BUSHNELL] VILLAGES WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI eet 
their dress; covered with feathers, blazing calicoes, scarlet blankets, 
and silver pendants. Their houses, sufficiently convenient with their 
habits, are oblong square, and without any other furniture than 
baskets and benches, spread with skins for the purpose of rest and 
repose. The fire, as usual, is in the middle of the hut, which is con- 
structed of strips of bark and cane, with doors also of the latter 
split and plaited together.” (Op. cit., pp. 97-98.) 
When returning down the Arkansas, on January 18, 1820, Nuttall 
evidently reached the Quapaw village which he had passed when 
ascending the stream during the preceding February. He wrote: 
“About noon we landed at one of the Quapaw or Osark villages, but 
found only three houses constructed of bark, and those unoccupied. 
In the largest of them, apparently appropriated to amusement and 
superstition, we found two gigantic painted wooden masks of 
Indians, and a considerable number of conic pelt caps, also painted. 
These, as we learnt from an Indian who came up to us from some 
houses below, were employed at festivals, and worn by the dan- 
cers ... At the entrance of the cabin, and suspended from the wall, 
there was a female figure, with a rudely carved head of wood painted 
with vermillion. Being hollow, and made of leather, we supposed it 
to be employed as a mask for one of the musicians, having in one 
hand a pendent ferule, as if for the purpose of beating a drum. In 
the spring and autumn the Quapaws have a custom of making a 
contribution dance, in which they visit also the whites, who live in 
the vicinity, and the chief alms which they crave is salt or articles 
of diet.” The following day the party reached Arkansas Post. 
(Nuttall, (1), p. 223.) 
This account of the ceremonial lodge,’for such it undoubtedly was, 
of the Quapaw of a century ago, is most interesting, as it proves how 
the rapidly diminishing tribe held to their old customs. The tribe 
gradually disappeared from the lower Arkansas. The remnants of 
this once large body moved westward, and on August 11, 1853, some 
were encountered by the Whipple expedition in the extreme north- 
west corner of the Choctaw Nation, on the right bank of the Ca- 
nadian, where the Shawnee Hills reach to the river bank. There, on 
the “high bank of the Canadian, stand still some wigwams or rather 
log-houses of Quappa Indians, who may boast of not having yet 
quitted the land of their forefathers. But they have shrunk to a 
small band that cannot furnish above twenty-five warriors, and it 
would scarcely be supposed that they are all who are left of the once 
powerful tribe of the Arkansas, whose hunting grounds extended 
from the Canadian to the Mississippi.” (Méllhausen, (1), I, p. 74.) 
Probably no section of the country has revealed more traces of 
the period of aboriginal occupancy than has that part of the Missis- 
