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Our attention should next be
turned to sepulture above the ground, including lodge, house, box,
scaffold, tree, and canoe burial, and the first example which may be
given is that of burial in lodges, which is by no means common. The
description which follows is by Stansbury,
[Footnote: Explorations of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah,
1852, p. 43.] and relates to the Sioux:
"I put on my moccasins, and, displaying my wet shirt
like a flag to the wind, we proceeded to the lodges which had attracted
our curiosity. There were five of them pitched upon the open prairie,
and in them we found the bodies of nine Sioux laid out upon the ground,
wrapped in their robes of buffalo-skin, with their saddles, spears,
camp-kettles, and all their accoutrements piled up around them. Some
lodges contained three, others only one body, all of which were more or
less in a state of decomposition. A short distance apart from these was
one lodge which, though small, seemed of rather superior pretensions,
and was evidently pitched with great care. It contained the body of a
young Indian girl of sixteen or eighteen years, with a countenance
presenting quite an agreeable expression; she was richly dressed in
leggins of fine scarlet cloth elaborately ornamented; a new pair of
moccasins, beautifully embroidered with porcupine quills, was on her
feet, and her body was wrapped in two superb buffalo-robes worked in
like manner; she had evidently been dead but a day or two, and to our
surprise a portion of the upper part of her person was bare, exposing
the face and a part of the breast, as if the robes in which she was
wrapped had by some means been disarranged, whereas all the other bodies
were closely covered up. It was, at the time, the opinion of our
mountaineers that these Indians must have fallen in an encounter with a
party of Crows; but I subsequently learned that they had all died of the
cholera, and that this young girl, being considered past recovery, had
been arranged by her friends in the habiliments of the dead, inclosed in
the lodge alive, and abandoned to her fate, so fearfully alarmed were
the Indians by this to them novel and terrible disease."
It might, perhaps, be said that this form of burial was
exceptional, and due to the dread of again using the lodges which had
served as the homes of those afflicted with the cholera, but it is
thought such was not the case, as the writer has notes of the same kind
of burial among the same tribe and of others, notably the Crows, the
body of one of their chiefs (Long Horse) being disposed of as follows.
"The lodge poles inclose an oblong circle some 18 by 22
feet at the base, converging to a point at least 30 feet high, covered
with buffalo-hides dressed without hair except a part of the tail
switch, which floats outside like, and mingled with human scalps. The
different skins are neatly fitted and sewed together with sinew, and all
painted in seven alternate horizontal stripes of brown and yellow,
decorated with various life-like war scenes. Over the small entrance is
a large bright cross, the upright being a large stuffed white wolf- skin
upon his war lance, and the cross-bar of bright scarlet flannel,
containing the quiver of bow and arrows, which nearly all warriors still
carry, even when armed with repeating rifles. As the cross is not a
pagan but a Christian (which Long Horse was not either by profession or
practice) emblem, it was probably placed there by the influence of some
of his white friends. I entered, finding Long Horse buried Indian
fashion, in full-war dress, paint and feathers, in a rude coffin, upon a
platform about breast high, decorated with weapons, scalps, and
ornaments. A large opening and wind-flap at top favored ventilation, and
though he had lain there in an open coffin a full month, some of which
was hot weather, there was but little effluvia; in fact, I have seldom
found much in a burial-teepee, and when this mode of burial is thus
performed it is less repulsive than natural to suppose."
This account is furnished by Col. P. W. Norris,
superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, he having been an
eye-witness of what he relates in 1876.
The Blackfeet, Sioux, and Navajos also bury in lodges,
and the Indians of Bellingham Bay, according to Dr. J. F. Hammond, U. S.
A., place their dead in carved wooden sarcophagi, inclosing these with a
rectangular tent of some white material.
Bancroft [Footnote: Nat. Races of Pac. States, 1874,
vol. 1, p. 780.] states that certain of the Indians of Costa Rica, when
a death occurred, deposited the body in a small hut constructed of
plaited palm reeds. In this it is preserved for three years, food being
supplied, and on each anniversary of the death it is redressed and
attended to amid certain ceremonies. The writer has been recently
informed that a similar custom prevailed in Demerara. No authentic
accounts are known of analogous modes of burial among the peoples of the
Old World, although quite frequently the dead were interred beneath the
floors of their houses, a custom which has been followed by the Mosquito
Indians of Central America and one or two of our own tribes.
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Introduction to the Study of Mortuary Customs
Among the North American Indians
Native American Nations
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