174 MORTUARY CUSTOMS OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
sanoes containing persons thus buried. What their customs were while burying, 
or what they placed around the dead, I am not informed, but am told that they did 
not take as much care then of their dead as they do now. Iam satisfied, however, 
that they then left some articles around the dead. An old resident informs me that 
the Clallam Indians always bury their dead in a sitting posture. 
(c) About twenty years ago gold mines were discovered in British Columbia, and 
boats being scarce in this region, unprincipled white men took many of the canoes in 
which the Indian dead had been left, emptying them of their contents. This incensed 
the Indians and they changed their mode of burial somewhat by burying the dead in one 
place, placing them in boxes whenever they could obtain them, by building scaffolds 
for them instead of placing them in forks of trees, and by cutting their canoes so as 
to render them useless, when they were used as coffins or left by the side of the dead. 
The ruins of one such graveyard now remain about two miles from this agency. 
Nearly all the remains were removed a few years ago. 
With this I furnish you the outlines of such graves which | have drawn. Fig. 
shows that at present only one pair of posts remains. I have supplied the other pair 
as they evidently were. 
Fic, 26.—Tent on Scaffold. 
Figure 26 is a recent grave at another place. That part which is covered with board 
and cloth ineloses the coffin, which is on a scaffold. 
As the Indians haye been more in contact with the whites they have learned to 
bury in the ground, and this is the most common method at the present time. There 
are cemeteries everywhere where Indians have resided any length of time. After a 
person has died a coffin is made after the cheaper kinds of American ones, the body is 
placed in it, and also with it a number of articles, chiefly cloth or clothes, though oc- 
sasionally money. I lately heard of a child being buried with a twenty-dollar gold 
piece in each hand and another in its mouth, but I am not able to vouch for the truth 
of it. Asa general thing, money is too valuable with them for this purpose, and there 
is too much temptation for some one to rob the grave when this is left in it. 
