Part 6

Where there were great caves (as in Kentucky), and where the people dwelt in caverns (as at one time in the Southwest), the dead were often laid away in some corner of the cave. In almost all such cases the body was folded into the smallest space, with the knees drawn up against the chin; it was then wrapped up in blankets and robes and corded. Such bodies were generally not buried, but simply stowed away. These dried bodies are sometimes called “mummies,” but that name should only be used when something has been done to the body with the definite purpose of preserving it.

Scaffold Burial. (After Yarrow.)

Mention has already been made of box burial in connection with the Tlingit and Haida Shamans. Many Eskimos bury their dead in boxes supported on posts. The weapons, tools, and utensils of the dead are usually stuck upon the posts or hung over the boxes. The Ponkas also bury in raised boxes, and at their present reservation in Oklahoma there are two extensive cemeteries of this kind.

Among some tribes in the extreme northwestern part of the United States canoes are used instead of boxes. They are supported above ground by posts. Usually two canoes are used; the body is placed in the lower, larger one; the smaller one is turned upside down over the corpse and fits within the larger. In the Mississippi and Missouri valley region many Siouan tribes placed their dead upon scaffolds, supported by poles at a height of six or eight feet in the air. Extensive cemeteries of this kind used to occupy high points overlooking the rivers; they could be seen—dreary sights—a long way across the country. Some tribes in wooded districts placed the dead in trees. Often scaffold and tree burial were only temporary, the body being later taken elsewhere for permanent burial. One time, visiting a winter camp of the Sacs and Foxes, far from their permanent village, we saw a strange bundle in a tree. It was the blanketed corpse of an old woman who had died a few days before; the party took it with them when they returned home in the spring.

We should find some of the mourning customs interesting. The friends of the dead wail and scream fearfully; they cut off their hair; they gash their bodies; they sometimes even chop off their finger tips or whole joints. They watch by the grave—this is particularly true of women. Food and drink are often carried to the grave for some time after the burial. Fires are kindled to supply light or heat to the soul on its long journey.

Ojibwa Gravepost. (From Schoolcraft.)

Not many tribes have special posts or marks at the grave. A few do. The Ojibwa made such with much care. Usually they bore pictures or marks telling about the dead man. His totem animal was often represented, usually upside down to indicate that the bearer of the emblem was dead.

H. C. YARROW.—Army physician, ethnologist. Wrote, among other papers, _A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians_.

XV. MOUNDS AND THEIR BUILDERS.

In many parts of the United States, from western New York to the Rocky Mountains and even beyond, there are great numbers of artificial heaps and extensive embankments of earth. These show skill in construction, and from them have been dug many relics of artistic merit and good workmanship. At one time these earthworks and relics were generally believed to be the work of a single, highly civilized people, who preceded the Indians, who were not related to them, and who are now extinct. To this people the name “mound-builders” was given.

There are three ways in which we can learn about these so-called “mound-builders.” We may learn something from the mounds themselves, from the relics found in the mounds, and from the bones of persons who were buried in them.

Studying the mounds themselves, we find that they differ in different areas. We will look at three areas:

(1) In Ohio there are thousands of mounds and earthworks. Near every important modern town there are groups of them. Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Dayton, Xenia, are all near important mounds.

The regular enclosures are numerous in this area: these are great embankments of earth inclosing a regular space. Some are in the form of circles; others are four-sided; in a few cases they are eight-sided. Sometimes a square and a circle are united. There is one such combination at Hopeton; one of the embankments is a nearly true circle containing twenty acres; joined to it is a square of almost the same area.

At Newark there was a wonderful group of enclosures. The group covered about two miles square and consisted of three divisions, which were connected with one another by long parallel embankment walls. One circle in this group contained more than thirty acres: the walls were twelve feet high and fifty feet wide; a ditch seven feet deep and thirty-five feet wide bordered it on the inner side; a gap of eighty feet in the circle served as an entrance. In the center of the area enclosed by this great circle was a curious earth heap somewhat like a bird in form. Northwest from this great circle, nearly a mile distant, were two connected enclosures, one octagonal, the other circular: the former contained more than fifty acres, the latter twenty. East from these and northeast from the great circle was a fine twenty-acre enclosure, nearly a square in form. Besides these great walls, there were long parallel lines of connecting embankment walls, small circular enclosures, and little mounds in considerable variety. This great mass of works represented an enormous amount of time and labor.

What was the purpose of these regular enclosures? Some writers claim that they were forts for protection; others consider them protections for the corn-fields; others think they were places for games or religious ceremonials; one eminent man insists that they were foundations upon which were built long and narrow houses.

