Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 81 



trotters, or turkey spurs that tinkled as they walked. 

 In their hair they braided eagle plumes, hawk wings, 

 or the brilliant plumage of the tanager and red- 

 bird. Trousers or breeches of any sort they de- 

 spised as marks of effeminacy. 



Vermilion was their war emblem; white was 

 only worn at the time of the Green-Corn Dance. 

 In each town stood the war pole or painted post, a 

 small peeled tree-trunk colored red. Some of their 

 villages were called white or peace towns; others 

 red or bloody towns. The white towns were sacred 

 to peace; no blood could be spilt within their bor- 

 ders. They were towns of refuge, where not even 

 an enemy taken in war could be slain; and a mur- 

 derer who fled thither was safe from vengeance. 

 The captives were tortured to death in the red 

 towns, and it was in these that the chiefs and war- 

 riors gathered when they were planning or prepar- 

 ing for war. 



They held great marriage-feasts; the dead were 

 burned with the goods they had owned in their life- 

 time. 



Every night all the people of a town gathered 

 in the council-house to dance and sing and talk. 

 Besides this, they held there on stated occasions 

 the ceremonial dances : such were the dances of war 

 and of triumph, when the warriors, painted red and 

 black, returned, carrying the scalps of their slain 

 foes on branches of evergreen pine, while they 

 chanted the sonorous song of victory ; and such was 

 the Dance of the Serpent, the dance of lawless love, 



