234 BELIEFS AND USAGES OF CHICKASAW [BTH. ANN. 44 
risque of the law of adultery being executed against the recusants. Every 
evening, and at the very dawn of day, for the first year of her widowhood, 
she is obliged, through the fear of shame, to lament her loss in very intense 
audible strains. . . 
Their law compels the widow, through the long term of her weeds, to refrain 
all public company and diversions at the penalty of an adulteress; and like- 
wise to go with flowing hair, without the privilege of oil to anoint it. The 
nearest kinsmen of the deceased husband keep a very watchful eye over her 
conduct in this respect. The place of interment is also calculated to wake 
the widow’s grief, for he is intombed in the house under her bed. And, if he 
was a war leader, she is obliged for the first moon to sit in the day-time under 
his mourning war-pole,” which is decked with all his martial trophies, and 
must be heard to ery with bewailing notes. But none of them are fond of 
that month’s supposed religious duty; it chills or sweats and wastes them so 
exceedingly, for they are allowed no shade or shelter. This sharp, rigid custom 
excites the women to honour the marriage-state, and keeps them obliging to 
their husbands by anticipating the visible, sharp difficulties which they must 
undergo for so great a loss. The three or four years monastic life which she 
lives after his death makes it her interest to strive by every means to keep 
in his lamp of life, be it ever so dull and worthless; if she is able to shed 
tears on such an occasion, they often proceed from self-love. We can generally 
distinguish between the widow’s natural mourning voice and her tuneful, 
laboured strain. She doth not so much bewail his death as her own recluse 
life and hateful state of celibacy, which to many of them is as uneligible as 
it was to the Hebrew ladies. . . . 
The Choktah Indians hire mourners to magnify the merit and loss of their 
dead, and if their tears can not be seen to flow their shrill voices will be 
heard to cry, which answers the solemn chorus a great deal better. However, 
they are no way churlish of their tears, for I have seen them on the occasion 
pour them cut like fountains of water; but after having thus tired themselves, 
they might with equal propriety have asked bystanders in the matter of the 
native Irish, Ara ci fuar bass—‘And who is dead?” 
They formerly dressed their head with black moss on those solemn occasicns, 
and the ground adjacent to the place of interment they now beat with laurel 
bushes, the women having their hair disheveled. .. . 
The [Chickasaw] Indian women mourn three moons for the death of any 
female of their own family or tribe. During that time they are not to anoint 
or tie up their hair; neither is the husband of the deceased allowed, when the 
offices of nature do not call him, to go out of the house, much less to join any 
company; and in that time of mourning he often lies among the ashes. The 
time being expired, the female mourners meet in the evening of the beginning 
of the fourth moon, at the house where their female relation is intombed, and 
stay there till morning, when the nearest surviving old kinswoman crops their 
forelocks pretty short. This they call Hhé Intandah,” “the women have 
mourned the appointed time.” . . . When they have eaten and drank 
together, they return home by sunrise, and thus finish their solemn Yah-ah. 
Although a widow is bound, by a strict penal law, to mourn the death of her 
husband for the space of three or four years; yet, if she be known to lament 
* The war-pole is a small peeled tree painted red, the top and boughs cut off short; it 
is fixt in the ground opposite to his door, and all his implements of war are hung on the 
short boughs of it till they rot.—Adair. 
The use of this war-pole was not shared by the Indians of the Creek confederacy., 
*0 Bho=ohoyo, “ woman”; intandah, probably from tani, “to rise up from a prostrate 
position.” 