“Altar mounds” occur in Ohio. Professor Putnam and his assistants opened a number of these. They are small, rounded heaps of earth. At their center is a basin-shaped mass of hard clay showing the effect of fire. These basins are a yard or four feet across and contain ashes and charcoal. Upon these are found many curious objects. On one altar were two bushels of ornaments made of stone, copper, mica, shells, bears’ teeth, and sixty thousand pearls. Most of these objects were pierced with a small hole and were apparently strung as ornaments. These objects had all been thrown into a fire blazing on the altar and had been spoiled by the heat. After the kindling of the fire, and the destruction of these precious things, earth had been heaped up over the altars, completing the mound.

The most famous mound in Ohio is _the great serpent_ in Adams County. It lies upon a narrow ridge between three streams, which unite. It is a gigantic serpent form made in earth; across the widely opened jaws it measures seventy-five feet; the body, just behind the head, measures thirty feet across and five feet high; following the curves the length is thirteen hundred forty-eight feet. The tail is thrown into a triple coil. In front of the serpent is an elliptical enclosure with a heap of stones at its center. Beyond this is a form, somewhat indistinct, thought by some to be a frog. Probably this wonderful earthwork was connected with some old religion. While there are many other earthworks of other forms in Ohio, the _sacred enclosures_, the _altar mounds_, and the _great serpent_ are the most characteristic.

Great Serpent Mound: Ohio. (From The Century Magazine.)

(2) In Wisconsin the most interesting mounds are the _effigy mounds_. There are great numbers of them in parts of this and a few adjoining states. They are earthen forms of mammals, birds, and reptiles. They are usually in groups; they are generally well shaped and of gigantic size. Among the quadrupeds represented are the buffalo, moose, elk, deer, fox, wolf, panther, and lynx. Mr. Peet, who has carefully studied them, shows that quadruped mammals are always represented in profile so that only two legs are shown; the birds have their wings spread; reptiles sprawl, showing all four legs; fish are mere bodies without limbs. We have said these earth pictures are gigantic: some panthers have tails three hundred and fifty feet long, and some eagles measure one thousand feet from tip to tip of the outspread wings. Not only are these great animal and bird pictures found in Wisconsin in relief; occasionally they are found cut or sunken in the soil. With these curious effigy mounds there occur hundreds of simple burial mounds.

The purpose of the effigy mounds is somewhat uncertain. Some authors think they represent the totem animals after which the families of their builders were named, and that they served as objects of worship or as guardians over the villages.

Ground Plan of Earthworks at Newark, Ohio. (After Squier and Davis.)

(3) Farther south, in western Tennessee, another class of mounds is common. These contain graves made of slabs of stone set on edge. The simplest of these stone graves consist of six stones: two sides, two ends, one top, and one bottom. There may be a single one of these graves in a mound, or there may be many. In one mound, about twelve miles from Nashville, which was forty-five feet across and twelve feet high, were found about one hundred skeletons, mostly in stone graves, which were in ranges, one above another. The upper graves contained the bones of bodies, which had been buried stretched at full length; the bones were found in their natural positions. The lower graves were short and square, and the bones in them had been cleaned and piled up in little heaps. This mound was very carefully made. The lids of the upper graves were so arranged as to make a perfectly smooth, rounded surface. Sometimes these stone graves of Tennessee are not placed in mounds, but in true graveyards in the level fields. In these stone graves are found beautiful objects of stone, shell, and pottery. The stone-grave men were true artists in working these materials.

In the same district are found many dirt rings called “house-circles.” These occur in groups and appear to mark the sites of ancient villages, each being the ruin of a house. These rings are nearly circular and from ten to fifty feet across, and from a few inches to two or three feet high. Excavation within them shows old floors made of hard clay, with the fireplace or hearth. The stone-grave people lived in these houses. They often buried little children who died, under the floor. Their stone coffins measured only from one to four feet long. They contain the little skeletons and all the childish treasures—pretty cups and bowls of pottery, shell beads, pearls, and even the leg bones of birds, on which the babies used to cut their teeth as our babies do on rubber rings.

These are but three of the areas where mounds are found; there are several others. If the “mound-builders” were a single people, with one set of customs, one language, and one government, it is strange that there should be such great differences in the mounds they built. If we had space to speak about the relics from the mounds, they would tell a story.

Shell Gorgets: Tennessee. (After Holmes.)

They would show that the builders of the mounds, while they made many beautiful things of stone, shell, bone, beaten metals, could not smelt ores. They were Stone Age men, not civilized men. The objects from different areas differ so much in kind, pattern, and material as to suggest that their makers were not one people. Study of skulls from mounds in one district—as Ohio or Iowa—show that different types of men built the mounds even of one area.

