SKULL OF CHIEF COMCOMLY—STEWART 567 
of the woods” (Lewis and Murakami, 1923, footnote 46, pp. 76-77).° 
Gairdner does not mention a box, only the canoe; and he adds that 
sometimes (“as may be”) burial in the ground occurred 38 or 4 years 
after death. The implication is that this had happened to Comcomly 
and that digging had been the “ressurrectionary labour” required to 
obtain the skull. In any case the identity and location of the remains 
undoubtedly would have been well known in a community as small 
as Astoria was in 1835. 
Transference of the skull from moribund Gairdner in Oahu to the 
Haslar Museum in England via Richardson in 1835-88 is attested 
by the documents cited. The essential information was inscribed on 
the skull itself (pl. 2) probably at the time of its receipt at the 
museum, judging from a comparison of the inscription and the orig- 
inal museum record. Also, according to Harvey (1939, p. 166), 
“a copy [of Gairdner’s letter of transmittal] was discovered by 
Sir Mervyn Bunbury during the summer of 1938, screwed up and 
tucked away inside the skull, where it had been hidden for a hundred 
years.” 
If all this were not enough to ensure the identity of the skull and 
to prove that no substitution had occurred during the many years that 
have elapsed since its exhumation, the unusual form of the skull also 
provides some supporting evidence. It will be recalled that Gairdner 
asked the following question of Richardson: “When the phrenologists 
look at [Comcomly’s] frontal development what will they say to 
this?” As plates 3 and 4 show, the skull vault exhibits extreme artifi- 
cial deformity—‘the Chinook sign of freedom.” Although, with the 
exception of Gairdner’s question, eyewitness statements that Com- 
comly had a flattened head are lacking, most of the early narratives 
point out that the Chinook practiced intentional head deformation. 
The epigraph from Washington Irving’s book is an example. Ob- 
viously, the shape of Comcomly’s skull confirms this account of 
Chinook custom and thereby makes the possibility of later substitution 
quite unlikely. 
To return to Gairdner’s question, the skull probably never was 
examined by a phrenologist. But an indirect and incomplete answer 
to his question exists in the literature on phrenology. By coincidence, 
John K. Townsend, the Philadelphia ornithologist,’ visited Fort 
George (Astoria) in September 1836, just about a year after Gairdner’s 
departure for the Hawaiian Islands. While there he obtained, among 
5Ray (1938, p. 75) interprets Wilkes’s illustration of Comcomly’s “tomb” (pl. 1) as 
an “elevated box interment,” basing this opinion, not on a contemporary record, but on 
the form of the structure and on an earlier report that boxes were sometimes used in place 
of canoes (Vancouver, 1798, p. 54). (See also footnote 7.) 
6 Townsend later worked for the National Institute, the forerunner of the U.S. National 
Museum, and some of the birds that he collected at the mouth of the Columbia River are 
preserved in the latter museum. 
536608—60—_38 
