GATSCHET — KAS. LEG. COMMENTARY. [85] 53 



division had a medicine-bundle, kept by the conjurers, and carried about 

 in all general expeditions.* 



Afteu four years thky left the Co(^saws," etc. We need not 

 feel any surprise at the slow progress made by the Kasi'hta people 

 migrating East, encumbered as they were by their families. A 

 parallel to this slow progress we find in Adair's History, p. 410, 

 who, in the middle of the iSth century, met a part of the main 

 camp of the Shawano about fifty miles northeast of the Chicasa 

 country, "consisting of about 450 persons, on a tedious ramble to 

 the Muskohge country, where they settled, seventy miles above 

 the Alabahme garrison ; they had been straggling in the woods 

 for the space of four years, they assured me." Nevertheless they 

 all looked hale and healthy ; evidently they were not in a hurry 

 to complete their march. 



•'The people had flattened heads," etc. Artificial deforma- 

 tion of the skull during infancy is a custom practiced by many 

 American and foreign tribes, and in very difterent ways. We find 

 it on the Pacific coast, between the 44° and 54° of northern lati- 

 tude, extending from the shore line to some distance inland. The 

 Maya people practice it, and the Quichhuas managed to elongate 

 the skull by compressing it on all sides. By a soft pressure of the 

 hollow hands, the mothers of the Greenland-Eskimo tribes com- 

 press the tender skulls of their infants shortly after birth, to hasten 

 the concrescence of the sutures, and do not repeat the process 

 afterwards. 



In the southern parts of North America, the tribes which prac- 

 ticed this custom upon their infants were the Shetimasha, Caddo, 

 Koroa, Naktche(?), Cna'hta, the tribes of the Creek confederacy, 

 and the Waxsaw, a Kataba tribe, and many other Kataba tribes 

 as well. 



No distinct notice can be found in the early writers that the 

 Creeks flattened the heads of their children. But Chicote, a Creek 

 chief of Hitchiti origin, now (in 18S4) sixty-five years old, and one 

 of the few surviving men who has seen the Creeks when living in 

 their old country, affirms that all their tribes observed the custom 

 of flattening the infants' heads behind^ by fastening them upon the 

 hard wood of the baby-board. This, of course, made the deforma- 



* John B. Dunbar, "The Pawnee Indians," Mag. of Amer. Hist., iSSi, pp. 73^-75'' (§ S) . 