So neither the mounds, the relics, nor the remains prove that there was one people, the “mound-builders,” but rather that the mounds were built by many different tribes. These tribes were not of civilized, but of barbarous, Stone Age men. It is likely that some of the tribes that built the mounds still live in the United States. Thus the Shawnees may be the descendants of the stone-grave people, the Winnebagoes may have come from the effigy-builders of Wisconsin, and the Cherokees may be the old Ohio “mound-builders.”

E. G. SQUIER and E. H. DAVIS.—Authors of _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, published in 1847. It was the _first_ great work on American Archæology.

INCREASE ALLEN LAPHAM.—Civil engineer, scientist. His _Antiquities of Wisconsin_ was published in 1855.

STEPHEN D. PEET.—Minister, antiquarian, editor. Established _The American Antiquarian_, which he still conducts. Wrote _Emblematic Mounds_.

CYRUS THOMAS.—Minister, entomologist, archæologist. In charge of the mound exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology. Wrote _Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States_ and _Report of the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology_.

FREDERIC WARD PUTNAM.—Ichthyologist, archæologist, teacher. For many years Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology, at Cambridge, Mass. Has organized much field work upon mounds of Ohio and Tennessee. Also Curator in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

XVI. THE ALGONKINS.

Algonkin tribes occupied the Atlantic seacoast from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick south to Virginia, and stretched west as far, at places, as the Rocky Mountains. They also occupied a large area in the interior of British America north of the Great Lakes. Brinton names more than thirty tribes of this great group. Among the best known of these were the Lenape (Delawares), Blackfeet, Ojibwas, and Crees.

It was chiefly Algonkin tribes with whom the first white settlers met. The Indians who supplied the Pilgrims with corn in that first dreadful winter were Algonkins; so were Powhatan and Pocahontas, King Philip and Massasoit. Of course whites came into contact with the Iroquois in New York, and with the Cherokees, the Creeks, and their kin in the south, but much the larger part of their early Indian acquaintance was Algonkin.

There are a number of borrowed Indian words in our English language of to-day. _Wigwam_, _wampum_, _squaw_, _papoose_, _moccasin_, are examples. These have been taken from the Indian languages into our own, and most of them—all of those mentioned—are Algonkin. They soon became common to English speakers, and were carried by them everywhere they went. All the western tribes had their own names for all these objects, but we have forced these upon them, and to-day we may hear Utes speak of _wigwams_ and Navajo talk about _squaws_ or _moccasins_.

We shall speak of two Algonkin tribes. One—the Lenape—is eastern; the other—the Blackfeet—is western. The former are woodland, the latter Plains Indians. The Lenape lived in settled villages, and had a good deal of agriculture; they were also hunters, fishermen, and warriors. Their houses were like those of their Iroquois neighbors, but each family had its own. They were huts of poles and interwoven branches with a thatching of corn leaves, the stalk of sweet-flag, or the bark of trees. Sometimes at the center of the village, surrounded by the houses, was a sort of hillock or mound from which the country around might be overlooked. The women made good garments of deerskin with skillful beadwork. In cooking they used soapstone vessels. For pounding corn they had mortars of wood, dug out of a section of a tree trunk, and long stone pestles.

In districts where the wild rice or _zizania_ grew abundantly great quantities of it were gathered. The women in canoes paddled out among the plants, bent the heads over the edge of the canoe and beat out the grain. This was a food supply of no importance to the Lenape, but the Ojibwas and their neighbors used much of it.

Ojibwa Women Gathering Wild Rice. (After Schoolcraft.)

In war, the men used the bow and arrows, spear and tomahawk. They protected themselves with round shields. They speared fish in the streams and lakes or caught them in brush nets or with hooks of bone or bird-claws.

There were three totems of the Lenape. Every man was either a wolf, turkey, or turtle. He had one of these three animals for his emblem, and was as fond of drawing or carving it as a boy among us is of writing his name. This emblem was signed to treaties, it was painted on the houses, it was carved on stones. But only those who were turtles drew their totem entire; usually the wolf or the turkey were represented only by one foot. Between a person and his totem there was a curious friendship, and it was believed that the animal was a sort of protector and friend of those who bore his name. All who had the same totem were blood-relations.

All Algonkins were accustomed to draw pictures to record events. The blankets of chiefs were decorated with such pictures. The Ojibwas were fond of writing birch-bark letters. One of the most interesting Indian records known is the _Walam olum_; this means the red score or red record. Probably it at first consisted of a lot of little sticks or boards with some quaint red pictures upon them. These were probably kept tied together into a little bundle. The original sticks have long been lost, but the one hundred and eighty-four pictures were copied and are still preserved. They were intended to assist in remembering a long poetical legend in which the Algonkin ideas regarding the creation of the world and their tribal history were told.

