SKULL OF CHIEF COMCOMLY—STEWART 569 
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Figure 1.—Chinook cradle collected by John K. Townsend during his visit to the mouth 
of the Columbia River in 1835-36. It was “formed by excavating a single piece of wood 
about three feet long. Midway between the top and bottom, inside, are little slats of 
light wood, A,A,A, in a transverse direction, on which are placed a grass matorbed. The 
head of the cradle, B, is an excavated chamber, bounded towards the foot by an inclined 
plane, D, the rounded margin of which supports the child’s neck, while the head itself is 
received into the concavity at B. Attached)to the)side of the cradle is the pad, C, made of 
grass, with a loop at the end: this is dwn down over the child’s forehead, keeps it in 
place, and causes the flatness of that part so universal in these people. The lateral loops, 
D,D,D, are for the purpose of keeping the child’s body in a fixed position, The project- 
ing end, E, is rounded, and answers for rocking the cradle, when poised on it, by a rotary 
motion ‘applied at the opposite end. The head and neck rest on a grass mat or pillow” 
(Morton, 1839, p. 204). 
these two men we have not only the earliest anthropometric descrip- 
tion of a Chinook skull, but also probably the earliest illustration 
(fig. 1) of the type of cradle which Washington Irving mentions (see 
epigraph) as being responsible for the Chinook cranial deformity.® 
This particular cradle, which seems to have been overlooked in the 
literature on the Chinook (cf. Ray, 1938, pp. 69-70; Underhill, 1945, 
pp. 128-130), is pertinent here mainly because the skull described by 
Morton, like Comcomly’s, is deformed. This is consistent with the 
claims of Townsend for his specimen. Incidentally, the Townsend 
cradle is one of two types of deforming apparatus employed by the 
Chinook. The other type, sketched by Lewis and Clark (see Ray, 
1938, fig. 3) and later painted by Catlin (Donaldson, 1886, pl. 42), 
employed a hinged flattening board to compress the head in much 
the same manner as a nutcracker is used. 
Morton made no special effort to describe the deformities exhibited 
by the specimens he was reporting, being content apparently to let 
the illustrations speak for themselves.? In the case of Townsend’s 
8 Although the skull is still preserved in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadel- 
phia, its presence there having been noted in 1857 by Meigs, the cradle is not in that insti- 
tution and its present location had not been discovered at the time of this writing. 
® Morton made his drawings by means of a craniograph devised by his friend John S. 
Phillips (for illustration, see Morton, 1839, p. 294). It consisted of a board 6 feet long 
and 1 foot wide with a short upright piece attached at each end. The skull, which was 
posed against one of these uprights, was viewed through a small hole in the other 
upright. Between the skull and eyepiece, but only 15 inches from the latter, was a 
Square frame holding a piece of glass. The outline of the skull was traced on this glass, 
yielding a reduction to one quarter. From the glass the outline was transferred to paper 
and perfected. Later an artist redrew the picture on lithographic stone. 
