neighbouring trees, are placed on their ends at a sufficient distance below, while the other ends overlap each other where they meet at the ridge pole, the whole forming a hut shaped like the roof of a common house, in which they make a fire, and the men, when not hunting, lounge at full length wrapped in their blankets, or sit cross legged, while the women do the domestick drudgery, or make baskets of various shapes with split cane, which they do with great neatness, and a certain degree of ingenuity. If any of the men die while on an excursion, they erect a scaffold about five feet high, on which they place the corpse covered with the skin of a deer, a bear, or some other animal they have killed in hunting. The dead man's rifle, tomahawk, bow and arrows are placed along side of him on the scaffold, to which the whole is bound with strings cut from some hide. It is then surrounded with stout poles or stakes, ten or twelve feet long, drove firmly into the ground and so close to each other as not to admit the entry of a small bird. Some of the female relations, are left in the hut close to the scaffold, until the excursion is {261} finished; when, ere they return home to their nation, they bury the corpse with much privacy.—I had been informed that some priest or privileged person, who was called the bone picker, was always sent for to the nation to come and cleanse the bones from the flesh even in the most loathsome state of putrefaction, that the bones might be carried home and interred in the general cemetery, but I had frequent opportunities of proving the error of this opinion. As to the women, when they die, (which is very rare, except from old age) they are buried at once on the spot, with little or no ceremony. While on the subject of Indians, it may not be amiss to mention a trait in their character, of courage and submission to their laws, of which numberless instances have happened, particularly amongst the Chocktaws on the frontier of the Mis-
