582 THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
eight foot in length and four foot in breadth.”* In Florida proper we 
are told that upon the death of a king he was buried with great 
solemnity, and the shell from which he usually drank was placed on 
the tumulus, around which many arrows were stuck up. Le Moynet 
gives a picture of one of these graves—shell, arrows, and all—but 
either the drawing is most abominably foreshortened, or else the 
tumulus is too insignificant to come within the scope of our inquiry. 
However, both this and the preceding interment belong to-the class 
called single, and this may perhaps account for the size of the mounds 
erected over them. In each of the localities referred to the communal 
form of burial was also practiced, and in some cases, especially on the 
peninsula, mounds covering interments of this character have been 
found, which are not only of large size,{ but which, from the nature of 
their contents, must have been thrown up after the arrival of the 
whites. That the tribes inhabiting the Gulf States, including under 
this head the Chickasaws, Cherokees, Choctaws, and the Muscogees 
and their allies, were at one time in the habit of erecting mounds over 
their dead does not admit of a doubt, though it is probable that the 
custom, like many others connected with their funeral rites, died out 
at an early day. 
Adair tells us that “‘many of these heaps are to be seen in all parts 
of North America; where stones could not be had, they raised large 
hillocks or mounds of earth, wherein they carefully deposited the bones 
of their dead, which were placed either in earthen vessels or in a simple 
kind of ark chests.”§ According to De Brahm, “A large conical mound 
near Savannah was pointed out to Gen. Oglethorpe as being the tomb 
of the Yamacraw chief, who had, many years before, entertained a 
ereat white man with a red beard;” || and the evidence of the younger 
(William) Bartram, to which we have so often had occasion to refer, 
is even more definite. Describing the burial customs of the Choctaws, 
that writer says: ‘As soon as a person is dead they erect a scaffold 18 
or 20 feet high in a grove adjacent to the town, where they lay the 
corpse, lightly covered with a mantle; here it is suffered to remain, — 
visited and protected by the friends and relatives, until the flesh 
becomes putrid, so as easily to part from the bones, then undertakers, 
who make it their business, carefully strip the flesh from the bones, 
wash and cleanse them, and when dry and purified by the air, having 
provided a curiously-wrought chest or coffin, fabricated of bones and 
splints, they place all the bones therein, which is deposited in the bone- 
house, a building erected for that purpose in every town. And when 
*-History of Carolina, p. 21. 
tDe Bry, plate xl. 
{ Narrativeof Osceola, quoted by Dr. Brinton in the American Antiquarian for Oc- 
tober, 1881. 
§ Hist. of Amer. Indians, note to p. 185. 
|| Quoted in Antiquities of the Southern Indians, p. 131. 