At first everything was good. Animals and men lived in peace. Then a wicked serpent tried to drown the world. Only a few persons escaped to the back of a great turtle. Their great hero Nanabush helped them. The waters subsided. As the land where they now found themselves was cold, the people determined to move southward. The story of their quarrels and divisions on the journey is told, and also the way in which they seized their new home, destroying or driving out the original owners.

The song in which this story is told is long and full of old words difficult to understand. The Indians themselves must have had difficulty in remembering it. It was a great help to have these little sticks with the red pictures to remind them of its different parts.

Far to the west, close against the base of the Rocky Mountains, lived a famous Algonkin tribe—the Blackfeet. They were great buffalo hunters and warriors. We often think of Indians as being stern and morose, never smiling, never amused. Yet most tribes had sunny tempers like children. Mr. Grinnell, to show this side of Indian nature, describes a day in camp in the olden, happy time. Two parts of his description describe feasts and gambling. Feasts were in constant progress: sometimes one man would give three in a day; men who were favorites might go from feast to feast all day long. If a man wished to give a feast, he ordered the best food he had to be cooked. Then, going outside, he called out the list of invited guests: the name of each one was cried three times. At the close of his invitation he announced how many pipes would be smoked: usually three. When the guests came, each was given a dish, with his share of the food; no one might have a second help, but it was quite polite to carry away what was not eaten.

While the guests were feasting, the man of the house prepared a pipe and tobacco. After the eating was over, the pipe was lighted and passed from hand to hand, each person giving it to the one on his left. Meantime stories of hunting and war were narrated and jokes cracked. Only one man spoke at one time, the rest listening until he was through. Thus they whiled away the time until the last pipe was smoked out, when the host, knocking the ashes from the pipe, told them they might go.

All Indians are gamblers, and they have many gambling games. The Blackfeet played one which was something like the famous game of Chunkey, played among the Creeks. (See XIX.) A wheel about four inches in diameter with five spokes on which were beads of different colors, made of horn or bone, was used. It was rolled along upon a smooth piece of ground at the ends of which logs were laid to stop it. One player stood at each end of the course. After a player set the wheel to rolling, he hurled a dart after it. This was done just before the wheel reached the end of its journey. Points were counted according to the way in which the wheel and dart fell with reference to each other. Ten counts made the game. This game always attracted great crowds of spectators, who became greatly excited and bet heavily on the result.

Blackfoot Squaw Traveling.

At night about their camp-fires the Blackfeet delighted to tell their sacred stories, which they did not dare repeat in daylight. In telling a story of personal adventure, Indians, like white people, were often tempted to make it larger than it really was.

The Blackfeet and some other Indians had the following mode of getting at the truth. When a man told an improbable story some one handed a pipe to the medicine man, who painted the stem red and prayed over it, asking that the man’s life might be long if his story were true, but cut short if the story were false. The pipe was then filled and lighted and given to the man. The medicine man said, as he handed it to him: “Accept this pipe, but remember that if you smoke, your story must be as sure as that there is a hole through this pipe and as straight as the hole through this stem. So your life shall be long and you shall survive; but if you have spoken falsely, your days are counted.” If he refused to smoke, as he surely would if he had not spoken true things, every one knew that he was a braggart and a liar.

DANIEL GARRISON BRINTON.—Physician, anthropologist. Has written many books, mostly about American Indians. _The Lenape and their Legends_, in which the _Walam olum_ is given in full, is a volume in his _Library of Aboriginal American Literature_.

XVII. THE SIX NATIONS.

When white men began to settle what is now the state of New York, that part of it extending from about the Hudson River west along the Mohawk and on beyond it to the Niagara, was occupied by the Iroquois or Five Nations. The separate tribes, naming them from the east, were the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. These were flourishing tribes; they had important villages and towns and large cornfields; they were, however, also hunting tribes and powerful in war. In fact, they were the terror of their milder Algonkin neighbors. Personally, Iroquois Indians were finely built, strong, energetic, and active.

They spoke languages much alike and probably derived from one ancient language. This was believed by them to prove that the five tribes were related. Still they were at one time frequently at war with each other. This was before the white men came. Finally, a man named Hayenwatha was a chief among the Onondagas. He was wise, kind, and peaceable. There was at this same time another Onondaga chief named Atotarho, who was in character the opposite of Hayenwatha. He was a bold warrior and the dreaded foe of the Cayugas and Senecas, against whom he led war-parties; he was feared and disliked by his own people. When these two men were chiefs among the Onondagas, the Mohawks and the Oneidas were much harassed by their Algonkin neighbors, the Mohicans. Hayenwatha thought much over the sad condition of the Iroquois tribes. Constantly warring with their kindred in the west and troubled by outside foes in the east, their future looked dark. He thought of a plan of union which he believed would bring peace and prosperity.