Charley Shaplish (Dr. Whirlwind)

This undated image shows a Cayuse Indian doctor known variously as Charley Shaplish, Pai Shamkain, and, most commonly among whites, Dr. Whirlwind. The photograph was taken by Major Lee Moorhouse, an eastern Oregon businessman and civic leader who served a short stint as Pendleton’s mayor in the mid-1880s and later worked as an Indian agent on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. He was also an avid semi-professional photographer, taking more than 9,000 photos from 1897 until his death in 1926.

With his stern visage and apparent willingness to pose in a variety of costumes, Dr. Whirlwind was one of Moorhouse’s favorite subjects. Born around 1825, Whirlwind carried dispatches for Colonels George Wright and Edward Steptoe during the wars of 1855-1856, and served as a U.S. Army scout during the campaign against the Bannocks in the late 1870s. He is shown here probably around the turn of the century wearing otter fur hair wraps, an elaborate necklace likely made from dentalium shells, and a necklace made of bear claws interspersed with beads.

One of Whirlwind’s signature practices as an Indian doctor was the performance of medicine dances while holding live rattlesnakes. Dangerous practices like this were not uncommon on the Plateau, where Indian doctors sometimes performed ceremonial gashing (the cutting of loose flesh from one’s own body) and other forms of self-mutilation in order to demonstrate their spirit power to others. Whirlwind was fatally bitten by a rattlesnake during his final dancing display, probably in the late 1900s or 1910s.

Indian doctors, also called shamans or medicine men, played an important role in Indian societies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These men and women were religious leaders as well as healers, and used a variety of herbal medicines and ceremonies to cure their patients. But Northwest Indians also believed that shamanic powers could be used in destructive ways. Bad medicine was sometimes blamed when individuals died while under the care of Indian doctors. In these cases, the family avenged the deceased by killing the suspected sorcerer.