimate fellow-feeling with (in particular) the Chiricahuas and the Western Apaches. His admiration was initially roused by the Indians' skill and courage in resisting his own forces in battle, and then heightened by comparison between the best of the Indians and the worst of their white neighbours-demagogues, journalists, and middlemen who stood to profit from a policy of enforced impoverishment for the Indians. A turning-point for Bourke was the US government's breaking of the Fort Laramie agreement (1875) when prospectors discovered gold on land which it had conceded to the Lakotas, one of several acts of official treachery which embarrassed Bourke's code of honour. Disgusted by the brutal means used towards dubious ends, Bourke, while still an army officer, became an ethnologist, aiming to record details of the vanishing aboriginal way of life, to ease the path of the Indians towards a worthwhile way of living in compatibility with the Anglos, and to develop the intellectual sophistication of ethnology itself. Bourke's personal path led him through some extraordinary experiences, which are here described in his own words: the Sun Dance of the Oglalas, the Snake Dance of the Hopis, and the Urine Dance of the Zunis. Given his familiarity with so many Indians, it is only to be expected that his observations on Indian clinical medicine rank as primary evidence, for instance his records of puerperal fever among the Cheyennes (p. 63) and of Apache midwifery (p. 198). Medicine was one of the subjects on which he encouraged his Apache friends to discourse in his attempt to retrieve tribal lore from oblivion (p. 182), from which one infers that, although clinical medical subjects form only a small and scattered part of the book under review, there is more such material still embedded in the manuscript of the diary. If so, this book is an essential introduction to it.