114 MORTUARY CUSTOMS OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
Dr. Jones has given an exceedingly interesting account of the stone 
graves of Tennessee, in his volume published by the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution, to which valuable work * the reader is referred for a more detailed . 
account of this mode of burial. 
G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, informs the 
writer that in 1878 he had a conversation with an old Moquis chief 
as to their manner of burial, which is as follows: The body is placed in 
a receptacle or cist of stone slabs or wood, in a sitting posture, the hands 
near the knees, and clasping a stick (articles are buried with the dead), 
and it is supposed that the soul finds its way out of the grave by climb- 
ing up the stick, which is allowed to project above the ground after the 
grave is filled in. 
The Indians of Illinois, on the Saline River, according to George 
Escoll Sellers, inclosed their dead in cists, the description of which is as 
follows: 
Above this bluff, where the spur rises at an angle of about 30°, it has been terraced 
and the terrace as well as the crown of the spur have been used as a cemetery; por- 
tions of the terraces are still perfect; all the burials appear to have been made in 
rude stone cists, that vary in size from 18 inches by 3 feet to 2 feet by 4 feet, and from 
18 inches to 2 feet deep. They are made of thin-bedded sandstone slabs, generally 
roughly shaped, but some of them have been edged and squared with considerable 
care, particularly the covering slabs. The slope below the terraces was thickly 
strewed with these slabs, washed out as the terraces have worn away, and which have 
since been carried off for door-steps and hearth-stones. I have opened many of these 
cists; they nearly all contain fragments of human bones far gone in decay, but I 
have never succeeded in securing a perfect skull; even the clay vessels that were 
interred with the dead have disintegrated, the portions remaining being almost as soft 
and fragile as the bones. Some of the cists that I explored were payed with valves 
of fresh-water shells, but most generally with the fragments of the great salt-pans, 
which in every case are so far gone in decay as to have lost the outside markings. 
This seems conclusively to couple the tenants of these ancient graves with the makers 
and users of these salt-pans. The great number of graves and the quantity of slabs that 
have been washed out prove either a dense population or a long occupancy, or both. 
W. J. Owsley, of Fort Hall, Idaho, furnishes the writer with a des- 
cription of the cist graves of Kentucky, which differ somewhat from 
other accounts, inasmuch as the graves appeared to be isolated. 
Iremember that when a school-boy in Kentucky, some twenty-five years ago, of 
seeing what was called “Indian graves,” and those that I examined were close to 
small streams of water, and were buried in a sitting or squatting posture and inclosed 
by rough, flat stones, and were then buried from 1 to 4 feet from the surface. Those- 
graves which I examined, which examination was not very minute, seemed to be iso- 
lated, no two being found in the same locality. When the burials took place I could 
hardly conjecture, but it must have been, from appearances, from fifty to one hundred 
years, The bones that I took out on first appearance seemed tolerably perfect, but 
on short exposure to the atmosphere crumbled, and*I was unable to save a specimen. 
No implements or relics were observed in those examined by me, but I have heard of 
others who have found such. In that State, Kentucky, there are a number of places 
* Antiquities of Tennessee. Smith. Inst. Cont. to Knowledge. No. 259, 1876. Pp. 1, 
8, 37, 52, 55, 82. 
tPop. Se. Month., Sept., 1877, p. 577. 
